I found the documentary fascinating, but it left me with a few questions (aside from the obvious ones).

Apologies for any ignorance in the below:

Quite near the beginning of the doc, they explain the basics of radar, and how primary radar can only identify that a plane is present in the sky and track its movements etc. It does NOT offer any details of the aircraft.

With this in mind, skip ahead to the part of the doc where they explain how primary radar tracks the initial deviation of flight that the aircraft undertakes - it pretty much makes a 180 degree turn and flies back over Malaysia for a time.
We know that contact was lost with the plane when it was out of reach of primary radar (something I can't see being a coincidence) but then presumably ventures back into range which is why the flight path can be traced. I might have misheard this bit, but I think the doc mentioned it was army or military radar that picked it up?

Anyway, my question is, if it was only primary radar tracking this flight path, how did they know that it was definitely MH370? Were the inmarsat pings used to confirm this part of the flight path too?
And also, presuming somebody was monitoring malaysian airspace at the time, why were they not alarmed when this plane (that shouldn't have been there) suddenly showed up on their primary radar? Why didn't they try and contact/intercept the unidentified plane while it was flying across land?

There was a considerable delay before it even came out into the open that any military radar tracks existed, presumably the relevant military choosing to give away as little as possible.

I agree with you that the changes in course and unusual behaviour and circumstances must surely have initiated a scramble of military jets (else what's the point of the radar). I don't readily accept that they would have seen what they saw, yet sat on their hands.

It's a curious feature. Had the plane disappeared roundabout that point, teh finger would be pointed strongly at that military. However, we know it didn't. We know it flew south, far beyond the range of fighters and that strange behaviour seems to get them off the hook.

But I am sure that military must know more, as I suspect do the owners of a number of reconnaisance satellites which must during these hours have passed over the general area. Many of whose basic function you'd guess, would be precisely to detect high flying metallic tubes of unknown origin.

This is the best explanation I can figure out.

Primary radar has a nominal range of around 50-60NM and certainly no further than 100NM if operating at the typical L-Band, as most civilian primary radar does. Secondary radar generally has a nominal range of 200NM.

Military primary radar sometimes operates at the lower HF-UHF band which can look over the horizon (OTH) but require huge antenna arrays, often hundreds of metres long. This lower band gives much lower resolution returns returns but is better for spotting incoming aircraft or missiles early - the range can be up to 1,600NM. This may account for why the military were able to follow MH370 throughout though I doubt the RMAF are too keen to give away data which may reveal their radar locations and capabilities which could explain the delay.

This map shows radar locations on the Malaysian peninsular. Primary and secondary radar are located together. The 200NM secondary range is shown for each antenna, from that you can work out the 50-60NM range.



This is the [url=http://aip.dca.gov.my/aip%20pdf/ENR/ENR%201/ENR%201.6/Enr1_6.pdfDepartment of Civil Aviation Malyasia's primary and secondary radar services[/url (opens a pdf).

Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 has crashed near the Ukraine Russia Boredr en route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur. On this route it would have been at around 30,000 - 35,000 feet so as there are no reports of any distress or emergency calls, maybe the first things to consider are being shot down especially where it was, but obviously that's pure speculation.

it was shot down by a missile this one, think there could be some serious trouble ahead

Serious trouble for who? It was shot down by militants, not by an official army of a country.

I think the wider issue is that [iIF[/i pro-Russians have shot it down, Russia have almost certainly supplied the weapons. There's been a build up of Russian hardware in recent days and concern the separatists are being massively bolstered by Russian weapons and perhaps manpower once again.

The US has already stiffened their sanctions against Russia, if the above is proven to be the case you can expect wider reaching consequences.

Edit: looking more likely this is the case. Russian-backed separatist leader Igor Girkin posted pictures of the smoke plumes boasting of the shooting down of an aircraft, saying "The plane has just been taken down somewhere around Torez (Donetsk Oblast). It lays there behind the Progress mine. We did warn you – do not fly in 'our sky,'". The post has been deleted and he's in full denial mode.

The Ukrainians have also released recordings of phone calls which appear to show pro-Russians stating they (or more specifically, Kazaks) have shot down an aircraft, later confirming they have found many bodies and it's actually a civilian aircraft. The calls are allegedly between a separatist commander and a 'colonel of the Main Intelligence Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation', Vasili Geranin.

This illustrates perfectly the reason why when, for example,Russia wants to take over the Crimea and seize its airports, they do so by sending troops with no identifying signs: it sounds bizarre, but they know that this lets thousands ludicrously come up with stuff like "You got no PROOF its them". That is true. There could have been a fully equipped, highly trained, led and organized army of Ukrainian rebels secretly sitting about for decades, which nobody noticed. And like the BUK missile launcher that shot down the aircraft, they could've got all their high-tech weaponry from Guns'R'uz. There's no connection between "the rebels" and Russia whatsoever. Oh, no. Provided, that is, you have the swallowing capacity of a basking shark.

Haven't the Ukrainians admitted that a BUK missile launcher could have been among the materiel acquired by seperatists when the took over Eastern Ukraine? Although it is of Russian manufacture the source is still undetermined

I'm not sure it matters that much where it comes from but on the stuff I've read following this story, the separatists were bragging recently that they had "captured" it, and posting images of it. So I assume it is more probably a Ukrainian captured one, and would imagine that Putin is mightily sed off at one being used to down a civilian airliner wherever they got it from. But the fact is, the separatists are basically proxy Russian forces and so while i don't believe Putin would have ordered it nor that his forces would have made the mistake of hitting such a wrong target, equally it doesn't smack of keeping your attack/subversion dogs on a tight leash.

Throw in a comment I heard on the radio today about the whole region being full of bored young mercenaries looking for anyone to employ them to stir up trouble, murder on command and generally swagger around like Putin in an all male sauna, for $100 dollars a day and you can see how random acts of inexplicable violence can happen with million dollar weapons being left lying around and no-one in charge.

As I heard it, the reference was to Cossacks, not Kazaks.

This is becoming an astonishing sequence of events. First pro-Russians shoot the aircraft down - little doubt it was them - then the situation becomes a mix of the shocking, the farcical and the dangerous with militia robbing from the dead, removing evidence including the black boxes, getting drunk and leaving empty bottles at the crash site, firing weapons over the heads of and denying access to air crash investigators, lumping bodies around and stacking them into refrigeration wagons. Now the UN Security Council is being forced to draft resolutions to get somewhere. I realise this is a war zone, but the crash site is hardly on the front line.

Russia and their friends are showing their true colours. Where's LeighGionaire with his laughable pro-Russki rants and blind and foolish devotion to "impartial" RT reporting? I note another RT reporter has quit due to the lies they are asked to spout.

Putin could have put this to bed early with strong, clear and reasonable leadership, but he's let it drag out with staggering arrogance. Truly and utterly disgusting, as the entire world is bearing witness to.

I can't stop thinking about this, and the poor people on board. It might seem a little morbid, and I apologise if I offend anyone, but I can't help wondering about the moment of impact, what went through the minds of the passengers, and if any of them would have been unfortunate enough to still be conscious as they fell to earth. It's a horrifying thought, and one I'm struggling to get out of my mind.

don't have nightmares

Whilst a little OT this makes me think of the space shuttle disasters. I think it was both (can't remember for certain if it was both, but definitely one of them) Discovery & Columbia where they think the crew were still alive and conscious when they hit the ground.

A former director of the CIA was on Charlie Rose last night. He said that it was either a Russian BUK missile which they'd supplied to the separatists, or it was a Ukrainian BUK which the separatists had managed to take from them.

So no matter whether whether the BUK missiles were from the Russians or Ukrainians , it was the Russians who are to blame.

I think that's just the natural curiosity of the human brain, I occas find myself watching a YouTube video of the 9/11 attacks, not because It's enjoyable, just because of the "holy sh*t" factor.

This whole mess was triggered by a US/EU-backed overthrow of an elected government, don't forget...

Jill Dando used to say the same.

wasn't it Nick Ross rather than Jill Dando?

Do a google search for explosive decompression in an aircraft, there are some very good science papers on the subject specifically related to high altitude flying but basically the sort of catastrophic damage that will be caused by a missile means that by the time your brain has registered that something is wrong you'll be unconcious and then dead vety quickly afterwards - survival at just 25000 feet is estimated at 4 to 7 seconds in explosive decompression (loss of all artifical pressurisation with half a second) and the effect increases rapidly above that.

The whole "put your oxygen mask on" routine only works with a gradual loss such as a window fracture, any reports from autopsies on previous explosions that suggest that victims could be concious throughout just dont ring true when a body cannot survive in minus 60 degrees, sudden low pressure bloating every pocket of air in your body and oxygen saturation way below anything like necessary - by the time you can say "what the fook..." you'll be gone and if not then hypoxia can be a pleasant way to go - apparently.

Thanks for that JerryChicken.

Yet there are documented cases of wheel well stowaways who have survived flights of several hours at the relevant temperatures and pressures. I appreciate there is no "explosive" decompression but nobody seems to explain how these survivors survive the apparently impossible

That's due to the speed of the event though - what Jerry's talking about would give the body no chance at all to adjust/go into some kind of survival mode, which may be possible when someone is flown up to such an altitude.

If you're going to die in an air disaster, explosive decompression at altitude is by far the best option - I still regret watching one of those air disaster documentaries on a Japanese crash where everybody was well aware of what was going to happen and many wrote notes to loved ones in the time they had left. I am reasonably sure I would be far too busy literally sh*tting myself to be able to think of anything except terror.

Was looking this up on Wikipedia (yes, I know

) after watching a documentary about the early space age. Its thought that the crew of Challenger were alive but unconscious when the cabin hit the water. Columbia disintegrated and rapid depressurization effectively killed the crew before they were torn apart.