A few of my friends asked how we can so easily track mobile phones but a jumbo jet like Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 can disappear without a trace. First off, one of these is designed to transmit all the time, but aside from that difference it is a big ocean out there and it’s still possible to lose things in it.
I responded to my friends with this:
Radars don’t reach everywhere. Polar-orbiting satellites scan the globe but are not always around. Mobile phones have a hard enough time connecting to a tower when turned on in a plane at the terminal. Over the ocean? Forget it.
Then I remembered the U.S. has a fleet of fire-detecting satellites overhead, used to detect missile launches (and also said to be powerful enough to detect artillery). Surely one of these would have seen the plane if it exploded, right?
If the plane blew up in a fiery crash there’s a good chance we might have detected it with our SBIRS missile-surveillance satellites but I have not heard any mention of this.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/07/how-us-satellites-pinpointed-source-of-missile-that-shot-down-airliner/This could mean a few things:
1. The plane didn’t explode
2. The plane exploded somewhere we weren’t looking (I find this unlikely for a system tuned to detect submarine missile launches).
3. The plane exploded but it’s infrared signature did not draw attention from SBIRS (too weak, etc).
4. The plane exploded and SBIRS detected it but this information has not been released.
It’s quite possible the infrared-detecting satellites we have in orbit were not overhead when MH-370 did its disappearing act. Either way, I haven’t heard any word from government sources about any signs of MH-370 appearing on these satellites.