[Gay State Conservative]

The one thing I have never understood fully is with all the surface radar and satellites watching the world we inhabit how or why was the aircraft’s location when it disappeared not better known.

I don't know if this really applies to the point you've made,however:

I subscribe to a website called "flightradar24".It costs about $10 a year and with it you can track just about every commercial flight on earth...in real time.One thing that I've noticed is that on a flight from,say,JFK to Tokyo the site seems to lose track of the aircraft for a while as it passes over northern Canada and Alaska.suggesting that to me,at least, radar tracking doesn't exist *everywhere* in the world.

It seems to me that a remote part of the earth like the expanse of the Indian Ocean between Australia and southern African just might be such an area.

[Political Junkie Too]

I don't know how much airplane tracking is done by radars these days short of approach and departure. I think a lot of it is GPS-based, with the planes sending data bursts of their positions every few minutes.

That said, it's also possible that this is impractical near the poles where lines of longitude compress.

-PJ