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.