How we track airplanes in 2014 might surprise you

The disappearance of Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 has raised many uncomfortable questions for fliers. In The Guardian last week, Stephen Trimble said the technology on your iPhone "is more powerful than the evidence-collecting computers in the cockpit":

The ongoing mystery of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 is the fault of a bizarre quirk in our networked society. Even cars have broadband connectivity now, but the modern jet airliner — perhaps our most technologically evolved mode of transport — still exists in the age of radio.

Air traffic controllers today must orchestrate the most congested airspace using primarily voice commands. You can send and receive text messages from most aircraft, surf the web and even stream House of Cards. The system that powers the plane is limited to pre-dial-up internet connection speeds.

There is simply no datalink onboard an aircraft with the bandwidth to continuously stream the volumes of data collected and stored during every second of a flight by the flight data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder.

The result is a dangerous silence in the immediate and sometimes extended aftermath of what appears to be the worst airline crash in more than a decade. In the absence of data, the biological temptation to seek patterns within the flimsiest of available evidence is overwhelming.

One of the problems in the plane's disappearance is the lack of a global tracking system for flights.

"It was passing from one airspace to another at precisely the time it lost communication," reports Channel 4 News in the UK. "Air-traffic controllers in Malaysia had just handed over the flight to Vietnam before the Acars data-transmission system was disabled."

On The Daily Circuit, we discuss what really happens when we fly across multiple countries, oceans and time zones.

LEARN MORE ABOUT AIRPLANE TECHNOLOGY:

• 7 technologies for tracking (or losing) airplanes
Here are the technologies that airlines, air traffic controllers, and militaries use to monitor the skies. (Global Post)

• Tension Is Growing as Families of Flight 370 Passengers Hold Vigil
As the world puzzles over the fate of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, which disappeared on its way to Beijing on March 8, the families of the 239 people aboard the Boeing 777 jet have been stuck in a netherworld between anger and grief, clinging to the remotest hope that their relatives might still be alive as the authorities have offered conflicting and confounding possible narratives. (New York Times)

• What do we actually know about Malaysia Airlines Flight 370? (Christian Science Monitor)