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by mbell
4479 days ago
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This plane, like most other commercial jets, already had ADS-B onboard which transmits quite a bit of flight data. This is where most of the data on flightradar24.com comes from. In the case of the Air France flight it was way out in the ocean away from ADS-B receivers. There is already a plan to include ADS-B receivers on more satellites to help the ocean coverage problem. None of this solves the issue of sorting out what happened during a catastrophic failure. It's likely any transmission based system will fail is such situations. The only reliable way to have real time information is to use external sources, e.g. high resolution radar covering every point on Earth, that isn't cheap nor politically easy. |
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But as I understand in this situation they were not out of ADS-B range nor were they out of radar range. While ADS-B requires the aircraft to transmit, radar does not.
An example of an in-flight breakup happened in 2002 when China Airlines 611 which broke into 4 pieces about 40km off of an island. Looking at the radar returns they found the aircraft broke into 4 large chunks and they were able to tell where items would be due to the radar tracks.
I'm really not sure what's happened here but my hunch is that the incident happened at the boundary of one or more countries' radar systems. So Malaysia needs Vietnam and/or Thailand and/or Cambodia and/or China to turn over their radar returns so that everything can be lined up correctly.
If it was all within one radar system you would have a location pinpointed within an hour.