The Malaysia Airlines Disappearance Shows Technology’s Limits; Radar, Satellites Are Powerful Tools but Still Have Limited Reach

The Malaysia Airlines Disappearance Shows Technology’s Limits

Radar, Satellites Are Powerful Tools but Still Have Limited Reach

DANIEL MICHAELS and JON OSTROWER

March 11, 2014 7:59 p.m. ET

In the past 65 years, 80 planes have taken off and vanished, according to the Aviation Safety Network. Harro Ranter, the organization’s president, names some of the most dangerous places to fly.

Eleven years ago, a shiny silver Boeing BA -0.96% 727 airliner took off from Luanda, Angola, and became one of the few commercial jetliners to vanish and never be found.

Massive jet airplanes disappear more often in fiction than in real life, but it does happen. In 1979, a Boeing 707 with six people aboard was lost in the Pacific Ocean after leaving Tokyo. And dozens of smaller planes have gone missing and never been located.

The so-far fruitless search for Malaysia Airlines 3786.KU +2.08% Flight 370, which disappeared early Saturday with 239 people aboard, is unprecedented because of the plane’s size and because the widebody Boeing 777 had been in radio and satellite contact with multiple locations on the ground. It was also flying when it lost contact over the sea in one of the world’s most densely populated regions, Southeast Asia, not over remote jungle or open ocean.

Planes have fallen, never to be seen again, from the earliest days of aviation. Others have been found only after lengthy searches or by chance decades later. Radar, satellites and other technology have become powerful aids in such situations.

But as Flight 370’s disappearance shows, technology still has limited reach in some swaths of the planet.

“The fact is that, in many parts of the world…radar coverage is not complete,” said David McMillan, Chairman of the Flight Safety Foundation and former head of Eurocontrol, Europe’s air-traffic coordinator. “It’s clearly an area for further improvement.”

In the same region in 2007, it took crews 10 days to find the first pieces of an Indonesian Boeing 737 that crashed in the sea near Sulawesi. Searchers needed 36 hours to locate the first wreckage of Air France Flight 447, which crashed over the Atlantic five years ago with 228 people aboard.

“If a plane goes down in the ocean, it’s very difficult to find it,” said Richard B. Stone, a former president of the International Society of Air Safety Investigators.

The Aviation Safety Network, a database tracking accidents, lists 80 planes as “missing” since 1948. No trace of the planes or their occupants was ever found, according to ASN President Harro Ranter. The aircraft range from tiny one-seat propeller planes to jetliners and a U.S. Coast Guard Lockheed C-130 Hercules—a four-engine turboprop transport—that crashed off the California coast in 2009.

The 727 that vanished over Angola is believed to have had only two people aboard. At dusk on May 25, 2003, an American mechanic for Aerospace Sales & Leasing Co., the Florida-based lessor that owned the 18-year-old plane, boarded the jetliner in Luanda, according to press reports at the time. He was accompanied by a Congolese assistant. Neither was certified to pilot the plane, which normally required a crew of three.

Without authorization or communication, the plane began taxiing, according to press reports. Its lights and transponder remained off as it took off and started to fly over the Atlantic.

The unauthorized departure, less than two years after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, sparked an international search. U.S. diplomats and African authorities visited airfields across the continent, seeking hints the plane had landed. U.S. national-security authorities including the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency scoured satellite images. The plane was never seen again.

“I have no idea” about what happened to the 727, it is “one of those things we’ve never understood,” said Maury Joseph, president of Aerospace Sales & Leasing. “It’s unheard of for something that large, and nothing to this day has ever shown up.”

The FBI and CIA didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 is one of the first jet planes since then to disappear for this long.

“The fact that it’s so rare is the reason everyone is paying attention to it,” said Bob van der Linden, chairman of the aeronautics department at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum.

Disappearances used to be more common. Amelia Earhart was notable as one of the first female aviators to set distance records in the 1930s. But she remains in the public consciousness today more because she disappeared in her Lockheed Electra near New Guinea while attempting to circumnavigate the globe.

Today, radar can generally track aircraft large and small. But even in an age of global satellite navigation and the perception of world-wide surveillance, significant areas of Earth are untouched by radar or regular observation.

Empty spots are shrinking. In the 1970s, the “Bermuda Triangle” loomed in the American imagination after several military planes disappeared in the Atlantic Ocean region between Florida, Puerto Rico and Bermuda, and other planes and ships were said to have vanished there. Supernatural explanations were eventually debunked.

“The accident rate in the Bermuda Triangle is no better or worse than anywhere else, but it sounds really intriguing,” said the Smithsonian’s Mr. van der Linden.

Rational explanations haven’t limited people’s imaginations. The hugely successful TV series “Lost” focused on passengers of a jetliner that crashed on a mysterious island not found on maps.

Disappearances are often simply accidents in remote locations, based on an analysis of planes that eventually showed up. Air France Flight 447 vanished for more than a day before searchers found floating pieces of the Airbus A330.

Millionaire adventurer Steve Fossett disappeared in September 2007 while flying a single-engine propeller plane near Yosemite National Park in California. It took more than a year to find the wreckage.

Other accidents are often too difficult to investigate, or the small number of people killed is deemed too low to merit a costly search. “It is very expensive to do,” said Mr. Stone, the accident investigator.

The Boeing 707 that crashed off Japan in 1979 had six people aboard. A Boeing 727 that sent distress messages and vanished after taking off from Reykjavik, Iceland, in 1990 had 18 people aboard. Neither was ever found.

On rare occasions, disappearances are solved by passengers. On Oct. 13, 1972, a Fairchild FH-227D with 45 people aboard, including a Uruguayan rugby team, crashed in the Andes while flying from Argentina to Chile—an incident later dramatized in the 1993 film “Alive.” Twelve passengers died immediately or were missing and the others waited in the freezing heights for rescue, some eventually resorting to cannibalism to survive.

When no help arrived, three of the 16 survivors in December set off for help. After one turned back to ration food, the remaining two men walked for seven days before they spotted a sign of civilization: an empty soup can and a horseshoe. Two more days passed before they found men on horseback who sent for help. Helicopters were dispatched to retrieve the remaining survivors.

Modern technology increases the chance the Malaysia Airlines flight will be found, the Air France crash suggests. While floating wreckage of that Airbus plane was found in less than two days, weeks of deep-sea searches turned up no sign of the fuselage or pings from beacons on its recorders.

Two subsequent searches were conducted using progressively more-sophisticated remote undersea vehicles, advanced sonar equipment and computer modeling of tidal patterns. Within days of launching the third search, almost two years after the crash, the wreckage was discovered.

“There’s going to be a trace somewhere, it will be found,” the Smithsonian’s Mr. van der Linden said of the Malaysian plane. “It may be a surprise about where it’s found, but we don’t know what happened on the airplane.”