re: Official Thread: Missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370

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Could a massive passenger jet slip past radar, cross international borders and land undetected?
That's a key question investigators are weighing as they continue the search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, which vanished March 8 on a flight between Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and Beijing.
Radar does have some blind spots, and it's possible to fly at lower altitudes to avoid being spotted, analysts told CNN.
But experts are divided over whether that could be what happened to the missing Boeing 777.

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"It certainly is possible to fly through the mountains in that part of the world and not be visible on radar. Also, an experienced pilot, anyone who wanted to go in that direction, could certainly plot out all the known radar locations, and you can easily determine, where are the radar blind spots?" he said. "It's the type of things the Americans did when they went into Pakistan to go after Osama bin Laden."
On Monday, the Malaysian newspaper New Straits Times reported that the plane may have flown low to the ground -- 5,000 feet or less -- and used mountainous terrain as cover to evade radar detection. The newspaper cited unnamed sources for its reporting, which CNN could not immediately confirm.
And a senior Indian military official told CNN on Monday that military radar near the Andaman and Nicobar Islands isn't as closely watched as other radar systems. That leaves open the possibility that Indian radar systems may not have picked up the airplane at the time of its last known Malaysian radar contact, near the tiny island of Palau Perak in the Strait of Malacca.
U.S. officials have said they don't think it's likely the plane flew north over land as it veered off course. If it had, they've said, radar somewhere would have detected it. Landing the plane somewhere also seems unlikely, since that would require a large runway, refueling capability and the ability to fix the plane, the officials have said.
Malaysian officials said Monday that they were not aware of the Malaysian newspaper's report.
"It does not come from us," said Malaysia Airlines CEO Ahmad Jauhari Yahya.
Analysts interviewed by CNN said that it would be extremely difficult to fly such a large aircraft so close to the ground over a long period of time, and that it's not even clear that doing so would keep the plane off radar scopes.
"Five-thousand isn't really low enough to evade the radar, and that's kind of where general aviation flies all the time anyway, and we're visible to radar," said Mary Schiavo, a CNN aviation analyst and former inspector general for the U.S. Department of Transportation.
"It just seems really highly improbable, unless we've been overestimating a lot of other countries' radar system capabilities," said Daniel Rose, an aviation and maritime attorney.
Buck Sexton, a former CIA officer who's now national security editor for TheBlaze.com, said radar would have detected the plane if it flew over land.
"This is a bus in the sky. It's a lot harder to get under the radar with this kind of thing than I think most people realize," he said. "So really, while the search I know has extended to this vast area stretching up into (the nations and central or south Asia), clearly there really should be much more of a search over open water, because this is not getting past people's radars."
It wouldn't be easy to avoid radar detection, experts say, but it could be done.
"Anything like this is possible," radar expert Greg Charvat told CNN's Piers Morgan Live. "But to do it, you'd have to have very detailed information of the type of radars, their disposition, their heights and their waveforms to pull that off."
Different countries would likely be using different radar systems, he said, but it's unclear how advanced the technology is in many countries.
"It took a great deal of skill to do this," CNN aviation analyst Jim Tilmon said. "I think somebody was at the controls who understood the value of altitude control to eliminate the possibility of being spotted and tracked on radar."
Whoever was in control in the cockpit, he said, "really had the ability to map out a route that was given the very best chance of not being detected."
One other possibility, he said: the plane could have shadowed another plane so closely that it slipped by radar detection.
Other analysts say that would require so much skill that it would be nearly impossible to pull off without getting caught.
There's another possible wrinkle, experts say. Some countries may be hesitant to reveal what they've seen on radar.
"They want to protect their own capabilities," Beatty said. "Their intelligence services are not going to want to publicize exactly what their capabilities are."

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