during handover from one ATC to another. That alone would cause a gap before anybody knew anything was wrong. And then given that the transponder was off, the natural thing would be to assume catastrophic failure and look thereabouts. Without a transponder all you've got is a radar blip, and there are many. And if the radar blip isn't at the elevation or somewhere near the expected course of the flight, there's no way to tie it to the missing plane.
Normally pilots will cope with a problem to try to stabilize and communicate as a secondary priority, but losing the transponder signal would generally mean a catastrophic failure right then.
But if the transponder had been on, ATCs would have tagged the flight and tried to contact it, and without contact the alert would have been raised really quickly.
They had no way to know at the time that the aircraft was still flying. That's not the natural assumption once the transponder signal is lost. And if the transponder signal had dropped out while the aircraft was still in one ATC center, there would have been an immediate red flag. But at the time the transponder cut out, the plane was leaving one ATC center and would be checking into the next one. It never did.
Also, IF the flight continued along the Malaysian military's suspected route, what happened is that the transponder signal dropped out, the plane turned to the west and dropped thousands of feet. If you were looking for the missing plane blip on radar, that's not where you would be looking.
It's been kind of obvious for a couple of days that if the Malaysian military did pick up this plane where they suspect they did, whatever happened was intentional rather than accidental. We don't know by whom, and we don't know why. But Occam's Razor says it was intentional, because this sequence of events otherwise is too coincidental to add up to "accident".
The pickup on the Malaysian military radar doesn't have to be this plane, but the ACARS pinging makes it much more likely that it was.
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