Big Media Covering Up Government Spy Technology During Coverage of Missing Malaysia Airliner: Claim Satellites Provide Airline Passangers With Wifi But 'Don't Track Airplanes' — Omits Capabilities of Spy Satellites

Spy Satellite photo of Syrian government artillery and tanks. US spy satellites are constantly
tracking the movements of foreign troops and military equipment in real time and the NSA is trying
to monitor everybody everywhere — But they ignore the movements of giant flying aircraft?
(Photo provided by Freedom House)

By Jad Mouawad, Christopher Drew and Nicola Clark
Airlines routinely use satellites to provide Wi-Fi for passengers. But for years they have failed to use a similar technology for a far more basic task: tracking planes and their black-box flight recorders.

Long before Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 vanished on March 8, the global airline industry had sophisticated tools in hand to follow planes in real time and stream data from their flight recorders. But for a variety of reasons, mostly involving cost and how infrequently planes crash, neither the airlines nor their regulators adopted them.

One of the haunting questions about Flight MH370 — how authorities could lose track of a Boeing 777 jetliner in age when an iPhone can be located in moments — persisted on Thursday as Australian officials said satellite cameras had spotted objects floating in the southern Indian Ocean that might be parts of the missing airliner...

The idea of tracking airplanes in flight or using deployable black boxes that can broadcast their location via satellites has been around for many years and gained attention after an Air France jet crashed in the Atlantic Ocean in 2009; it took investigators two years to locate the black boxes, over three kilometres underwater. But the disappearance of the Malaysian plane and improvements in satellite technology could provide a new impetus to track planes more closely, experts said.

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