I still find it a little amazing that in the "surveillance" world we seem to live in today, when the governments of the world know who we email, our friends on Facebook, and who we talk to on the phone that we can still manage to lose something the size of a 777.
Perhaps we shouldn't be so surprised that we can't find it. Slate has an interesting article
How to Disappear a Jetliner which talks about how planes are tracked:
The shock generated by the Boeing 777 mystery is largely a product of how much we’ve come to take for granted the modern superabundance of information. ..... If you log on to a flight-tracking website, you can punch in the flight number of any commercial aircraft and see its current location and direction. Seems pretty foolproof.
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Centers track each flight in a variety of ways. The first is with good old-fashioned radio calls. Controllers call up pilots to give them instructions, inquire about their intentions, and relay information. The second source of information is radar, of which there are two kinds. Primary radar tells operators where a plane is located. ......secondary radar, which pings an electronic device called a transponder inside each aircraft, which then transmits its altitude. Controllers will then be able to see on their screen the number of each flight, its location, and its altitude, derived from secondary radar.
---------------snip--------------
Together, these last two systems provide a robust and interlinking network, but they share the same limitation: They’re limited in range to somewhere between 100 to 200 miles from the nearest ground station, depending on atmospheric conditions. “In general, once you go far enough out over the water, if you don’t have a satellite link, there’s no way to talk to the ground,” says Rob Thomas,....
In such cases, the flight remains in the system, and controllers continue to see its symbol moving across their screens, based on the information obtained from the flight plan and from the last actual contact between controllers and the plane. .... They’re out of contact, and their status within the system is based on assumption until they can actually get back in contact and confirm that everything’s A-OK.
A footnote to the article mentions that they also have voice comms via shortwave radio which has much longer range, but doesn't always work. And if for some reason the cockpit crew is unable to talk then shortwave also doesn't help.
Regarding the search itself, WaPo has an
intersting graphic illustrating just how challenging a problem this search is.
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