EgyptAir Flight MS804 Disappears From Radar During Paris-Cairo

The plane was going 533 knots ground speed. The max speed of the A320 at 37,000 feet is mach 0.82 which is about 470 knots true air speed or 540 mph depending on temperature. Typical windspeeds can be up to 140 knots at that altitude bringing the maximum ground speed up to 610 knots when flying with a tailwind.Thanks. A much better explanation than mine. Spot on.Yeah, as obviously said, it's the speed over ground. So the aircraft still may have been cruising along at Mach .80 ,or whatever, but the wind may have been a tailwind which basically pushes the aircraft from behind thus a faster speed over ground.

Just as an aside, it is amazing to me that I can be here seeing the "real-time" read outs of a plane that is halfway across the world from me at the touch of a button, 40 years ago this was un-fucking-heard of.My own uninformed tendency would be to assume that a traceable remnant of the air frame would persist on radar in almost all scenarios short of a sudden and catastrophic destruction of the airplane at that altitude.This is completely correct. People keep focusing on the radar. As someone who communicates with airplanes 8 hours a day, the loss of radio aspect is much a greater concern than the loss of radar. Transponders /radar signals consistently are inaccurate while loss of radio is not. If there's a loss of radio, there's a problem.

I run a radar for a living. Not for ATC but something similar. ATC air search radars are designed to tell you where airplanes are, and filter everything else. You don't want to see noise and mistake it for aircraft. Thick patches of weather and other random stuff will send returns, but be filtered out. If an aircraft is behaving very irregularly it could be filtered out even though it's sending a return. For example an extreme dive would show little to no forward speed because all the movement is vertical, and therefore would definitely be filtered out. Those radars rarely have an associated height finder but rather rely on IFF mode C or mode S replies to determine altitude.

For those who have little to no frame of reference for number of flying hours for pilot and copilot (reportedly at roughly 6000 and 2000 hours respectively, give-take), thats around 10-13 years for the captain and 4-6 years for the copilot.
They're an experienced crew. If they had the chance, they'd have gotten a distress out, or even indicated it somehow given the chance. Considering their altitude, the plane's last reported location, and the glide ratio of the A320, they could not have made it back to land in the event of a non-catastrophic power loss. The plane is definitely in the water, intact or otherwise.