AirAsia QZ8501: Boss 'devastated' by missing Indonesia jet
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AirAsia boss Tony Fernandes says he is "devastated" that a plane carrying 162 people from Indonesia to Singapore has gone missing.
AirAsia Indonesia flight QZ8501, an Airbus A320-200, disappeared over the Java Sea an hour into its flight at 06:24 local time (23:24 GMT Saturday).
Sad thing, another sad news.Bad weather was reported in the area but no distress call was made and no wreckage has been sighted.
The search operation was halted for the night and resumes at about 23:00 GMT.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-30619085 -
This still amazes me that this could happen today. either the military is just utterly unwilling to admit the satellite functionality they have, or they don't have it but allow everyone to 'think' they do.
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We definitely have the satellite technology to track that stuff. We did in the 1970s (although not in real time like we can now.) My dad was a spy satellite guy in the early 70s
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There are good reasons not to allow spy satellite data to be used for civilian purposes, though, and this plane is long gone. Maybe the agencies that control the satellites look, know that they have no lives to save and let the fruitless searching continue because it is just news filler and not actually costing anyone their life.
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That's my point - I'd be super surprised if we didn't have satellite images (live) of the entire journey. It should take that long to find where it went down with those!
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@scottalanmiller said:
There are good reasons not to allow spy satellite data to be used for civilian purposes, though, and this plane is long gone. Maybe the agencies that control the satellites look, know that they have no lives to save and let the fruitless searching continue because it is just news filler and not actually costing anyone their life.
May not be costing anyone their life, but it is costing millions to keep searching, and the families left in the dark.
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@Dashrender said:
May not be costing anyone their life, but it is costing millions to keep searching, and the families left in the dark.
That's a small price to pay. No one is going to expose spy programs to save a foreign power some money who opted not to track their own plane in the first place and those families know that everyone is dead, even if there is nothing official. You are asking spy agencies to cross some pretty crazy boundaries, where would it stop? Once we allow the US spy programs to be used to "break bad news to families" or to "offset the price of a GPS system in an airplane" we've gone crazy and don't understand what spy programs are for. The whole point is that they are secret.
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Not just US spy agencies have this. I'm talking their own.. or their neighbors... not specifically us, the USA
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@Dashrender said:
Not just US spy agencies have this. I'm talking their own.. or their neighbors... not specifically us, the USA
Well only their own spy agency, which I am SURE can't do this, would be willing to consider such a thing. Certainly none of their neighbours, none of which have that capability, would be willing to share that data even if they could.
Remember, most countries don't have satellites at all, let alone spy satellites.
