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Comment by allochthon | Hacker News Reader

It's fascinating that you can find your iPhone using a Web site, but we're having such a hard time finding a plane (with lots of people with smartphones in their pockets turned off, or not).

EDIT: just to clarify -- I'm thinking of how tracking the precise location of a plane at all times is a problem that it seems like we should have a handle on by now, although not necessarily using cell phone technology. (I wasn't thinking clearly about the cell phone signals in this context, though, as people have been correct to point out.)

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Good luck finding your iPhone if someone else has taken enough control of it to turn off the signal. Or just while flying over the middle of the ocean. (personally I do always turn my phone off on international flights because otherwise the battery will be dead after searching for signal for so long. I suspect there are far fewer phones left on for a long international flight.)

It's not that fascinating. Most of the world does not have cellular or radar coverage, and those are the places where you will have a hard time finding missing aircraft (and phones).

When's the last time anyone found their iPhone when it fell into the ocean, hundreds of miles from land?

It's fascinating, but it leads one toward the unpleasant conclusion that the passengers could have already have been dead or unconscious before the plane flew back across Malaysia.

Cellphone tower records should provide more evidence, because there are sure to be some phones that were not in airplane mode.

Cellphones won't have enough power to connect more than about 50 km from the coast.

Do you still get cell signal seven miles up? I remember one time accidentally leaving my phone not in airplane mode and I had no signal. YMMV.

The quality of service may not be good, but text messaging will work, at least.

Or maybe, the passengers didn't yet know anything was wrong. They were only a small fraction into a very long overnight flight.

There are very few cellphone towers in the middle of the ocean.

>There are very few cellphone towers in the middle of the ocean.

And who said there are?

If you read the story, you will see that the plane flew back across land. If you look at a map, you'll see there's no other way it could get to the Indian Ocean

Which leads to the question of what the quality of cell service is like over/in that area. It may be land, but if there aren't any cell towers they may be SOL.

Malaysia and Thailand are relatively densely populated. Coverage is very heavy along both coasts of the countries, but much less complete inland.

This is a coverage map for one of 4 Malaysian mobile operators.

http://opensignal.com/networks/malaysia/my-celcom-coverage

Thanks. I haven't been following this closely enough to have an idea of the (presumed) flight path and thought the land travelled over was Indonesia, which seems to be not so dense on that western island.

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