The new TV series Lost is about a passenger airplane flying from the U.S. to Fiji that loses its radio, is driven “1000 miles off course” and then crashes on an uncharted island with 48 survivors. Presumably (I say after seeing only the pilot episode) there’s no hope of rescue.
I’m posting this in GQ instead of CS because I want to know: could this happen in this day and age? With GPS, IFF transponders, modern search and rescue techniques, spy satellites and a planet mapped down to the meter, is it possible for this scenario to play out as described above?
Has it ever happened in the past, that we know of?
There’s a device called a personal locater beacon that can be used to locate you anywhere on the planet. I think there would be one of these in each life raft, so even if the transceiver in the cockpit were unusable, they should be able to signal their presence.
I haven’t seen the show, but my first response is: No. (Well, as long as the air carrier was a first-tier carrier: something like British Airways, Singapore Airlines, American Airlines, etc. Bali Start-Up Airways doesn’t count.)
An aircraft flying oceanic routes has more than one radio. There will usually be a minimum of four radios on board (two VHF and two HF). There may also be SATCOM and ACARS. The radios are normally used for comunication with ATC, while SATCOM and ACARS are normally used for communication with the company (ie the dispatcher for that flight).
The only way that I can see the airplane losing contact with everyone was if they lost all electrical power - and even that is almost impossible. Airplanes have batteries to power essential equipment and some have Ram Air Turbines (RATs) that extend into the slipstream and turn a turbine which generates electrical power. For fly-by-wire airplanes like the 777 and A340, losing electrical power means losing control of the airplane, so the amount of redundancy available is staggering. Again: NO.
As far as being forced 1,000 miles off course: NO. Even at normal cruising speeds, going 1,000 miles will take about two hours. That means for two hours the airplane was deviating from its planned path (and not just a little bit - to get 1,000 miles off course in two hours you’d have to make some sort of huge deviation. I’m not doing the math, but it must be something greater than 45 degrees off course). So for two hours the airplane is flying along, deviating from it’s planned path and not talking to anyone? Nope.
I’ve only addressed the unlikeliness of a modern airliner even getting into this situation. There are people more qualified than me to address the search-and-rescue aspect of it.
Airplanes have been lost in the past, of course. Military, private and even commercial airliners have disappeared and never been heard from again. I’d have to do some reasearch, but I think the last time an airliner disappeared without a trace was in the 50s. I’m probably wrong on the date, but I know that it has been a long time.
If the plane was between Hawaii and Fiji, then it could have been well out of radar range for some time. (I have no idea what a transponder’s range is, though.)
So without a radio, it could have been 1,000 miles off course and no one on land would know. (Pending clarification on the transponder’s range.)
GPS equipment generally doesn’t send any signal; it receives. So the plane’s GPS equipment wouldn’t have helped direct rescuers to the crash unless it had some sort of beacon mode AND was receiving power.
That being the case, search and rescue would involve eyeballs and infrared equipment in boats and planes. You need to be within a few miles of a signal fire before those become effective technologies.
If there was a fireball in flight, some satellites could have spotted it, but there’s little sign of explosion or soot in this case.
The best hope for rescue would come in the form of a satellite phone, but those are pretty rare outside the military and among people who work in a few specialized fields (like off-shore platforms).
If no one onboard had a satellite phone, I’d try to fire up one of the Airfones in the passenger compartment.
There may have been some canyon size holes in the plot of Lost but they did address the “off course” issue. The plane did not drift off course; the pilot intentionally turned the plane towards a new destination after the radio died. That was the reason their crash occurred at a spot where no one would expect to find them.
That said, I have my doubts that a real world pilot flying a plane with no radio would decide the best thing to do would be to change his recorded flight plans.
You are correct: that is the LAST thing that any competent pilot would do. This has been thought out well in advance.
For example, what happens when not just one airplane loses it’s radio? Let’s say, for example, that Los Angeles center loses it’s radios (which has happened in the past). Would it makes sense for every airplane to just start going wherever they wanted to? No, that would be mass chaos. There are procedures in place for this that you are expected to follow, and none of them involve picking a new destination at random and heading toward it.
In the (highly unlikely) case of an airliner losing all contact over the ocean, again, the LAST thing you would do is deviate from your flight plan. You file your flight plan for many reasons: one of them is so people will know where to start looking for you if you don’t show up as expected.
I missed the premiere of Lost (I hope they show it again – I wanted to see it) but it sounded to me like a combination of Cast Away and *Jurassic Park. * In CA, though, the plane was over the Pacific, tried to go around some bad weather and lost radio contact with everybody before an accident brought the plane down in the middle of the ocean. While watching that I had the same kind of questions about whether or not a modern aircraft could find itself completely cut off and then go off course by such a large degree that searchers couldn’t find where it crashed.
But, there’s the way things are SUPPOSED to work, and the way things work in real life. People make bad decisions and mistakes under pressure, there are design flaws, and all sorts of accidents that can combine to turn an ordinarily survivable situation into a disaster. Maybe with Lost, the story will unfold in such a way to explain how the plane ended up the way it did. Or, as is the result with so many stories, it worked out that way because without it there would BE no story.
Planes can certainly go missing. And, without having seen the pilot, my impression is that “Lost” is one of those X-Files type shows where nothing is as it seems. So it’s quite possible that the plane was deliberately flown off course for nefarious reasons.
Zebra, I shouldn’t have said “uncharted.” Of course I meant “unexplored.”
Wow, pilot141, great response! Thank you!
Little Nemo, are you sure that’s the given reason why they were off course? That doesn’t make any sense!
A better one would have been that strong winds or a storm blew them off course after they lost the radio, but that also creates problems for the premise, because rescuers would know about and correct for wind direction and speed and water currents.
Also, re: this comment by pilot141:
I see I wasn’t clear enough. Of course planes have disappeared without a trace; what I meant to ask was, has it ever happened that a plane disappeared and it later was discovered that survivors made it to an island and eked out an existence for months or years afterward?
Hmm. Hadn’t considered the possibility of conspiracy. They had a spare transceiver right there in the cockpit and didn’t use it, after all. The survivors have been remarkably stupid about the life rafts; they haven’t done anything with the wreckage except hide in it. It actually makes a lot more sense that the plane is “lost” because it’s been “hijacked”. Kind of a rough way to land, though.
If it’s not exactly right, it’s very close. When the main characters were talking to the pilot, he told them the radio had gone out, and for some inane reason (he may have actually had a reason, but I don’t remember it at the moment- it amounted to “I didn’t want to fly without a radio so I turned the plane around”) he re-routed to the nearest aiport, which was, IIRC, Fiji (and 1000 miles off-course).
Unfortunately, I doubt the writers will ever explore the idea further, seeing as how they
had the pilot get eaten by the dinosaur that lives in the woods.
So, given pilot’s points above, the one character on the cast who’s being realistic is the bitchy blond girl who’s refusing to believe that they’re marooned, and they’re going to be rescued within a matter of days if not hours? That’s pretty ironic, since they’re portraying her as being in wildly unrealistic denial.
There are no uncharted or unexplored islands. You could find an uninhabited island, but it would have to be really, really small to be completely uninhabited. An island the size the one on the show seems to be, would at the very least have a resort hotel on it.
