We live in an age of hyper-visibility. If you order a pepperoni pizza on a Friday night, you can open an app and watch a small car icon navigate the streets of your neighborhood in real-time. You know when the driver turns the corner. You know when they are idling at a red light. You know, with near-perfect precision, when dinner will arrive at your doorstep.
Yet, in this same era of technological omniscience, a Boeing 777 carrying hundreds of people can vanish into the void of the ocean, leaving investigators baffled for years.
This paradox—the “Pizza vs. Plane” disconnect—reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of how we monitor movement in the modern world. We tend to assume that “tracking” is a singular, universal blanket that covers the Earth. In reality, it is a patchwork quilt full of holes, dependent on a complex web of economics, physics, and infrastructure.
The Illusion of “The Grid”
The reason you can track your pizza driver is not because of satellites alone; it is because of cell towers.
The driver’s smartphone uses satellites (GPS) to calculate its own location. This is the easy part. The “Global Positioning System” is a passive broadcast; the phone listens to the satellites to figure out where it is. But to tell you where it is, the phone must transmit that data back to a server. It does this using the 4G or 5G cellular network, which is cheap, high-bandwidth, and ubiquitous in urban areas.
Your pizza driver is never more than a few miles from a cell tower. They are swimming in a sea of connectivity.
Commercial aviation, however, operates in a different reality. When a plane takes off from New York to London, it spends hours flying over the “Blue Water Gap”—the vast stretches of ocean where there are no cell towers. For decades, once a plane left the range of ground-based radar (about 200 miles offshore), it effectively disappeared from the eyes of air traffic control.
The difference between “Navigation” and “Surveillance”
To understand why planes vanish, we must distinguish between navigation (knowing where you are) and surveillance (telling someone else where you are).
The pilots of Flight MH370, for example, almost certainly knew where they were. Their on-board computers were receiving signals from GPS satellites perfectly. The failure was not in navigation; it was in reporting.
Historically, aircraft have relied on two main systems to report their location:
- Radar: A ground station sends a “ping,” and the plane’s transponder replies. This requires a direct line of sight. Due to the curvature of the Earth, ground radar cannot see planes over the deep ocean.
- ACARS/HF Radio: Planes can send data bursts over High-Frequency radio or satellite links. However, historically, continuous satellite data streaming has been incredibly expensive. Airlines paid for “snapshots” of data every 15 or 30 minutes, rather than the second-by-second stream we expect from a pizza app.
The Cost of Bandwidth
This brings us to the economic brutalism of tracking. Tracking a pizza driver costs pennies in data charges because the infrastructure (cell towers) is subsidized by millions of users. Tracking a plane over the Pacific Ocean requires dedicated bandwidth on communication satellites (like Inmarsat or Iridium).
For a long time, the aviation industry operated on the “Big Sky Theory”—the idea that planes are so reliable and the sky is so empty that continuous, real-time tracking over the ocean wasn’t worth the astronomical cost. It took tragedies like Air France 447 and Malaysia Airlines 370 to shatter that complacency.
Closing the Gap: Space-Based ADS-B
The good news is that the technology is finally catching up to the expectation. The solution lies in moving the “cell towers” to space.
A technology called ADS-B (Automatic Dependent Surveillance–Broadcast) has become the new standard. Planes broadcast their GPS position twice a second. Until recently, these broadcasts were only caught by ground stations (recreating the radar limit problem).
However, new constellations of satellites, such as those operated by Aireon, utilize receivers piggybacked on the Iridium satellite network. These satellites orbit the Earth and “listen” for the ADS-B signals from aircraft below, regardless of whether the plane is over the Sahara Desert or the middle of the Pacific. They then beam that data down to air traffic control centers in real-time.
This creates, for the first time in history, a truly global, real-time surveillance capability.
The Future of Visibility
The “Pizza Paradox” is slowly resolving. We are moving toward a world where the visibility we enjoy in our neighborhoods extends to the most remote corners of the planet.
Understanding this evolution requires recognizing that there is no single magic bullet. There are many types of tracking devices—from the Bluetooth tag on your keys and the cellular chip in your driver’s phone, to the transponder in a jet and the satellite collar on a polar bear. Each operates on different physics, with different costs and different blind spots.
While we may never track a 747 with the same casual ease and low cost as a pepperoni pie, the era of the “vanishing plane” is rapidly becoming a relic of the past, closed shut by a net of data woven in low earth orbit.
