from what I know....all major naval warships, have aircraft detection radar, for defense, rather than air traffic control...be the ships US, China, or Russian, surely the aircraft would have been detected...assuming it flew over the Indian Ocean
The other alternative route that the flight, whose communication system is now believed to have been deliberately disabled, is to the Indian Ocean south of the Malacca Strait where the plane was last sighted on a Malaysian military radar. According to Pillai, this would have taken the aircraft south of the Andamans.
Speaking to TOI, air traffic controllers’ guild secretary Sugata Pramanik said that while flight MH370 could have avoided detection on the Secondary Surveillance Radar, the blip by the huge Boeing 777-200 ER aircraft would surely have been spotted by the Indian Air Force that uses primary surveillance radars to detect such intrusions.
“If an aircraft wants to avoid being seen, they can easily become invisible to civilian radar by switching off the transponder. But it cannot avoid defence systems. The IAF has radars in multiple installations across the country and it is inconceivable that none of them spotted the odd blip with no flight clearance,” he said. There are nine air defence identification zones in the country that are manned 24x7 to prevent an enemy aircraft from violating Indian airspace.
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According Guild member Sushil Mondal, all hell would break loose if the IAF detected an aircraft that did not have air defence clearance. Any plane flying through Indian airspace is first required to submit the flight plan and manifest to the air traffic controls in its flight path. This is then relayed to the air force for permission.
“There are times when the Air Force finds a blip that does not match a flight plan. That usually happens when flight plans going missing at their end due to a system or link failure. They then immediately contact us for information. If the plane flight plan isn’t of suspicious nature, a clearance is granted. Or else, it is asked to return to wherever it came from. In case, we too don’t have any information of the aircraft, there will be trouble and the Air Force scramble jets to take the plane down. Nothing of the kind happened last Saturday,” said Mondal.
Recently, the IAF scrambled a Su-30MKI in the western sector after noticing an unidentified ‘blip’ crossing over from Pakistan, It turned out to be a weather balloon.
There’ll be a lot of crow served when this is all over, although I expect an even more entertaining wave of excuses for the science fiction and fantasy literature (the cheap kind) and B movie inspired theories we have been hearing and reading in the past couple of weeks. So little is known for certain that any fable works just fine. I wrote one myself elsewhere.
I also suspect that these theories are culturally dependent, and those heard in other countries are borne out of those cultures’ experiences, beliefs and urban legends, and would sound exotic to our ears. We’re not the only weisenheimers on the planet.
Also, remember that almost every country on earth has the misfortune of having television (I think it’s Bhutan that doesn’t, but I could be wrong), and television is always hungry for talking head experts. It is its nature, bub! Since we are all global, this incident is known across the globe and experts are needed by every television channel, d’uh! Let’s establish conservatively that on all of world’s television channels there are 1,000 experts, each with a theory as to what happened, some or many of them parroting others’ theories, but many having their own, so let’s say 527 theories out there in television land in as many human languages.
You and 527 other theories. Don’t be so humble, said Golda Meir, you’re not that great!
The government knows almost exactly what route this plane took based on the six or seven hours of satellite pings it received - it knew the precise locations of the satellite each time it got a ping, and could calculate the distance of the satellite to the plane by the timing of the pings - assuming a flight path of average cruising speed with relatively negligible variations in speed and altitude, it should have been possible to use the different locations of the satellite to triangulate the plane’s location within a narrow band, surely enough to differentiate whether it went west or south - I’m guessing the smoke about where it’s really located is only to give the government enough time to take measures to stop any future use of the plane for terroristic purposes.....
CNN: Crew of Chinese plane searching for MH370 has spotted “suspicious objects” in south Indian Ocean, China’s state-run media reports.