171–180 of 215 posts
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That seems like a good solution. Why did the crew of the Helios flight not do that?
Someone mentions further down in the comments that they did - just after an "unexplainable" two hours. Presumably it was far too late for any remedial action by that time.
So will autopilots include a mode to drop to an altitude where people can start breathing again if depressurization occurs and is not fixed within 2 minutes?
Why no one is paying attention to the fact that the plane was flying over South China see which China is trying to claim for itself. Could it be the case that China by mistake shot the plane down ?
More than half the passengers were Chinese. That wouldn't go down very well with the home crowd.
It involved an Eastern passenger plane that had miscalibrated it's guidance system and strayed into Soviet(?) territory during a politically tense period at the same time a US spy plane was in the area.
The Russians(?) shot the plane down and it nearly started a war. The country the plane was from didn't believe it had strayed as far as the Russians(?) said it did.
Eventually, the US government released radar data showing the position and path of this plane so that it would avoid a war. It showed this particular plane had grossly gone off course and entered Russian territory. The radar they had was capable of tracking every plane in the world 24x7. This was back a couple/few decades as well! Turned out the plane has set the wrong guidance system pre takeoff which was a terrible and extremely rare mistake. The US held out until the last moment to release this data as they didn't want anyone to know they had the capability.
This leads me to believe some people somewhere know where this plane went down.
I am not sure if I am recalling this precisely, but I 100% remember that the US government back then apparently has this radar tech.
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Here's one potential problem with that theory... that plan was equipped with an onboard GSM microcell, right? So people could still use their phones? These should run over a different set of antenna, so if the other set was ripped away, this satellite link should have still worked. So, if something like this theory happened, why didn't someone in the main cabin use their phone to call home? Unless everyone suddenly l…
> So, if something like this theory happened, why didn't someone in the main cabin use their phone to call home? If rapid decompression occurred, there could have been panic in the plane, making it difficult to establish any kind of communication. Who knows...
This begs the question: why on earth is it even possible to turn off a transponder mid-flight on a commercial plane carrying hundreds of human beings? I also don't understand why, if we can send bursts of engine data every 30 minutes from the middle of the ocean, we can't send a GPS location every couple of minutes. Maybe even throw some GPS data in with the engine data - at least we would know where it was within a…
Transponders have to be turned off while you're at the airport and while the plane's being serviced on ground. I think 777 has 2 transponders, so you also need the ability switch from one to the other. Lastly, I believe all electronics on the plane must be on a breaker circuit in case of electrical shorts so that pilots can isolate and turn off faulty circuits. But you're right, ACARS (the system through which the en…
if(Plane.Altitude > 0 && Plane.FlightTime > 10 Minutes){ TransponderOn }
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So after 5 days, the hijackers are allowing all the hostages to charge their phones?
I don't think this is remotely plausible, but remember that dumbphones can last well over a week between charges.
Here is what I don't get. A plane, a HUGE plane, supposedly just disappeared. Near China. So this whole "fly under the radar" is just BS? You just need to turn off your transponder, and you can fly wherever you want?
Yes. I am astonished that you do not already know that. On 9-11, the combined maximal efforts of civilian and military aviation were unable to locate four airliners because their transponders were turned off. This occurred near the New York and DC metropolitan areas, some of the most carefully controlled air space in the world. Without a transponder, an aircraft is just a raw radar return among, potentially, hundreds…
Primary radar is difficult and inconvenient but it's not nearly as difficult as you make it sound.
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That did cross my mind when I posted it. I should point out that I don't know what is true. It just seems to be a contradiction that every passenger can take on board and use whatever they want in-flight, yet transponders specially engineered to be safe on a plane must be able to be disabled. I suspect the answer is that the transponder doesn't need to be under the control of anyone on the plane.
The answer is that when there's 100+ planes parked at an airport it's confusing to have 100's of transponders on as other planes are trying to land.