Why can’t the U.S. find Malaysia Airlines Flight mh370 with it’s spy satellites, and stuff? I hear this question a lot when these types of global emergencies occur. Here’s the answer, from a former spy.
I guarantee that as soon as a team of CIA analysts heard the news about the missing flight, that they jumped on the search. Our team leaders always had the autonomy to choose that day’s mission. I can imagine the team leader saying, “Guys and gals, today we’re going to try to find this missing plane. Smith, go pull what we have. Jones, go requisition some platforms.”
However, more than that, competition will drive the teams to work their hardest to be the first team to locate the missing plane. At the end of a shift, the oncoming team will be briefed as to where things were left off. Because more important than competition, there is cross team collaboration to ensure mission success.
Unfortunately, there are limits to the intelligence that we can collect, and the resources that are available to us. Sometimes, things just go missing, with no evidence that can be found by a U.S. sensor system.
Personally, I hope that this missing plane doesn’t fall into that category.
Actually, beyond what was said there, there is a little more to this.
1: What birds (satellites) do we have flying over the routes the plane could take.
1a: how often would those satellites fly over the area.
1b: do they have the right optics to do large area photos of the flight path
1c: if zoomed out to do wide area over the flight path, would they still have the resolution needed to find small bits of debris from a crashed.
2: what has the cover looked like.
I had a 3 but forgot what it was.
Chris, if only I could talk about the capabilities or even confirm or deny the existence of satellites, it would blow your mind. Thanks for your comments.