Reply to Egypt Air Flight has disappeared from radar

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[quote=Anonymous]Here is a comment from a pilot on reddit's livethread about the plane crash. I think its some good insight.
[i]I'm an A319/A320 First Officer.

Loss of radar contact is a rather unusual situation with regards to what may sadly turn out to be an accident.

There are basically two kinds of radar with regards to Aviation, primary and secondary. Primary is what you think of when you think of radar - a dot on a screen. Primary radar effectively bounces waves off the aircraft and times their return to calculate a position.

Secondary radar gives altitude, heading, call sign, altitude change trends, a kind of an ID called a squawk code, aircraft type. This works using a piece of equipment called a mode S transponder that pings this information live from the aircraft to SSR interrogations sent to the aircraft from the ground.

Ideally, there has just been some kind of transponder and comms failure. In this situation, being on an IFR flight plan, the aircraft should continue via its filed flight plan and then commence the approach at the destination at the time nominated on the flight plan. Not terribly uncommon, frequently trained for.

The alternative of the aircraft dropping off primary radar is sadly more serious and indicative of an accident.

Should the worst have happened it would be prudent not to get caught up in the usual media ill-informed hysteria and not jump to conclusions like terrorism. Most of my posts on here are about flying because the public in general have a lot of misconceptions with regards to aviation, not helped by an ill-informed media often pandering outright lies, and I like to set the record straight. For those interested in the facts of what may have happened to this aircraft, /r/flying will be a better reference for informed, neutral comment and debate than all other subreddits. The Aviation Herald is also a great resource.[/i]
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