The passengers used a trolley to try and break into the cockpit, there has been some debate about the still withheld cockpit voice recorder of the ensuing fight to get to the cockpit, I was curious as to whether anyone here is more of an expert and can ascertain that they did, for me, my opinion is that I hope they did, nothing would be more satisfying to know that before they passed, they kicked those terrorists ass.
How strong would that cockpit door be? I doubt it would withstand the repeated attempts of a trolley hitting it with alot of force.
Opinion seems divided on this, some people think they couldn’t breach it.
Airliner doors were strong but not armored before 9/11. I’d bet on three or four men with an aisle trolley being able to batter it in within a few minutes.
I would furthermore guess that the aircraft went in under control. Automatic stabilization etc. would have kept it on a gentler angle even if a furious fight was going on. I think a terrorist (with his throat cut) shoved the stick into a vertical descent.
The logical response is, “If they didn’t cause the plane to go down, then what did?” I doubt the terrorists would have forced the plane to land in the middle of west Pennsylvanian nowhere intentionally, nor do I think there were enough crew members in the cockpit to do it.
That’s interesting about the automatic stabilization thing, I thought Jarrah turned the plane upside down before plunging it into the ground, I’m not well versed in this, so are you saying that the design of the plane would prevent him from doing such a maneuver?
I am not an expert on big craft, but my understanding is that the modern airliners, left to themselves, will semi-autopilot to keep flying. So if there was a fight going on in the cockpit and no one was tending the controls, the 757 would have done its best to stay up and level. Since one or the other of the hijackers was likely belted in, it would have been difficult to keep him from driving the plane into the ground. Even if someone was trying to twist his head off, he would have been able to throw the plane out of control - perhaps in a roll turning into a vertical dive.
Several layers of WAG, those who know more specifics, especially about 757 controls, welcome to correct me.
I read it years ago…a quick internet search found this:
At the time I read it, perhaps 8 years ago, it was published along with commentary that was developed, I presume, with other black-box information, such as altitude, velocity, etc.
The transcript here does not contextualize as the first account I read did. However, from memory, the hijackers were debating with eachother if they should just crash the airplane immediately, or keep flying and try to hold the door closed. They were putting the plane through some extreme manoeuvres, trying to knock the passengers off their feet.
I also recall it was a brutal, savage battle, with the passengers using boiling water from the galley as a weapon.
Toward the end, the plane was flying very low. By this I mean that it did not “nosedive” into the ground from great height in one move, but had been flying low for some time before the final crash.
My personal belief is that the passengers did get through the door.
Well, even if they didn’t, I’ll bet they thought their success was imminent as well, and the crash happened so fast, they died succeeding in their minds, which is a good god thing. Argh, can’t post about this anymore. Just thinking about it always chokes me up. I don’t know why, but Flight 93 gets to me more even than the 3000 people in the Towers.
Not really, no. Autopilots are either on or off (with some non-relevant exceptions). When it is on the aircraft is under full control of the autopilot and when it is off the autopilot has no control.
The Airbus family is a little different in that the computers are flying the aeroplane even when the autopilot is off, but this is only to stop the pilot from flying the aircraft outside its normal operating envelope. It’ll stop you from stalling, but it won’t prevent the aircraft from plummeting into the ground. Airbus aircraft will also maintain the flight attitude the pilot sets so if no one touched the controls at all it will keep doing what ever you told it to, but any knock on the control stick will disrupt that.
This wasn’t an Airbus though and there is nothing in a B757 to prevent it from doing lazy cartwheels as it spirals out of the sky while the crew and terrorists are busy fighting.
You may be thinking of static stability which is a property designed into all aircraft, from tiny to huge, to essentially make them flyable by a human without requiring undue attention. A statically stable aircraft will tend to return to its original state if it is upset by something such as a bit of turbulence. That does not mean however, that you can leave the controls alone and the aircraft will keep flying exactly as you left it.
Ignorant of how autopilot really works, I can’t tell what happened in the Payne Stewart crash. After reading the link, I’m still unclear if it was on or off. Would autopilot let the aircraft veer up into the Dakotas on a Florida to Dallas flight, or was that just aerodynamic self-stabilization?
Autopilot, in and of itself, doesn’t just take the plane from point A to point B. Linked with GPS and programmed with waypoints (and setting the waypoints to automatically progress) can do that now, but when I learned to fly (and still to this day, for me) instrument navigation was done by charting a flight path from fixed radio positions (VOR stations) or the intersections of two VOR radials. In other words, you determine where the broadcasting station is, dial in its radio frequency, and set the heading to fly to that station. If you have distance measuring equipment, it will show you how many miles away you are (decreasing as you go TO the station, increasing as you go FROM the station.)
Typically, you’ll fly to the station or an intersection and, when over it, make your next turn to point to the next station.
If the autopilot was set to fly a certain heading to intercept a VOR station, the plane itself would continue on that heading if the pilot didn’t dial in the new heading when on top of the station.
That’s a long way of saying that yes, the autopilot would just keep going on the dialed-in heading if the pilots were incapacitated/dead. The plane might have been on its way to intercept a VOR on a heading that would take it, ultimately, to the Dakotas.
They terrorists had a set of ‘victory conditions’. The passengers denied the terrorist those conditions. Victory for the passengers. Whether they knew it or not.