Plane crashes at Nashville... no one notices.

[onyx39]

http://edition.cnn.com/2013/10/29/us/plane-crash-m...

I am guessing that there will be some questions to be answered here.

[MajorProblem]

onyx39 said:

http://edition.cnn.com/2013/10/29/us/plane-crash-m...

I am guessing that there will be some questions to be answered here.

Thought that would've been plane to see.

[MartinDB]

A bit of journalistic exaggeration surely,
"Authorities struggled to explain how a small plane crashed at an international airport, erupted in fire, but evidently went unnoticed for hours", if it was unnoticed how can they say it erupted in in fire as opposed to just quietly burning?

[Eric Mc]

Fog.

[Simpo Two]

Yes, but no radar?

[Eric Mc]

At the airport?

If he hadn't got an operational transponder or turned it on he may have appeared only briefly as an unidentified blip which may have gone unnoticed.

If he had been flying low to keep sight of the ground he may have dropped below radar cover.

[Simpo Two]

Yes, radar at the airport, where there are usually people looking at screens and seeing blips going back and forth. Don't need a transponder for that. If it is a 'big' airport you would think somebody would have noticed the blip, not least because light aircraft wanderng about near airports are a hazard, and perhaps wondered what it was, and then thought 'That's funny, last time round it was low and now it's gone'. But perhaps they'd all gone home early.

[Eric Mc]

Might not have appeared on the radar for the reason I said.

Even if it did, if it only appeared as an anonymous blip for a short while it may not have been noticed. Controllers tend to pick up blips when they are aware that a particular aircraft is going to be handed over to them.

Once it was down on the ground, if the airport was shrouded in fog it wouldn't have been visible to anybody.

I know of two major accidents where aeroplanes crashed in dense fog at airports (Heathrow and Shannon) and it took the rescue services around 30 minutes to find the wreckage.