re: Egyptian Air plane disappears

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It's 2016. How does a plane disappear?

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Simple. It impacts the water, breaks into a zillion pieces, and then mostly sinks.

Most ATC systems are passive, meaning they aren't out looking for airplanes. Instead, they rely on information they're getting from the plane's transponders. When the transponder goes off, the plane disappears from the screen - which is what happened with MH370.

The difference here is that MH370 disappeared over the Pacific, which is a bigass chunk of water with nothing in most of it. The Med is a small body of water surrounded by a lot of countries that neither like nor trust each other, so there are lots of active radars watching that airspace. Even then when it hits the water the track goes away but unlike MH370 they have a good idea where to start looking - which is why they found the rough location of this one so quickly.

No technology exists that would guarantee that the location of a plane would be known all the time. The best that could happen would be GPS transponders that can't be turned off from the cockpit (as happened with MH370) so that when one went down, you'd know where to start the search.