For many years the standard was 30 minutes. For the type of accident/incident that the CVR and FDR were designed for 2 hours is plenty of time. you might be able to imagine scenarios where 2 hours is not long enough but I suspect this may be the first time in forever that this has been the case. This is an incredibly unusual incident, you shouldn’t be surprised that it renders some systems and ways of doing things inadequate.
Can we consider the possibility of a pre-planned mission where the pilots stored an extra canister or two in the cockpit?
The system was set up like that because the possibility of a crash with more than 2 hours of deteriorating conditions was not thought likely, and since there is always a finite amount of data storage space/time available, 2 hours was a reasonable compromise. More storage would have cost more, and the technology wasn’t that advanced. It wasn’t long ago that 30 minutes was the maximum time stored; 2 hours seemed like overkill at the time.
I have 30 terabytes of storage available on my network and 40 more offline. The cost of this would have been in the many millions years ago, yet I purchased it for less than $5K. Commercial applications of technology always lags for cost reasons.
I know, but it would just be such a trivial thing to increase the recording time. Whenever they switched the standard from 30 minutes to 2 hours, it seems like they would have said, hey, let’s go nuts and just record the entire flight.
tv news says he has a flight simulator at home. photo showed a fairly big expensive setup.
it has been seized for investigation.
the only thing I could think of was an emergency situation where the pilot was somewhat incapacitated and pulled up a return route on the FMS. I think it’s just odd that the plane returned on known vectors instead of making a beeline to destination X. Maybe they wanted to appear like other commercial aircraft flying a standard route.
The requirement is still just 30 minutes. The NTSB recommends 2 hours plus and 2 hours is the industry standard. I guess there just hasn’t been any need for an even longer recording time until this past week.
That’s not too unusual. There are many reasons why you might have a simulator setup at home. He may be aeroplane nerd who likes playing flying games at home, or he might suffer from simulator stress and feels the need to practice before going for his company simulator checks, who knows. I’m not sure how it would be relevant to a suicide/hijacking attempt though.
I know very little about aviation but I knew about the recording limits due to the famous attempted hijacking of a FedEx plane in the 1990s in the United States.
The plane had I believe two pilots and a flight engineer, and a fourth guy who was actually supposed to be the flight engineer but he had accidentally exceeded some flight time restrictions so wasn’t allowed to be the FE on the flight. He did get to “dead head” on the plane, though.
Anyway, his life was in shambles, he knew he was days away from being fired from FedEx and seeing his aviation career end and I believe he had serious financial problems. He had a $2m life insurance policy on himself and wanted to kill himself and see his family get the money. So he went on to the flight with a claw hammer and a spear gun. A bit into the flight he takes out the claw hammer and starts attacking the crew, they all suffer horrific (career ending) injuries but are able to subdue him (the pilot actually took extreme maneuvers at one point to throw him off balance.)
His plan if he had killed the crew successfully was to fly for over 30 minutes so there would be no recording of the struggle, and then intentionally crash the plane. His assumption was since he planned to kill the crew with a blunt instrument no one would think too much about it and just assume the crew’s head trauma came from the crash (a reasonable assumption in terms of people thinking that.) I’m not sure how he thought it would play if they discovered the blood covered claw hammer or even the spear gun might raise some questions too (or maybe not, maybe it’s normal for a dead heading flight engineer to be allowed to transport one of those in the cabin of a cargo jet.)
Yes. If you had a problem and needed to get somewhere fast you’d hit the direct to button on the FMS, select the airport you want and hit enter. All FMSs would have a similar ability to go direct to an aerodrome quickly. Entering waypoints is not consistent with having a serious technical problem. It is consistent with a hijacking though.
Edit: For those interested in the technical aspects of the aeroplane, there are manuals at smartcockpit.com.
You have to remember that they don’t just need X hours of recording media, they need a storage medium that can survive an airplane crash. That requires testing and experimentation and other sorts of R&D. I expect the length of time recorded will continue to increase, but not as fast as for non-black box applications.
Also, aren’t most airline flights two hours or shorter? That length is more than sufficient for a lot, if not most, airline flights.
Having a flight simulator at home is nothing unusual. There are people who have never set food in a cockpit who have elaborate simulators at home because they fly simulators as a hobby. They have uses in flight training, even informally. A lot of pilots fly simulators at home, of varying complexity.
I mean sure, check it out, but a home flight simulator is not inherently suspicious.
Yes, and he’s a pilot. I don’t think it’s a stretch to assume he might be interested in flying simulators too, it’s not like finding out one of the passengers was a trained pilot and had a flight simulator at their house for example. (Which also could be true and could be innocuous.)
If we don’t find the wreckage the only way we might ever know anything about this is through the exhaustive personal histories of the entire passenger list (which I’m going to guess investigators have already started compiling.) While it’s a long list, I’m assuming we can get fairly decent histories on all of them given time. If we find that none of the passengers has any pilot training, interest in flying planes, evidence of knowing anything about 777s etc then it’d be safe to at least say there’s a high probability it was a member of the crew that hijacked/sabotaged the flight. Because based on all the articles we’re hearing this required pilots training and some specific training on the airplane in question, which we know the flight crew had but until we hear otherwise we can assume most of the passengers and perhaps none of the passengers had.
Yeah, but I saw that more as a sign of his dedication to his craft?
He also put up a bunch of D.I.Y. home repair tutorial videos on the Malaysian equivalent of YouTube, or what have you. Sounds like a friendly fella all around, from what little we know so far. Of course, the investigation might well reveal something more sinister…
But anyway: What do we know about who else was on that plane? Has the passenger list been revealed to the public? And what about the cabin crew / flight attendants, any word on who they were?
Sure, why not? We’ll never need it, and $10K or so more in additional cost per plane isn’t worth considering. Heck, for another million, we can record an entire year’s worth for no earthly reason. Let’s go!
Apologies for my late entry into this thread. Let me state for the record that I have not read it. So, if my question is answered/addressed upthread, kindly direct me to relevant post(s).
In any case, is there any information available regarding the passengers’ cell phones? Is it possible to know if they were turned on? Were any on? Were any calls made? If yes to either the last two questions, has that information affected estimates of the plane’s location? Informed ‘authorities’ of the goings on inside the plane?
If no phones were on, that in itself would be bizarre, no? If they were on but no calls were attempted, does that suggest the passengers were incapacitated (for whatever reason)?
Thanks!
Damn.
Assuming Zaharie Ahmad Shah’s YouTube channel is authentic… He sounds pretty much like your average Doper. Recently subscribed to Richard Dawkins’ channel, as well as Eddie Izzard’s. “Liked” a video titled “Atheist Michael Newdow Intellectually Demolishes Arrogant Moron on Fox News,” and another titled “Seth macfarlane on atheism and gay rights.”
you can’t usually call from an airplane unless you’re low and slow. The tower system is designed to ignore such calls because high speed high altitude calls cover many towers at once and overload the system.
Ah, I see. Thanks.
Still, could their feeble transmissions have been captured by some surveillance system(s) regardless? (especially sensitive, military types?)
Thanks for that. It’s good to have a pilot on board (heh).
The official word right now is that the last “handshake” between the plane and satellite was at 8:11 am, about six and a half hours after last contact with the ground, and an hour and a half past its ETA in Beijing. It must have been daylight at that time. Going by the two possible flight corridors based on the last ping, that would put the plane way south in the Indian Ocean or over Asia, maybe western China. I realize that’s assuming a lot, that the map is correct and that the plane flew in a straight line, etc.
Isn’t it a crazy coincidence that the CNN analyst has a recent video of himself and the co-pilot in a cockpit. I think it’s a conspiracy between the pilots… Or just the co-pilot.