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.
Even if they do someday find the wreck, I’m not sure if they can actually solve what happened. The flight recorders and CVR won’t last forever on the sea floor, and are very likely already unreadable.
Beyond ludicrous.
Most folks cannot even begin to comprehend how vast the south pacific is. Most fighters have a very limited combat radius without airborne refueling, which takes lengthy advance coordination to arrange.
Defensive fighter capability (interception) defends a specific area or border. AR is typically not required because the fighters are based close to the defended area. Response time in minutes. If the missing flight penetrated the wrong ADIZ, it could have been intercepted by fighters staged for that purpose.
Long-range offensive/strike ops require massive, complex coordination which takes 72-96 hours to arrange. That's what AR is used for.
An aerial search would utilize long-range/long-endurance patrol aircraft, and that's exactly what happened... the next day.
Also nobody in Oz or the USN likely even knew about this until they turned on CNN the next morning. Their job is not to patrol the vast reaches of the Pacific for lost jets. The ATC facilities which lost contact with MH don't have a red-phone to the pentagon.
That said, if it had approached a US ADIZ, it certainly would have been detected, transponder or not, and intercepted.