That’s a good point, maybe they should search the area the plane could have reached, based on its last position and fuel. Maybe it was hijacked and landed somewhere? How large a runway does a 777 need?
In search planning, if you have no strong leads such as a beacon or sightings etc, you start with the area of possibility. This is the area the aeroplane/boat/etc could possibly get to and is simply a circle centred on the last known position with a radius equal to the aeroplane’s maximum range at the time. The problem is that this area ends up being impractically huge and in order for a search to be useful you need to reduce the area of possibility down to an area of probability. This is the area of possibility refined by using information such as last known course and speed and any other information you might have.
In the case of the B777 the area of probability has changed as new information has come to hand. It would never be practical to search the area of possibility though.
Could this all be just an elaborate publicity stunt for the new Liam Neeson film Non-Stop?
Seems to me there really should be a way for the co-pilot to press a button or something to indicate the pilot has gone nuts and is trying to suicide and all control of the plane should be taken away from the pilot.
I’m not sure exactly how this should work. After all, one of the two pilots might try to suicide and the other one might hit the button. But, the other pilot might be the one who has gone nuts and then there would have to be some way that someone could decide which one is really nuts.
Short of arming one one the flight attendents with some kind of weapon, I don’t know how to resolve this problem.
But, I’m guessing there ought to be a way for one of the crew to let the ground know that the person fliying the plane has gone nuts and control of the plane has to be taken away from them.
Seems like there really should be a safe way to do this. Otherwise, these big jets are just too vulnerable to pilot suicide.
Remember that case of the Egyptian Air crazy co-pilot El-Patooey? (or something like that). This man was a womanizer and he eventually was told that his next flight would be his last. That was a really bad mistake because he used that flight to suicide (allegedly) and more than a hundred innocents suffered the consequences. There used to be a wonderful TV show about airplane disasters that showed many of these disasters. It was a show produced by the History Channel or National Geographic or some channel like that. It was excellent! I’ll never forget the face of that Egyptian who suicided by diving his jetliner into the sea. It was chilling! Absolutely chilling!
But because of a trans-temporal anomaly, it’ll be the year 2044.
After 9/11, didn’t they install just this sort of “panic button” in planes, and when activated it would alert authorities to a hijacking in progress?
For decades there has been a transponder code that, when dialed into the transponder, means “HELP PLANE IS HIJACKED!”
Otherwise, one can use a cellphone to call authorities and inform them of a hijacking. Woe to anyone making a prank call, as it will be taken seriously.
As far as taking control away from the pilots: I’m not aware of any ability to fly an airliner by remote control.
Vietnam scaling back search pending more info from Malaysian officials
The Malaysians really aren’t covering themselves in glory here. The whole thing has been so bizarre that I’m starting to wonder if they’re hiding something.
I’ve seen a couple 767s stop in a hundred meters. Well, most of them. 
Air Emergencies, on NatGeo?
The problem with the hijacking theory is that the passengers didn’t get in contact with anyone. In this day and age, even if their were armed gunman, I would be shocked that no one got out a text, an e-mail, a call, a tweet, or anything. The fact that there was nothing sent out either means it was something so slow and gradual that no one noticed anything was amiss, or so sudden that there wasn’t anytime to react.
8000-10,000 feet, per Wikipedia (with specialized paving). And it has a wingspan of about 200 feet. It’s not like you could set one down on a quiet country road somewhere.
No no no. 1977. At Devil’s Tower.
As you point out yourself this is not workable. Any system would necessarily be known by both pilots so the suicidal pilot just needs to incapacitate the other pilot. The fire axe should do it. You could arm the flight attendants but what if it is the flight attendant who is suicidal? That also puts a weapon of some sort into the passenger cabin.
Here’s the thing. Yes big jets are vulnerable to suicide, but so is every other mode of transport out there, busses, trucks, cars, bikes, etc. The number of airliners that have crashed due to suicide can be counted on one hand but the number of airliners flying at any one time is thousands. There are literally thousands of jets in the air at this moment.
Have a look at this, All Scheduled Flights Worldwide. This is air traffic over a 24 hour period. Now multiply that by 365 x 60 years and then consider that there have been a handful of suicides.
At some point we have to trust that people in a position of responsibility will act responsibly. If we try to micro manage the entire system based on events that are statistically extreme outliers we end up crippling the system.
This is life, not a video game, there can’t always be a button to fix things.
They wouldn’t have any coverage. Cell phones simply don’t work for the vast majority of time on an aeroplane. I’ve had some success but only at short range from the cell tower and at around 10,000’ maybe a bit higher. I’ve tried to send texts other times when I know I’m directly over cell towers and I’ve had no luck. You put too much faith in technology.
No, there is no hijack button. There has always been a transponder code that was used for hijackings but you’d need to set it without the hijackers knowing. Given that, if this is a hijacking, the transponder appears to have been turned off, these hijackers know about the transponder and won’t be fooled by publicly known codes.
The whole this is bizarre.
From my understanding cell tower systems are designed to ignore calls from aircraft. This is due to the fact that they ping all the towers below them. Not a big deal if one person is calling but when scaled up to commercial airline size with jets moving at 600 mph it’s a lot of calls going out to a significant number of towers.
It’s currently banned by the FCC. The U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) currently prohibits the use of mobile phones aboard any aircraft in flight. The reason given is that cell phone systems depend on channel reuse (Frequency (or channel) reuse allows for a dramatic increase in the number of customers that can be served (capacity) within a geographic area on a limited amount of radio spectrum (limited number of radio channels)), and operating a phone at an altitude may violate the fundamental assumptions that allow channel reuse to work.
I still can’t believe nobody in the media has addressed the ACARS system. There was a time when news agencies invested 5 minutes of research into what they reported on.
Malaysia is looking more and more like a stone-age country. This is old technology. It’s one think to keep the public in the dark but there are literally hundreds of assets roaming the oceans with nothing to go on.
There is this Bloomberg - Are you a robot?
Just makes no sense.
If it was a hijack job, suicide job, disintegration in the air something should be found by now.
I might be biased, but the Malaysian Air Force DID once have TWO engines stolen out of their fighter jets. And transported to Uruguay. So their reports may not be… the final word.
Could one build an unreported such runway, say in Philippines or Vietnam? Hmm I had no idea the 777 had such range.