The military has spent around a billion dollars on radar installations that can cover from the middle of Australia for thousands of "stated kilometres". It's been said that the range is much further but for political reasons it's not mentioned. One would think MH370 and QZ8501 were within radar range? That being said why wasn't the data released?

 

There are essentially two main types of radar for aviation.

Primary radar, which we call "radar" this sends out radio waves, these hit objects and diffuse in all directions, some of the waves head back to the radar dish, locating an object, we can then measure things like the Doppler shift to determine speed, range, bearing, position etc, this enables us to determine things like "Is it a missile, aircraft or a flock of birds?". The problem with this type of radar is that it is very sensitive, it picks up all kinds of things, and it does not discriminate between all types of aircraft. It's all very good picking up a signal and posting a blip on a screen, but it doesn't tell you whether or not that it is flight QZ8501. Instead, this is the type of radar the military uses to detect possible threats. Radar works on a line of sight basis, anything that falls behind horizon will not be picked up, this is why military helicopters and planes fly at low altitudes to avoid enemy Radar. Radar certainly does not penetrate water to any useful depth.

The other type is what we call Secondary surveillance radar, this is the type used by air traffic control. This works off the basis that aircraft are fitted with a device called a transponder. The target aircraft transponder replies to signals from an interrogator (usually, but not necessarily, a ground station co-located with a primary radar) by transmitting a coded reply signal containing the requested information. The requested information is usually altitude and identification of aircraft. This works by means of air traffic control assigning aircraft a Squawk (transponder) code, the pilots then input this code into the transponder, at which point the track on the radar screen of the air traffic controller will become correctly associated with their identity. This isn't a passive process, you can't just beam your radar out anywhere and get all aircraft, with all identification etc, transponders need to be assigned. Think of it like pairing a bluetooth device.

The military will have Secondary surveillance radar for its own aircraft, and they will have it for their own airspace, but it's not something they will have covering large areas of the globe. Such is the complexity of communicating with all aircraft transponders, having the correct codes for communication etc. If the military wish to communicate with an aircraft, they will contact via radio, and then manually add them to their radar.

 

The Jindalee setup is othr-over the horizon radar.

It's been debated that it has reach to China. In fact a US university had its students doing a thesis on RF in India and they recorded it there over a twelve month timespan. The results are on pdf from their site. The Russians had the woodpecker, perhaps you know about it?

Things are tracked over the horizon but the info is not passed on.

 

OTH Radar setups work by bouncing waves off the ionosphere, they have been around since the 50s. They aren't as accurate as normal radar and they require a large stationary array (at least they used to), so you can't just whack them onto a battleship, and then cover the entire Pacific. Still, these are of the primary type of radar, and thus are not going to communicate with aircraft transponders.

 

Radar and water dont go hand in hand. But satellites and lasers do. The laser mapping of the ocean floor for instance, lidar, could be used to detect an abnormality from a previous sweep.

 

The arrays are massive Google them. They are spaced across States. You don't need to communicate with the planes. The same can be said for tracking missiles. There's no transponder on an enemy missile.

 

At any one time, there aren't typically 15 thousand missiles flying about.

If you want to track an aircraft just go here.

*not_secure_link*uk.flightaware.com/live/

you can follow any airplane you fancy. When one drops out the sky and falls into the ocean you are still going to lose it.

 

I use flightaware frequently, it is an excellent way to get information about flights in realtime.
however, when using it to track international flights over the oceans, most of the information is from projections, not realtime.

 

Yes you are right, it's not a radar map, FlightAware compiles, aggregates, and processes data from over 45 government sources, dozens of airlines, commercial data providers, as well as hundreds of receivers in FlightAware's ADS-B flight tracking network. FlightAware's proprietary algorithms calculate delay and arrival time estimates based on this data, and not direct radar links.

 

The Mh370 thread had all the same stuff.

 

There's another factor, of which I was not aware when I posted earlier; the waters in which it is assumed to have gone down are very shallow, indeed they're all within reach of a diver. If it's there, it will very probably be found within a week or two.


Some oil slicks have been spotted, but it's not yet confirmed where they came from, and since the same thing happened when MH370 was missing and they turned out to not be from the plane, it's unwise to jump to conclusions.

 

Well there's good news and bad news with that. The bad news is that everyone is dead, although I'm sure most people already knew that 2 days ago. The good news is if it is in shallow water, they will find the wreckage, and most importantly they will be able to determine the cause of the accident, and hopefully prevent the same thing from happening again.

 

to lose one airplane is an accident......but TWICE! No DEFINATELY some Carelessness here. and two minuets AFTER ATC denied a request to climb to avoid a Thunderstorm......... bet windshear cut the thing apart in mid air and they'll find the wreckage on the bottom....JUST HOPE THEY PAY US FOR USEING OUR SEARCHERS THIS TIME.

getting sooooo tired of people in other weenie nations BITCHING about the US; then when the shit hits the fan, THEY COME BEGGING TO US!

 

They flew over the Bermuda Triad?

 

The last known radar on both planes is in close proximity, coincidence?

 

You call the distance between Philadelphia and Jacksonville, close proximity?

 

For the geographically unanointed would you care to show other recent crashes that involve Malaysian based airlines? Perhaps you could throw into the mix the fact that they both deviated from their flight paths and the time lag between disappearance and response.

 

from what i just read they think they found the debris field

 

Indonesian officials have spotted six bodies and recovered three of them floating near where the missing AirAsia last made contact with air traffic controllers

The bodies were found in the Java Sea six miles from Flight 8501's last known contact. The plane disappeared Sunday with 162 people on board traveling from Surbaya, Indonesia to Singapore.

*not_secure_link*www.foxnews.com/world/2014/12/30/air-asia-search-day-three/

 

I don't have fox news right now because of Dish.