Originally Posted by
kaputt
The most amazing thing to me is that not one country in that region scrambled fighters to intercept this jet, especially in the post 9/11 world. Or at the very least asked from immediate help from one of the larger nations in the region. I’m sure Australia could have thrown something together, and I bet the US Navy was somewhere in the region.
But there should have been jets on this thing almost immediately, and with the help of some tankers they could have tracked it until it went down and then maybe we don’t have this mystery.
I think you have a SERIOUS misunderstanding as to the number of square miles in the area (and possibly the world) and the number of military aircraft in existence, far less the TINY number that are on alert and capable of being generated in any reasonable timeframe on no notice.
Australia, for example, has a land area of 3 million miles. The Australian Air Force has - all types - approximately 260 aircraft. Sydney is 4100 miles from Kuala Lumpur.
The US Navy struggles to keep one (1) carrier deployed in the Arabian Sea. The Arabian Sea is 4000 miles from Malaysia.
https://news.usni.org/category/fleet-tracker
A carrier group will typically have 65-70 aircraft total.
Even had there been timely notification, it woukd have taken eight hours for US or Australian military aircraft to get to the area of the flight, and that’s assuming long range tanker support was available which, at least for the US military, would not have been the case.
It’s a big friggin’ world out there.