Fascinating read but for some REAL fun Jeff Wise's "Russian Hijacking Theory" is pretty awesome.... http://jeffwise.net/2019/03/09/the-russian-passengers-aboard...
>tradition is to brave subzero air temperatures and water temperatures of 34 degrees Good read, but: all that detail and couldn't be bothered providing a (bracketed) degree-centigrade comparison.
If you don't know that 34F is approximately 1C, that's a you problem. It doesn’t require any mental math to observe that 34 is marginally greater than 32, which is the freezing point of water in Fahrenheit.
one of the best long-form articles i've ever read on this was "Goodnight Malaysian 370" by William Langewiesche in the atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/07/mh370-m...
Thank you, this is the article that immediately came to mind (but whose title or venue I could not remember) when I saw this post. I found it pretty convincing at the time.
Imagine one day all of a sudden a low-quality few seconds long video is uploaded to the channel showing only someone filming their feet as they stroll on on a beach.
Well the found wreckage pieces apparently point to a controlled ditching, so it's not entirely impossible for the guy to be alive somehow.
Unlikely that he's still alive, but the evidence of a controlled landing makes the whole thing more puzzling from a psychological perspective. Why slowly and consciously drag it out until the very bitter end when you've already completed your suicide mission?
Curious, based on actual evidence, is there any reason to believe the pilot didn’t exit the plane prior to it crashing?
I don't think you can open the door on a 777 in flight. For comparison the plane that D B Cooper used had a stairway in the back(sometimes called airstairs). He was able to override the in flight lock and get out that way. My understanding is that the db cooper incident is in a large part why they don't put airstairs on planes any more. But now you have me watching videos on 777 doors. they open outward than forwards…
>incident is in a large part why they don't put airstairs on planes any more.
They don't do it because it's completely inefficient to carry this weight and waste this space from economic point of view. It's way better to carry few more paying passengers instead.
They still carry things like this on private jets, i.e. Golfstream.
Risk has to be put in context. It's one of the biggest risks, where all the risks are fantastically low against number of flights and passenger/miles. All airline risks are lower than driving. I would have said the 787 lithium battery risk was more concerning personally. Or the 737 Max problem.
In ‘97, there was SilkAir 185. NTSB was fairly certain that was pilot suicide. Another one was EgyptAir 990 in ‘99. In terms of fatalities and hull losses, pilot suicide is a much larger risk than the 737 Max. It’s made worse by outdated FAA rules that would have pilots grounded for seeking treatment.
737 Max had two losses in the first two years of operation. That's maybe a decade of commercial flights (at least suspected of) intentionally downed by an authorized pilot according to this list [1].
If you consider that the number of 737 Maxes in service was not that large, it's pretty clear that MCAS was more dangerous than pilot suicide.
Being able to rapidly depressurize is fairly critical; the doors are prevented from opening in flight by a pressure differential and their construction. In an emergency, being unable to depressurize would mean being unable to evacuate the aircraft. Passengers would've had their oxygen masks deploy, which works in normal circumstances, but they only last 12 minutes; intended to give the crew time to descend. When the…
In an evacuation event, the aircraft would be at sea level and the interior would not be pressurized relative to outside air. You only need to depressurize if you're going to parachute out, which... is not an option in commercial aviation.
Unless you, say, make an emergency landing somewhere like Denver or La Paz.
I think the difference is that in a car, any action that could kill the passengers is nearly as likely to kill the driver as well. Obviously you can't stop the pilot from crashing the plane and killing everyone, but it's still pretty creepy to learn that there's a "kill all passengers but leave me alive" switch in every plane, in a locked cockpit inaccessible to the people whose lives are affected by that switch.
This is a really weird characterization of a normal airplane function. First, you are seeming to act as if the power between passengers and pilots should be equal. Why would this ever be? The pilot has all the power and the passengers none. Thinking of past hijackings, it's obvious that it must be this way. Second, the plane needs to be able to handle all sorts of 1 in a million events. Recall there were around 22 mi…
I didn't say it was a bad idea with no legitimate purpose, just that it's pretty creepy. Given that it's only been used to commit mass murder ~once (at most), it's probably not worth implementing any mitigating controls.