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Originally Posted by underscore
Can the next person who posts about the damn phones ringing get points?
This is also ~400 miles from where they said last contact was, going in the wrong direction and not really towards Kuala Lumpur. To top it off, according to this: Crash: Malaysia B772 over Gulf of Thailand on Mar 8th 2014, aircraft missing they originally listed the last contact as 02:40L originally (the time of this location near Pulau Perak), and then corrected it to 01:30L.
So either the military radar isn't very dependable (which could be possible, if the planes radar systems were shut off I assume the military could only see the plane, not know which plane it is) , or some fuckheads have known the whole time that the plane was nowhere near where they said it was. 
Disclaimer: Slightly goofy theory/question below
edit: and now I'm wondering, if they had a massive communications issue so planes radar systems are off, they can't talk to anyone (and lets assume nav systems are screwy too, they guesstimated the U turn back towards Kuala Lumpur and were off) and they show up on the military radar as a bigass jet not on a designated flight path, what would the military do? I have a hard time thinking they would just ignore that and not send a jet or something. |
Here's the thing: RADAR doesn't tell anyone what plane it's showing, it just shows an object. They could have picked up a different plane on a similar course and an operator mistook it for the airliner in question.
In fact, there seems to be a little confusion as to exactly how RADAR works: all it does is send out a pulse of radio waves, and IF some are reflected back, it calculates the distance the object is by the time it takes the signal to return. Speed toward or away from the array can be determined by Doppler shift; speed perpendicular to the array can be determined by position change between sweeps.
As has been already noted, civilian RADAR has an effective maximum distance of 120 miles or so - this is because radio waves disperse over distance... same as shining a flashlight on distant trees. The further the object, the weaker the signal, the less reliable it gets. You can get more range with a tighter beam, but at the expense of coverage area and only being able to scan a small area (picture a flashlight you can focus from a wide beam to a narrow spot).
The plane's own RADAR systems have nothing to do with their tracking on the ground; those are there to show the plane's crew what's around it in the sky.