Getting your people on a passenger plane in order to hijack it is pretty easy if you are a government. How are you going to convince a cargo airline to let your people on one of their planes?
Unless, of course, the pilots are the hijackers, in which case getting your people on either type of plane is equally difficult.
Forget theft - in addition to a cargo configuration being better for use as a bomb, an empty plane with lots of fuel already aboard would be much more useful. Those things are thirsty, and getting a few hundred tons of Jet A fuel to a strip in the middle of nowhere would likely to also draw attention.
A fleet of tankers all loading Jet A and then heading away from nearby large airports would be suspicious.
Small airports do not stock enough Jet A to fill an empty 777.
Steal a cargo plane being readied for a flight to N. America or Europe, not something full of people and fueled for a short hop to Beijing.
That’s still standard British spelling. I see it here in Thailand all the time.
I’m afraid this is looking more and more like a case of pilot suicide. BBC mentioned that the deepest parts of the Indian Ocean are something like the third deepest on Earth. Maybe he wanted to minimize the chances of ever being found.
The hijackers could conceal themselves inside the cargo and exit once the plane was in flight. Air cargo scrutiny, especially that from established shippers, is surprisingly lax. They then travel to the cockpit, overwhelm a surprised flight crew and they’d have an aircraft.
Which works fine except for the minor detail that (as I understand it) the hold of a cargo plane is not heated and that the cargo may very well be packed in a way that makes it impossible to exit your hiding place, and / or reach the cockpit.
Also - as to the idea of jet fuel. Sure, if you have to take enough jet fuel all in a day or two to refuel a 777 then eyebrows may very well be raised.
BUT
What if
a) You are a state level player? Then the amount to refuel is going to be chicken feed
b) You have a longer time frame - say 6 months, to refuel the plane? How hard would it be, really, to move a few thousand gallons a day from different places if you are not constrained by time?
Also - it’s my understanding, that jet engines aren’t particularly sensitive over what fuel they have - so perhaps “pure” jet fuel is not required - isn’t jet fuel mostly just kerosene anyway?
Since we’re speculating on state-level actors, one possible use of a stolen plane would be to carry a nuclear bomb. If one of the world powers wanted to nuke someone else and get away with it (ie, not start WWIII) then they would absolutely need a delivery vehicle that could not be traced back to them in any conceivable way. Any country capable of planning such an attack would be able to alter the plane’s appearance, and these days they could probably fit the plane to fly by remote control, so finding someone willing to sacrifice themself would be unnecessary.
Well…indulging in conspiracy theories…
That being the case -
If somebody wanted to nuke NK without the rest of the world knowing who - does NK have the capability to intercept such an attempt?
Assuming that such a thing did happen - is there anyway to determine where the nuclear device originated from (a-la a Tom Clancy novel)?
Alternatively - what if someone was able to get a dose of something like bubonic plague or small pox - just how hard would it be to “weaponise” such a thing, and then use the 777 as a delivery vehicle?
Hmmm. And Iran was along the direction of that northern corridor they said was one possible flight path.
Radar suggests that the plane climbed to 45,000 feet shortly after is disappeared from civilian radar. Whoever took the plane was being very methodical, so he probably didn’t climb to 45,000 feet just for fun. The only reason I can think to do that would be to incapacitate the passengers.
Could the pilot depressurize the plane (while wearing an Oxygen mask himself)? Could he disable the passenger compartment Oxygen masks, either overriding them dropping down, or disabling the flow of Oxygen? For that matter, how long will the Oxygen last if he can’t disable it?
People can barely breath at 29,000 feet at the top of Everest, so I’d expect no one would last long at 45,00 feet. With the passengers dead, the pilot could set his waypoints for the autopilot, descend or repressurize the plane, then find and turn off any cell phones that anyone may have had out.
If the pilot/hijackers could do any of these things, it would eliminate the need to have to arrange some sort of “death squad” at the landing site. I suspect the oxygen wouldn’t last more than a few hours max, since the plane’s designers were no doubt assuming that the pilot would head to the nearest available airstrip in the event of a depresurization.
I’ll defer to Richard Pearse and others who have been very helpful in the other MPSIMS thread. But I believe the takeaway was that the passengers O2 system is only designed to last a few minutes - merely long enough for the pilot to fly the plane to a lower altitude where oxygen would not be necessary. The cockpit crew has a separate O2 system which lasts longer. Also, it is possible for the pilot to manually de-pressurize the aircraft, and then stay at a high altitude until the passenger oxygen ran out.
The bottom line is that it would by possible for a pilot to manually depressurize the plane and maintain a high altitude until the passengers were all incapacitated / dead, prior to descending to a lower altitude.
In the other thread, Richard Pearse said the passenger’s oxygen only lasts about 10 minutes, long enough for the pilot to drop below 10,000 feet.
So, if the pilot/hijacker is able to depressurize the cabin, killing the passengers via oxygen deprevation would actually be pretty easy to do :eek:
One reason to climb that high would be to attempt to put out a fire. This Wired article speculates they had a fire and wanted to starve the fire of oxygen.
If so, a Mayday call would be likely. If intentional suicide, it would not be. So far, we haven’t heard a Mayday. And turning off the transponder won’t help put out a fire unless the fire caused the transponder failure, and suddenly.
I didn’t know a passenger plane could even get to 45,000 feet. If they can, why is normal cruising altitude more like 30,000? Seems like the higher you go, the less air resistance. Does ice build up a lot faster if you go much higher?
Air gets thinner too, so go too high and your engine performance will suffer. Fighters intended for high-altitude combat in WWII had to have fairly specialized hardware to allow their engines to perform at 20,000 feet, which is why many cheaper but otherwise very good aircraft were sent to the Mediterranean, the Pacific, and Asia, where combat happened at lower altitudes. But yeah, icing is also going to be an issue. IIRC, the temperature drops something like 10 degrees F for every 1000 feet you go up, and where airliners operate the temperatures are usually below freezing. It’s been pointed out by many a pedantic history nerd that Icarus was under no danger of burning up from flying too high, not that it’d matter to him once he got high enough to asphyxiate or for the wax on his wings to get brittle and break up from freezing.
The hold has to be heated as cargo planes carry various types of cargo, some of it is perishable or could be damaged if it were unheated. Also, many flights carry a loadmaster whose job it is to watch the load during the flight to make certain that it does nit shift and make the pilot if kit does ( a shifting load will throw the plane’s center of gravity off and might cause a crash). The loadmaster would probably not wish to work in subzero conditions.
Finally, fluids flow through the cargo hold’s walls, hydraulic fluid being one of them. If the cargo hold were unheated, the fluids could freeze and that would cause assorted problems with the controls.
[QUOTE …the temperature drops something like 10 degrees F for every 1000 feet you go up]
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Actually, the temperature drop is 3.5° per 1000 feet. If you ask an engineer about this, he will call it “the adiabatic lapse rate” if you don’t stop him.
Here’s what Wikipedia says about it:
According to this, the 747-400 has a 45,000 foot ceiling:
Note what my link says about the 777:
It sounds like it is difficult to climb much past the service ceiling. How accurate is the radar that gave that 45,000 foot reading?
A lot of what I read about this is impossible to make sense of without knowing how often the situation occurs in normal aviation. Take this:
If an informal handoff happens a lot in the middle of the night in that part of the world, this is insignificant. If virtually unknown, it’s important.
I’m going with it having been hijacked by pirates, who will sell it to cargo cultists. The passengers are enjoying life on an island paradise, but are getting sick of a diet of yams, taro, and coconuts. Some of the scientists among them are working out the final details of a coconut radio and we will be hearing from them real soon now.