US Flight routes

[maevedarcy]

Hello, everyone!

So, I'm writing a fic where a plane disappears in the US. As in, it drops from all radars for a few minutes and it's presumed down for a few hours. I need to know any plausible flight routes within the US from Boston where this could happen. Any stretches of land where a pilot could make an emergency landing and the plane still be presumed down for like an hour or three is good for me.

Comments

[beatrice_otter]

I'm assuming that the plane's radio is out? And that this is a modern airplane and not, say, the 1950s? In the 1950s it would be easy, there was hardly any radar across the country.

I am not an expert, but I would be surprised if there were many. US air radar is extremely complete, and the sorts of places where there are not many people or civilian airports often have military bases which do classified stuff (top secret research, ballistic missile fields, etc.) And, as such, those military bases tend to be veryaware of what is in their airspace.

Maybe the Rockies?

[maevedarcy]

yeah I was thinking the plane radio malfunctions (how idk I'm hazy on the details, perhaps they don't matter for that part) and the plane experiments *something* with the engine that causes them to emergency land *somewhere*. It's a small private plane, so I suppose it's easier for things to go wrong.

[voidampersand]

The Red Lake Reservation prohibits anyone from flying over at less than 20,000 feet. Land there and they will impound the plane.

[maevedarcy]

oh? interesting. very interesting. I am googling stuff

[lilacsigil]

If you have a small plane, go near any large mountains that aren't near a military base. The plane will probably have a transponder, but it may not reach very far or be transmitting data such as altitude.

If you have a large plane, it's much harder. Most large aircraft these days also have a transponder that is sending information on its location in real time. Even when a plane isn't visible on civilian radar, it's usually visible on military radar (see the missing Malaysian flight MH370) for much longer.

[maevedarcy]

Ok so this is a terribly dumb question but I'm not a US resident. The Rocky Mountains, are they near a military base? Or what's the farthest away from a military base they could get? I'm sorry, these questions might seem really dumb but really my knowledge of US geography is not the best

[anne]

NORAD is under Cheyenne Mountain (and the Stargate is under NORAD, if that helps.)

[maevedarcy]

this is actually really helpful. I'm hoping people can suspend their disbelief long enough to read the fic because I cannot possibly make up a universe where these bases don't exist

[jadelennox]

The Rockies are 4,800 km long, by the way, so they are near a lot of things in both the US and Canada, but they are also FAR from a lot of things in both the US and Canada. I don't know how far a small private plane can go without stopping, but if it's headed to Seattle or Vancouver from Boston you could absolutely end up over a part of the Rockies that aren't near anything. They're the third longest range in the world (not even close to the Andes, but long compared to everything else).

In other words, you can wave your hands and make it work. :)

[dsrtao]

Boston is an Atlantic port city in the northeast, with warm summers and snow most winters (like right now). The East Coast mountain chain is the Appalachians, and stretches from Newfoundland (an island in Canada) all the way down the side of the continent to Alabama. They are old, mostly low mountains, rounded and bumpy rather than spiky and craggy.

The Rocky Mountains, on the other side of the continent, stretch from the western Yukon in Canada down to Santa Fe, New Mexico (a US state which borders the country of Mexico) between Arizona and Texas. They are younger (in geologic terms), and spiky and craggy and can be tall and photogenic.

It would not be completely wrong to think of North America as a plate stretching from the West Coast (on the Pacific) leading to the crumpled up Rockies, a huge mostly flat area in the middle of the plate drained by the Mississippi River and tributaries, and then another crinkle (the Appalachians) forming the inland border of the East Coast (on the Atlantic). The distance from edge to edge is about the same as London to Tel Aviv, or Cape Town to Addis Ababa, or 1.5x the distance from Perth to Cairns.

The population is concentrated along the coasts, plus the chain of rivers and lakes forming half the border to Canada, plus the Mississippi. Military bases tend to be located in those areas as well.

A small plane taking off from Boston (probably not Logan, the main airport, which is much too expensive and commercial) could go low in the Appalachians anywhere in New York State or northern Pennsylvania and land on a paved road or at one of the small general-aviation airports, depending on what you want to happen. A crash in the Applachians can be relatively close to civilization and still not be immediately accessible or locatable due to the nature of the roads (which tend to follow valleys rather than cross mountains) and the local ecology (forests of mixed conifers and deciduous, up and down the hills).

[maevedarcy]

yes. good. this is excellent news for me. I love this "close to civilization but difficult to locate" that's exactly what I need for dramatic effect.

[passingbuzzards]

Yeah NOT anywhere near Colorado, the *US Airforce Academy* + Buckley Space Force Base (which houses the US missile warning system) + are also here near the Rockies :,D The Yellowstone-ish area in Wyoming would be more believably remote.

[maevedarcy]

duly noted. thank you <3

[brokenallbroken]

Depending on the size of the plane and time period, the <ahref="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/superstition_mountains">Superstitions in central Arizona tend to eat people, and the surrounding area was sparsely-populated hinterland of the Phoenix conurbation until about 20 years ago. Now it's getting quite suburbanized.

[maevedarcy]

thank you <3

[full_metal_ox]

Also avoid the Dayton, Ohio area—-home of the Dayton International Airport, the smaller Dayton-Wright Brothers Airport, and Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, and a past hub of UFO gossip, as well as a geographically flat region.

(WPAFB is south enough of the Great Lakes to qualify as inland, and military aircraft from coastal bases often shelter there during hurricanes.)

[maevedarcy]

duly noted, thank you!

[rugessnome]

This doesn't help with location or, I think, working around military radar, (and I think some fixes have been made), but it might be worth looking into the EasyJet 6074 incident in September 2006 (one video about it), where a sensor fault in the electrical system caused many of the systems in a jet, including their transponder and radio, to lose power.

[maevedarcy]

this is actually extremely helpful for reasons that don't even go into this fic. Like this is for my own peace of mind

this is me having a feeling and not actually being helpful!

[jadelennox]

haha my brain weasels. I skimmed your question initially and immediately had a gasping flashback to the morning of 9/11 where we knew people who were on planes taking off from Boston Logan that morning of 9/11 and other people on planes headed to Logan that morning (mobile phones weren't ubiquitous) and it genuinely was that terrifying to not know and have no way to know.

That being said I assume you have a way to deal with the fact that it's no longer 2001 and everyone on the plane has cell phones? Unexpected solar storm to create panic in the NHL, heh.

(I'm not sure this could realistically happen with a commercial jet on a domestic flight from Boston, TBH. A private plane, sure. Arguably right now it probably could because the FAA is in such crisis, but that's more political than I suspect you want.)

Re: this is me having a feeling and not actually being helpful!

[maevedarcy]

how did you know this related to the hockey players oh my god my brainworms are extremely obvious

I actually am setting this on 2021 in a non-Covid world, so I had to take out literal cell tower coverage maps to see if this could be plausible. I ended up going with "actually this is extremely hard for what I wanted initially, but this is good for a very, very, specific moment of panic on Shane's part that I could write beautifully" so now we're going with that. The plane barely even got lost. It was like an hour. The worst hour of Shane's life though :)

[silveradept]

Land is not great for this, but consider a water landing. Most commercial aircraft are buoyant enough to stay afloat, and have emergency raft capability in case of sinking. They'll be off radar, and not easily accessible, even if the last known position of the plane is in the area. It takes time to assemble emergency rescue for water, and there won't be any real danger of drowning.

(Plus, there's some yucks there about paying attention to / not paying attention to the safety lecture before flights.)

[maevedarcy]

oh. OH.

you have planted a seed on my head for another story fuck