Technically, a deep dive should make it easier to get to the front of the plane, shouldn’t it? You have gravity on your side.
What actually happened, though, is that a bunch of passengers started gathering around the cockpit door when they heard the pilot screaming as he was being stabbed, before the dive started, so all they had to do was get inside.
The big question is whether the dive started before they got through the door, or after. Did the attacker decide to crash the plane before he was threatened, did he push the nose down once the passengers came through the door, or were the controls hit by accident?
IMO if the airplane’s deck angle had gotten beyond the ability for ordinary folks to stand up or walk, they’d never have recovered from that dive. Acceleration to overspeed would be too quick and it’d be game over.
It could sure get steeper than most passengers experience and still be recoverable if gotten to quickly enough.
Mayday, shown in other countries under various titles including Air Crash Investigation, Air Disasters, and others, focuses each episode on a single emergency aviation incident: mostly crashes or near-crashes but also including bombings, etc. They feature dramatic reenactments, interviews with survivors, relatives, and/or investigators, any existing film footage, and CGI imagery of what happened in the cockpit and to the plane.
Thanks, after hearing about the damage, I was wondering about that particular detail. Not to give future hijackers/insane folks any ideas but, given the dive probably wasn’t steep enough to do so, could a pilot under attack use other sudden maneuvers and reasonably expect to shake them off their feet? In other words, is it responsive enough to resemble limb-breaking turbulance?
Boeing’s written guidance is that maneuvering to defeat attacks from the cabin is very dangerous and is likely to severely damage the airplane or result in loss of control before the maneuvers get violent enough to significantly hurt anyone in back. Slow 'em down a little? Yeah, maybe. For as long as you keep doing that. But you gotta stop sometime.
It will also hamper the people trying help about as much as it hampers the people trying to hurt. Assuming a fracas in the cabin, not the cockpit, my money is on the overwhelming numbers of goodguys defeating the comparatively few badguys unless they have machine guns. So leave 'em be to fight it out.
Having said all that, we had a saying in the fighter biz: “In a bad enough situation you may have to commit suicide to avoid being killed.” IOW, desperate straits call for desperate measures.
If we’re out of ideas to stop the badguys and they’re about to take over and therefore eventually kill us all, then my maneuvering and perhaps inadvertently breaking the jet and killing us all becomes a no-lose proposition. Might work. Probably won’t, but we’re no worse off for trying. We’re all already dead, but some of us haven’t quite noticed that yet.
This tactic was used, somewhat successfully during the horrific [Federal Express Flight 705 - Wikipedia] attempted FedEx hijacking in 1995. Took the guy off his feet and slowed him down a bit. Even so, the crew just barely survived it.
I heard this aspect of the story and had to laugh. That the plumber learned enough from television to stabilize the plane was hilarious. And to think my mother thought I was rotting my brain watching television. (I was expecting to hear that the guy learned how to fly by playing Microsoft Flight Simulator or another such game.)
if the plane is doing an extreme descend like it did after the brawl …
… what happens if Joe the Plumber sees (and presses) the button labeled “Autopilot” in the cockpit?
would it engage or would it say “plane is outside of my parameters/envelope, please contact a local Boeing associate at your earliest convenience to further discuss your options”?
Could the pilots, when trying to defeat people in the cabin, just fly straight and level, but resort to putting on oxygen masks, then intentionally depressurizing the cabin so everyone passes out from lack of O2? Sure, they might recover when the airplane descends down to breathable air, but it would at least buy some time. I even seem to recall that, post-9/11, some airlines had a strategy of “if hijackers are up to no good, knock them out with hypoxia, then send a crewmember with a portable oxygen tank to go into the cabin, kill the unconscious hijackers with some weapon, then turn on oxygen again”.
I’m a bizjet guy, not a Boeing guy. In my plane I could use the “dump” button which would drive the outflow valves to full open and de-pressurize the cabin. But when the cabin altitude reached around 14,500’ the valves would close enough to stabilize the pressure there, regardless of the plane’s actual altitude. This would happen somewhat suddenly (it’s normally an emergency measure to expel smoke), but I’m not sure it would incapacitate everyone. Especially not the young and fit. Might buy some time though.
The concensus on big jets is its just too slow-acting. And far more likely to incapacitate the passengers than the typically younger badguys
Do the badguys have portable oxygen in their carryons? Do they know where to find the stuff stored in the cabin? Are you sure?
The fact the bad guys are outnumbered 10 or 20 to 1 is a valuable combat asset. Don’t waste it.
I’ll also point out it’s irrelevant to the instant case of a badguy pilot. Whether political terrorist, simple suicidal wanna be, or outright crazy / drug-addled.