With the transponder on they could track the singapore jet with TCAS up to about 30 miles. With the transponder turned off, it would not be so easy.
I’m confused here, mind you its been years since I was up on the latest technology. But the Malaysia Flight 370 could have turned off it’s transponder, thereby eliminating the primary way of tracking it.
But it in turn shouldn’t have needed it on to utilize the weather/search radar in the nose of the aircraft to find the Singapore jet and follow it.
The transponder is a separate piece of equipment from the on-board radar and the on-board radar can, (well they used to anyway), be set to receive only and not transmit. It’s the transmitter that makes them easy to track. If they needed to they could turn on the radar transmitter for a couple of sweeps and then turn it off and look at the returns on the stored memory in the cockpit instruments.
In any case I would say it was an amazing feat of flying for any pilot today who has been trained to rely on so much of the modern equipment in the planes they fly today.
For the 40 plus years I flew, I flew behind airborne radars for maybe 30 of those years..
I never heard of a civilian radar that could see anything other than weather, primarily because its beam is a very narrow “pencil” beam.
It mus be narrow so that the exact size and location of large storms can be seen in a manner that allows circumnavigation. A wide beam sufficient to see aircraft would paint the ground and make two cells look as though they are one, thus making it impossible to plot a course between them.
Obviously fighters have a means of intercepting aircraft, but airlines are not designed for that purpose.
Intimate knowledge of airline schedules, the TCAS and carefully monitoring center frequencies during the planning period would have been his best means.
I would be interested in knowing if the pilot’s flight simulator had the software capability of following another flight.
Let’s not forget that the pilot had his personal laptop in the cabin with him. Did he connect to the internet during the flight? Did he have any software on the laptop that helped him avoid detection during the flight?
Part of the transponder system is the TCAS system (transponder collision avoidance system) This system allows planes to ping other airplane's transponders to determine location and altitude. It's range is about 30 miles and it puts a symbol and altitude readout on the planes Navigation Display. The weather radar can paint other aircraft nearby, but not very well. The TCAS, however, only works when the transponder is turned on.