the problem in this area, arizona, NM, southern california, nevada, is that the mountains block
allot of the coverage unless you are high. You can be flying into las vegas from the west, about 15
miles or so away from LAS ( las vegas international) and LAS cant see you. same goes with flying
into henderson from the SE. There is allot of dead space unless your above 10,000 ft.
where this guy went down at, near primm, there is I-15 not far away, he had just passed Jean
airport, it was about 5 -8 minutes away. if he was low, then no one may have seen hi on radar. plus
that may have been aroudn the time that winter storm was passing through with freezing levels from
the surface up and clouds covering the mountains.

"R. Hubbell" wrote:

On Wed, 3 Mar 2004 23:26:27 -0800 "C J Campbell" wrote:


"R. Hubbell" wrote in message
news:20040303194733.3b99a3f5@fstop...

An unfortunate end to a plane gone missing:

http://www.reviewjournal.com/lvrj_ho.../23314333.html

Interesting that they used radar signals to find the crash site.
I thought they would always do that.

It is extremely difficult to sort out the all those planes squawking 1200;
even harder to pick out traces of airplanes with no transponders. They are
analyzing the radar tracks to find an airplane that went missing in this
area recently. It will probably take several days, if not weeks, with a poor
chance of success.

There are still large areas of the country without radar coverage of any
kind, especially in the West in the mountain regions.

I think there is a lot more radar coverage than what you might think.
Out west there's a lot of MOAs and that means radar coverage, I don't know
if the military will share that data, but I suspect they would for SAR OPS.

R. Hubbell