These are networks designed for lossy variable-delay links and yeah, satellites don’t tend to fall out of the sky. The problems that remain are the same that could affect blackbox interfacing.
Ok, obsolete was overstating for effect. Of course blackboxes will remain for redundancy (and the critical last minutes where satellite data may not be available).
Satellite bandwidth is expensive. I can’t see them sending video from the cockpit on all planes, just to address this once-in-a-generation incident. Existing flight data recording has proven itself useful in the vast majority of incidents.
I don’t know “how.” But the two most famous cases of hypoxia are the Helios Airways 522 and Payne Stewart’s Learjet, and both involved the respective aircraft climbing after the pilots stopped responding.
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But the Helios one probably climbed to the altitude already configured in the autopilot (in fact it flew all the way to Athens and entered the holding pattern there), so that doesn’t negate Esox Lucius’s point, which as I understand it is that 45,000 feet is an unlikely altitude to enter into an autopilot.
That thought has occured to me.
Was the final course change, into the south Indian Ocean, the dying effort of someone at the limits of their resources, thinking "Well, at least I can make sure we don’t hit a city ? ".
They formally announced yesterday that all lives are considered lost. I think most people had come to that conclusion quite a few days ago. The Chinese families aren’t taking it well. I just don’t understand what more they think could be done. Many, many nations have contributed resources to this search. The ocean is staggeringly huge and deep. That plane is the needle in a haystack. Planes crash and that’s just a risk everyone takes when they fly.
I think they’re frustrated with the way the search was conducted and they’re mistrustful of the Malaysian government because of its incompetence and lack of good answers and responsiveness. Their experiences with their own government may affect their opinions as well. I don’t know how anybody really could’ve expected anything other than the plane crashing into the ocean, but if you got jerked around like this maybe you wouldn’t know what to believe.
I imagine it would start with a few still shots in long-haul and progress from there. But of course flight data and voice are the priority and cheaper.
Compared to a multi year search in the bottom of the Atlantic or Indian Ocean the economics might shift. Also to identify and respond to hijacking situations.
I was wondering, assuming that the plane is never found, at what point can Malaysia say “There’s nothing more we can do, it’s time to stop looking.” Three months? Six? Two years?
I hope the Malaysians have little or no say in the matter. With the number of Chinese nationals on board, I don’t see them giving up the search. I don’t see the US giving up entirely, though it may be scaled back after a few weeks. I just hope that if the black box is found, that it doesn’t go to the Malaysians. They seem to bee the Barney Fife of air investigations.
As soon as they can get away with it without egg on their faces.
I seems like they could develop a satellite up link that could transfer data during any erratic flight movements. It would need to be automatic. Anytime certain predefined extreme conditions were present the computer could send the data.
Strictly speaking, you don’t need an autopilot. If the plane was configured to climb and received no further input it would simply climb until it physically couldn’t climb higher - and no, it wouldn’t necessarily stall at that point, either. It would most likely simply continue at that altitude until it ran out of gas - which is apparently what happened with the Payne Steward Learjet.
Hypothetically, if someone shuts off an autopilot when the airplane is in climb but makes no other changes the airplane will still continue to fly as it was - that is, it will continue to climb. Hypothetically, of someone shuts off an autopilot, configures the aircraft manually for a climb, then passes out the airplane will, again, continue to climb.
Once you set an airplane on a course it tends to continue along that same course until someone or something induces a significant change. They are very good at illustrating Newton’s Laws that way.
Here’s what Lithium Ion battery fire looks like. It creates a lot of heat and smoke. And of course, if it’s a runaway fire thisis what it does to an airplane. Obviously there was not a runaway fire that destroyed the plane.
What is reported was a possible brief fire on a plane. Could have been a meteor but it was reported as a plane. What is known is that the plane had Lithium Ion batteries on board and they can only be transported in the cargo bay. Such a fire produces a tremendous amount of smoke and heat. A fire like that could cause a lot of damage before a fire suppression system stops it.
There was no warning from either pilot regarding a terrorist attack and there is no evidence of mental issues with either pilot. The transponder and ACARS system goes offline. That put’s incapacitation of the crew and electrical mechanical on the table without the total destruction of the plane. It’s not likely a suicide attempt dragged on for for 2000 miles.
I’m not stating any theory as fact but if you look at fatal aircraft events it’s almost always a series of events that take the plane down.
Aren’t there longstanding ethnic tensions between Malaysians and Chinese living in Malaysia? Maybe that is behind the mistrust the Chinese families are showing.
How significant is it that no search planes have found this debris yet? I know the ocean is a big place and all that, but the satellite pictures that have been released are all pretty blurry, and I can’t help but wonder if the satellites are just tracking a couple of whales or something.
And for that matter, what sort of debris could break off a commercial airliner that would be 76 feet long, and not sink?
Aside from the extreme changes in altitude soon after the plane turned back, the flight path wasn’t erratic. Everything the plane did showed it was either flown by someone who was competent at the controls or was responding to programmed commands in the flight management system.
It could simply be the thorough bungling the Malaysian authorities (airline, government, and military) have done so far. Mainland Chinese people shouldn’t be expected to care, or even know about, ethnic tensions in Malaysia.
Did they then descend “quickly and unevenly”, as it’s been described, by more than 20,000 feet and then normally navigate a completely different flight route as if nothing had happened?
To expand on that, I can see everyone–passengers and crew–dying by hypoxia, but the subsequent actions of the plane means that the new flight route would have to have been previously programmed into the FMS.
After it has been proven that the missing Malaysian Boeing 777 crashed landed in the southern Indian Ocean and that still has to be proven … after this becomes a fact due to finding the black box or just debris that can be identified coming from the airplane in question.
Then I urge the US government to fire all physic soothsayers they pay good money to (no cite on this) that said anything different.