Since the doors are practical unbreakable : what happens if both pilots in a plane die at the same time (maybe an electroshock or something)
no one could get into the cockpit and land the plane (if another pilot is on board)
This is a reasonable hypothesis for what happened to Malaysia Air Flight 370. Something happened to the 2 pilots (one theory is an electrical fire underneath the cockpit) that incapacitated them both. When the pilots were responding to the event, they followed the troubleshooting checklist which involved turning off circuit breakers that included ones powering the transponder. The pilots then passed out, with the plane still on autopilot.
It’s entirely possible that the passenger cabin was perfectly habitable and all passengers and crew were forced to wait helplessly for the many hours it took for the plane to run out of fuel.
Oh wow I did not know that this was one of the theories…
But isn’t the system pretty fail nowadays if there is absolutely no way to get into the cockpit anymore?
The Navigator typically came out of the pilot training program. At least that’s my understanding from WWII and beyond. One of my dad’s best friends in the service was a Air Force Navigator in the 50’s & 60’s. I’m pretty sure he started in pilot training and got switched to Navigator.
Perhaps like Helios 522, one of the flight attendants would be able to enter a code to get in (I’m not sure if that’s what he did?)
Not sure if that was a post-9/11 hardened door, though.
If that were true, would there be some technical reason no one could call out from the plane? Serious question. I don’t know the logistics of phone calls from airplanes out over the ocean.
It was a night flight. Few, if any, would have noticed the plane wasn’t on a proper course. And most would probably be sleeping.
The cabin attendants would have noticed if the pilots were not responsive after about an hour. At least one attendant will frequently speak to the pilots on intercom and ask them if they need drinks etc. in your scenario eventually it would have been obvious to passengers in first class that the attendants had a problem.
Also most planes have satellite phones outside the cockpit which the cabin attendants could have used to call for help if they couldn’t contact the pilots, which obviously didn’t happen.
In short I think your scenario is highly unlikely.
There have been documentaries of people using cell phone on the plane but it is probably luck. When you flying so high and fast you passing so many tower sites.
It’s all over red rover.
In our company the cabin crew check in with us every 20 mins to see that we are ok. If we didn’t respond then there is nothing the CC can do other than try and break through the door.
You all die…dumbass
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I see
are the doors made of stronger material after 9/11? Do you think the crew could even break into the cockpit somehow?
This is what I’m wondering. Given enough time, and help from the bigger passengers, I wonder if it would be possible to break in.
Isn’t there another way into the cockpit, one that requires an electronic unlock? I saw a reference to that on a piece about one of the new Boeing jetliners that I can’t find now, but they referenced an electronic unlock and would go no further. It was located in the computer/avionics area under and to the rear of the flight deck. They didn’t go into it any further than that.
On one hand that seems quite probable that it exists, yet it seems unlikely that they would have mentioned it if it was accessible from the cabin area. So, it may not solve the problem of getting another pilot to the controls.
That was one thing I was wondering about Helios 522 that I’ve never seen addressed. Why did the flight attendant take so long to enter the cockpit with the passengers passing out and no response from the crew? And was there a chance he could have brought it down safely (talking over the radio? Airport with autoland?) if he hadn’t waited until literally a minute before it ran out of fuel and was still stable?
If it were possible, wouldn’t it make sense to enable some ground people to send a signal that would unlock the cabin doors? Unfortunately, that would only be of any help if there was some qualified pilot on board who could land the plane or who could do something to help. It’s got to be extremely doubtful that unlocking the cabin door remotely could ever be of any help.
Can you imagine being a passenger aboard such a flight? That would be a living nightmare. You would just sit and wait for the plane to run out of gas and then crash. Yikes!
If I really knew I was in that situation, I hope I wouldn’t just sit and wait. I might break a few bones by pounding on the door and trying to break into the flight deck, and maybe it’s a million-to-one shot that I could do anything once I was there, but that’s better than sitting around.
I wasn’t familiar with the Helios crash someone mentioned upthread, so I read the Wikipedia entry on it. Interesting. Someone did manage to get to the flight deck, although whether the door was hardened to post-9/11 U.S. standard isn’t mentioned. And once he was there, he wouldn’t necessarily have had to land the plane himself, just revive one of the pilots. Once you’ve passed out at high altitude, does anyone know how long it takes to recover? If he could have got the pilots on an oxygen supply (chase planes reported masks hanging in the cockpit, or portable ones like the flight attendant was using), or descended to lower altitude, would the pilots have been able to revive and land the plane?
Well this would be a great idea tbh…if the ground people could unlock the door in case of an emergency…
and you would be amazed how “easy” it is to land such a plane even without beeing a pilot
I saw a documentary on television where a guy asked if he could land a plane with just some experience in microsoft flight simulator. they put him in a real simulator and let him land the plane alone (with some help from the “tower”). he managed to land it perfectly
We have discussed this scenario many times here. If the pilots both die/become incapacitated while the door is closed, the door will remain closed until it bursts open when the jet hits the ground & shatters into umpteen thousand small pieces.
The post-9/11 doors are designed very carefully to be unbreakable using any tools likely to be available to the passengers. Big strong guys aren’t going to have success either. The pre-9/11 doors were flimsy privacy screens. All have long since been removed from service and replaced with the modern armored doors.
There are no secret passageways below decks which bypass the doors. Again by design. Security by obscurity doesn’t work.
Somebody up-thread mentioned Navigators. There haven’t been navigators on commercial passenger flights since the late 1950s. There are still Flight Engineers on a tiny handful of charter and 3rd world passenger flights on 727s and early 747s. But that’s it.
Everybody else has crews of only pilots nowadays. Ranging between 2 and 4 pilots depending on how long the flight is. If there are more than 2 in the crew, the extras will generally be in a sleeping space, not in the cockpit. Said “space” may be a hidden bunk compartment or simply a curtain around a seat or two in the first or business class section of the aircraft.