The passenger oxygen masks are designed to provide oxygen for only a few minutes, long enough for a plane to descend to a safe altitude. Turn off depressurization from the cockpit, keep the plane high long enough until the oxygen runs out, and everyone’s dead.
The pilots can use auxiliary, portable tanks. Perhaps they anticipated this, and stockpiled a few extra in the cockpit.
The flight attendants would have auxiliary tanks, too, but cunning, advance planning might have removed, emptied or disabled them. I doubt if these tanks are checked or inventoried before every flight. And even if some of them exist, they, too, will run out of gas. Or maybe the pilots thought flight attendants wouldn’t be a big enough threat to their plans to worry about after the passengers were gone.
As far as an objective, how about pilot suicide? Then it really doesn’t matter where they go just as long as they eventually crash. Taking a route that no one expects would give them free time for personal reflection before the inevitable.
While crashing into buildings might have been suspected at first, it obviously didn’t happen, unless you have a multi-story skyscraper in the Gobi Desert without communication. That leaves only pilot suicide. Religiously driven? At this point, who knows?
Why go to all the trouble then? Lock the cockpit door, disengage the autopilot and push the stick forward.
In just a few minutes you and everyone else on board will be dead.
I can’t remember which book it was, but sometime in the past few years I remember reading a novel where the VP was sent to like Indonesia to work on a trade deal or something, only the meeting was a ruse to draw AF1 there so it could be stolen by terrorists, loaded with bombs and explosives, and used in an attack on the US.
I’m pretty sure it was in Directive 51 by John Barnes, but I’m at work right now and none of the online synopsis I’ve checked mention the AF1 thing, which I think was right at the beginning of the book.
This is one of the very rare times that my voracious reading habits are working against me. :mad:
Anyway, I bring it up because I can see this is a possible component to a very long-range plan that isn’t scheduled to come to fruition in months or even years.
ETA: scr4, maybe we read the same book!
EATA: The more I think about, I’m sure it was Directive 51. I recall that the rescue teams were called off because of the presence of detrimental nanotech, which is at the heart of the novel’s plot.
I wonder if the answer will come if a passenger or a few or them were very important.
If what the Boston Globe reports is correct and the Malaysian investigators have concluded that the flight was hijacked then this is beginning to sound like the plot of that classic Tin Tin Belgian comic: Flight 714.
Now, I still think that unfortunately - since this is post 9/11 - I do think that even if extreme measures were done to control most of the passengers I think that a few would not had taken this lying down, and this ended unlike the comic. It likely ended like Flight 93 on 9/11.
If they really did take it up to 45,000 and depressurize the airplane the passengers would have about 5-15 seconds of useful consciousness before being too incapacitated to do anything. Particularly if it was done without warning, and fairly abruptly it could incapacitate everyone aboard too rapidly to dial a phone. Which is a horrible thought.
Scr4 and Snowboarder Bo, that sure is clever. Now I’m scared (mostly thinking of relatives in DC and NY). Step 1 - pilot deliberately diverts plane to safe haven (and kills passengers). Step 2 (could be months later) - a similar plane on its way to a big target is shot down or otherwise forced to be destroyed, over ocean far from radar and such. Step 3 - Minutes later, the first plane, now filled with explosives, takes over the second plane’s route. It has little trouble entering the target city’s airspace.
(Pilot Dopers – how, and how soon, would it likely be detected as an imposter? Could transponder codes and such be set to fool ATC, or is this built in uniquely with the manufacture of each plane? And oral communication would be easy to fake. I’m guessing it could reach a target without detection, of at least not be detected until too late to scramble jet fighters. Is this right?)
(And, based on what little we know at this point, does it look like the plan failed (or was foiled) during Step 1? Unless the terrorists have an undetected aircraft carrier two miles long, which of course they don’t, aren’t we pretty sure it never reached a far shore of the Indian Ocean?)
The pilot turns out to be one Zaharie Ahmad Shah, with the airline since 1981. Stable old fellow, by all accounts.
The co-pilot / first officer is one Fariq Abdul Hamid. Bright young kid, about to get married. Flying since 2007.
The two Iranian passengers - Pouria Nour Mohammed Mehrdad (or Pouri Nourmohammadi, according to some sources) and Delavar Seyed Mohammed Reza - turned out be, well, just your random Iranian fellas. Not really suspects anymore.
The Malaysian press has apparently written quite a bit about another passenger, an ethnic Uighur named Maimaitijiang Abula, who was travelling with “a group of artists and calligraphers returning home from an exhibition in Malaysia celebrating the ‘Chinese Dream’.” Maybe a suspect, if only because of his ethnic background…? (I realize how extremely racist that is.)
So… Apart from these fellas, who else was on that flight who might be a suspect?
Is it plausible that the flight was shot down to prevent a 9/11 style attack, and it’s being covered up, maybe an agreement between the Chinese government and the Malaysians who don’t want to be embarrassed?
It would make sense to me, as MH370 reached cruising altitude, the plane was hijacked, then the hijackers moved the altitude higher to disorientate the passengers/crew, and the transponder was turned off whilst the plane was turned back towards Kuala Lumpur, and whilst it was going towards the Malacca straits, it was descending towards 20,000 feet, whilst this was happening, the Malay Military track the plane on radar, and scramble jets to shoot it down, OR, the plane has been ditched due to the passengers revolting and trying to reclaim the plane.
I guess the only problem with this theory is that it would become apparent in a short time that it was being covered up, and that it’s taking a very long time to find any actual aircraft whatsoever.
If the perpetrators wanted to erase as much of their actions as possible, they would have to fly for more than 2 hours. Maybe their plans required more than just being dead.
I was actually taking the Helios plane incidentinto account, almost all the crew and passengers were incapacitated with the decompression, but one passenger actually had scuba diving training and managed to keep himself alive and a bit conscious and he reached the cockpit, but unfortunately he did not have a clue on how to make contact with the ground let alone to fly the plane and it crashed.
I speculate here that even if they tried to kill all passengers there would be a few that when when the plane reached a low altitude surprised the kidnappers.
I think that person had some flight experience, but by then he was seriously disoriented due to oxygen starvation and couldn’t compensate for the negative factors before the plane ran out of fuel.
Which might explain why the plane made erratic moves about that time, as was reported.
If fuel is particularly expensive at an airport then you will “tanker” extra fuel because the additional cost to carry the fuel is cheaper than the additional cost of buying fuel at the destination. That is one possible reason why they might have had more than just flight fuel plus reserves. It’s impossible to know what fuel they should have been carrying without knowing the airline’s fuel policy. It is most likely that the policy results in flight fuel plus about an hour though, as you say.
Just because it continued flying for 7 hours doesn’t mean it had 7 hours * [typical cruise speed] in range available either. If who ever was in the flight deck was trying to buy time they could have powered right back to maximum endurance speed. This will decrease range but allow the aeroplane to stay in the air for longer.
Yeah, water would be the issue. The raft survival packs have water rations and means for collecting rain water. You have to end up in a raft for that to be useful though.
That is highly unlikely. I think the most likely event that would fry some electronics but not all would be a lightning strike.
I can’t speak for the B777 but the jet I fly has three generator sources capable of running the entire electrical system on their own, it also has a stand by generator run by one of the hydraulic systems that can power the “essential” electrical systems, if you get down to just the batteries then the “emergency” electrical systems can be powered for at least 30 minutes. Many levels of redundancy as you can see. The transponder is part of the essential system so you have to lose everything down to battery power only in order to lose the transponder.
In addition the health of the electrical power supply is monitored and if it is not close to 115 VAC and 400 Hz it is rejected and a back up power supply takes over. You can’t get the type of degraded function that you’ve experienced with your computer.
We still have a plain old magnetic compass on board. The B777 standby altimeter does take a digital readout from an air data module that converts the basic dynamic and static air pressure readings so it could be susceptible to corruption, but as with the electrical system there is enough redundancy that I think you’d be hard pressed to find a way to corrupt all of it at once.
The AF447 accident was slightly different in that all of the pitot tubes were iced up by the one thing that connects all of the systems, the air the aeroplane was flying through. By contrast the night MH370 went missing the weather was fine and any outside electrical disturbance big enough to fry every electrical circuit on the plane except the engine health transmitters but that doesn’t affect any other aeroplanes in the area and isn’t otherwise detected is unlikely.
There is apparently an electrical equipment bay in the B777 that is technically accessible from the passenger cabin but then we are back to the hijacking scenario.
It is not ACARS that had been pinging the satellite. MAS does have ACARS and ACARS was turned off at about the same time as the transponder. The transmitting system that was still functioning was something different. I’m assuming it was the engine health system fitted to all aeroplanes but optionally subscribed to. This was reported to be communicating for hours a few days ago but the Malaysians denied it at the time.
The rig worker might have seen a meteor, they’re pretty common if you’re given to star gazing.
As for the off button on the transponder, actually a standby button, Broomstick already covered some of this. To add to what she said, as well as needing to turn the thing off if it malfunctions, we also turn it on and off every time we go flying because ATC don’t want to see a heap of radar paints at the terminal from aeroplanes that are powered but aren’t going flying for another 30 minutes. It’s not like some little used function for those rare times when the transponder plays up, the standby switch is used on every flight.
I’m treating the reported altitude of 43000’ with a grain of salt until there’s more information.
Still, allowing for it to be correct, I think a more likely scenario may be that the pilots were trying to render the hijackers unconscious. If a hijacker was trying to gain access to the cabin, one way to slow them down would be to depressurise the cabin and go on oxygen. If they didn’t get to the passenger masks in time they’d be out cold pretty quickly.
To answer the questions.
Yes you can depressurise on purpose. The pressurisation system has auto and manual controls. In manual you can simply open the outflow valves which dumps pressure from the cabin.
The oxygen masks in the cabin will still release, as far as I know there is no way to prevent that in the B777. They would not work as long as the crews. The passenger oxygen is intended for use for the time taken to descend to 14000’ which is not long, only a few minutes. The pilot oxygen has a dual function of being protective breathing as well and needs to last for significantly longer in the event of fumes/smoke/fire in the cockpit. I think the requirement is for 15 minutes at 100% and positive pressure but you can extend that by using less than 100% and on demand.
I think you’d be unlikely to kill the passengers/hijackers, you’d just be putting them to sleep. I’ll defer to someone with more medical knowledge than I though.
If you were trying to defeat a hijacker using this method you only need to knock them out so that hopefully someone else who got on oxygen is able to restrain them.
The pilot oxygen system is not portable, it is a separate fixed system to the passenger’s. the only portable oxygen is the first aid oxygen kept in the cabin.
What the hell? Why would the system be set up like that? It’s really not hard to imagine scenarios where you would want audio from more than two hours previous.
The transponder codes are changeable - they have to be because they’re assigned by ATC for each flight and, if I recall, ATC changes them as the flight moves from region to region. This is done verbally over the radio so yes, you can listen in and pick those up.
Your scenario presupposes they could eliminate the true flight assigned those numbers quickly enough no one gets off a warning, and any automated reporting system doesn’t get off a warning, or no one notices the automated system isn’t signalling any more, then playing the part of the designated flight perfectly.
I don’t know what the hell anyone knows - now they’re saying it flew for 7 hours past take-off. The story keeps changing every day.
[nitpick] That was actually a flight attendant who held a commercial pilot license but was not trained for the airliner. That, and hypoxia probably prevented him from taking effective action. [/nitpick]
“When you eliminate the impossible whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”
I think we’re still in the “eliminating” stage at the moment, but I expect a final answer (should we ever get one) will seem to be a string of improbable events.
