Missing AirAsia Plane: How A Plane Can Disappear at 32,000 Feet

nuttapong/iStock Editorial/Thinkstock(NEW YORK) — One of the biggest questions baffling investigators and aviation experts in the latest commercial airline disappearance in Southeast Asia is how a sizable aircraft can simply vanish from radar screens without leaving a virtual trail.

As investigators expand the search area for missing AirAsia flight QZ 8501, former Marine Corps fighter pilot and ABC News consultant Col. Stephen Ganyard says that the real mystery about this plane is why there are no further clues on the radar that may provide hints of what happened to the plane.

“The radar data itself showed that at 32,000 feet the aircraft just disappeared,” Ganyard said on Good Morning America.

“You would think if the crew had lost control, maybe as they’d come down there would have been some additional [radar] hits there to say, ‘Hey, the aircraft is descending,’ but it just disappeared at 32,000 feet,” he said.

“There’s very few things that could do that. It could be weather-related, but highly unlikely. Or a bomb, but it just doesn’t make sense that an airplane would disappear at 32,000 feet,” he told GMA.

Weather is being viewed as a likely factor by investigators and Ganyard, partly because the pilot of the plane last communicated with air traffic control five minutes before the plane disappeared when he asked for permission to go to a higher altitude in order to avoid a storm.

“It’s the only thing we have to hang our hat on at this point, other than some mystifying radar data, is that there was weather involved,” Ganyard said. He went on to warn that just because it may have been turbulent it wasn’t necessarily strong enough to crash the plane.

“The difference between contributing [factor] and bringing a plane down is significant,” he said.

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