How can a plane full of people go missing?

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I know they have found it now, but how can it have gone missing for so many days?

If mobile phone networks can trace a mobile phone, and GPS can trace where a car is, then why can't an airline company or a government trace a plane?

Surely planes are fitted with tracking devices?

Yes, a transponder. But the design flaw is that the pilot (or hijacker) can simply turn it off!

Only while those devices are switched on.
Switching off tracking devices on a plane helps to demonstrate that the world is much larger than technology makes it appear.

I think someone somewhere should recommend putting transmitters on planes that cannot be turned off. It would be a good idea to attach it to the black box.

Let's start by realizing that most tracking technology relies on TRIANGULATION. That means more than one antenna site must pick up the signal. Cell phones and the like have amazingly short ranges, and if they work at all during a flight, the plane is likely relaying the signal. Mere location features won't be included in that function.

Even if you have multiple antennas get a fix at one point in time, if the target moves without a continuous lock, you could still have a vast area to search...especially if there is no way to reacquire the signal.

Also, until they actually start pulling up salvage/debris from the plane, don't believe it's over yet. They've only declared the plane lost, I don't recall them getting hard evidence of it being down in the ocean.

There is a transmitter in the black box, but you have to get close enough to pick up the signal. And you have to find it within 30 days, or it goes dead. People just don't understand how much power it takes to send a radio signal over a long distance.

For an FM radio station to broadcast over a radius of about 50 miles, takes 100,000 watts of electricity and anything large that gets in the way will block the signal out.

An AM signal can go much further, bouncing and pinging around off the atmosphere (skip), but good luck triangulating on that. That's why commercial radio stations are required by law to identify themselves every hour by call sign and location.

I don't have any knowledge about cell signals, but I do know they require a huge network of repeater towers to keep them in communication, which indicates to me their signal doesn't carry very far on it's own without being picked up and rebroadcast in a relay network.

Of course, I'm a proud wearer of the Tinfoil Hat, but I'm still not convinced Malaysia 370 wasn't hijacked by an intelligence agency, for the brainpower of the passengers. There were a whole bunch of designers on board from Freescale Semiconductor, which makes highly classified military technology for the US and Israel, some specifically to be used against Iran.

Dang. This is the first I heard of that.

All made even more difficult if said transmitter is under a few thousand feet of water.
The Air France flight 447 black box had an ultrasonic acoustic pinger with a 30-day life (I assume this is standard on these things), but the wreckage was eventually located by AUVs from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution using sonar under 12,500 to 13,100 ft of water - almost two years after it went down. Essentially: it was found by sight, not hearing.

Correct, and every phone has a unique ID so its location or movement can be triangulated from the "ID footprints" it leaves with every cell tower used.
This wouldn't have worked with the plane since it would be well outside the range of cell towers so some single, central relaying system was likely used instead and as zer0netgain says - that's no use for location.

Transponders are capable of being turned off because when a plane is taxiing on the ground it should not be cluttering ATC displays. ACARS (the replacement to radar-based transponders) I believe eventually will automatically stop broadcasting when the plane's landing gear is down - but I believe it's also tied into the transponder kill switch on larger aircraft.

Either way, when you are out of range of radar stations and/or ACARS receivers, the signal doesn't reach anywhere and satellite communication is the only option.

How does it go missing, I don't think it did, I strongly suspect various militaries would know roughly where it is but will not speak our for fear of giving away operational abilities. The US has massive amounts of surveillance at Pine Gap in Australia and its Pivot to Asia mean the whole area especially the Malacca Straits and INdian Ocean are heavily monitored. The Australian defence force has the Jindalee Operational Radar Network (JORN) in Western Australia JORN The New Straits Times has reported that the Australian Defence Department refused to supply information from JORN.

As Ian Storey, a senior fellow at Singapore’s Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, told Reuters: “Information and intelligence exchange is very sensitive in this part of the world, where there is a lot of distrust and sovereign issues. Countries are unwilling to share sensitive intelligence because it reveals their military capabilities—or lack of capabilities.”

Once out of range of the echo radars the planes use a transponder that responds to a ping, with the plane and flight i.d. and the gps co-ordinates. If the transponder is turned off then there is no real way of knowing where the plane is and if it went down where it went down.

Face it. This plane is missing and it will remain missing until wreckage is found and identified.

ruveyn

^Out of range of civilian radar yes, but most certainly not out of range of military radar.

I would believe the military know more, and I am curious about the fact a lot of scientists were on board the plane.

How can a plane full of people go missing ? A question the media has been asking over and over again for the last couple of weeks No offense, but I'm suspecting that this is a diversion attempt by Obama just because he doesn't have a backbone and is afraid of Putin

How is Obama preventing Putin from taking over the Ukraine ? By cutting his money ! !! ! Wow Mr President, is it really hard to believe that the Russian President has a higher population rating ?

Okaaaay... So Obama has somehow personally forced all news organisations, domestic and foreign, to ask an obvious question?

Alcan just called - they want their tinfoil back...

Sir,

I have it from a retired 333rd Degree Freemason who was in on not only the JFK assassination, but also the RFK and MLK assainations that the plane was not hijacked per se, but rather it was beamed aboard Bigfoot's UFO by Elvis Presley himself, and is now enroute to N'Ngah Wu'Unqh * Blee'Ur !!AuGh, (Which we know as exosolar system HD 40307 planet 2) where it is on target for scheduled arrival in 2 Earth weeks, whereupon the occupants of the plane are to be inspected and processed for profoundly strange Sexperiments.