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Final two communications from MH370 support controlled descent scenario (2021)

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Re: Final two communications from MH370 support controlled descent scenario (2021)

#61
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's possible for the pilot to depressurise the plane and use their dedicated oxygen system to breathe while everyone else on board will pass out after using their individual masks. Doing so will give them 60-90 minutes of extra air, the passengers' masks don't last that long.

What legitimate reason would a pilot have to depressurize a plane at altitude, incapacitating or killing the passengers? Just wondering if and if so why that system / function is available.

It's more that they have the ability to control the pressurisation manually in case the automatic system fails.

Ultimately the pilots have to be able to turn anything off that might malfunction.

Also even if you (try to) take capabilities away they are by definition quite smart people and could probably figure a way round if they really wanted to.

Re: Final two communications from MH370 support controlled descent scenario (2021)

#62
post #58
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could of course blame the individuals for not knowing where which information comes from, but that wouldn't help in avoiding such problems in the future. I think it's a UX failure in some sense. It's important information to know which number comes from what source. So it should be clearly visible if a trajectory is prediction without up to date positional data. It should be clearly visible which values are from…

> Sometimes I think UX design should be mandatory for software developers and engineers. Human Factors is very much part of every airplane's design. From the ground up, and it involves all roles and every subsystems. > Even only reading The Design of Everyday Things would probably prevent a lot of catastrophes. I think you have a twisted assumption about how much care goes into aviation UX. The people who do these de…

> Good plan!

Looking at an aircraft cockpit I see Billions of Buttons https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BillionsOfButton...

Would writing the equation, data sources, and output format for each of those buttons on the button be good UX?

No, I agree with you, this is not a UX problem it's a training one - a test question along the lines of "How does fuel prediction work on a B790" etc ...

Re: Final two communications from MH370 support controlled descent scenario (2021)

#63

The more certain it seems that MH370 was a murder-suicide scenario, the less comfortable I am with the media's preoccupation with it. News reports about such events may contribute to copycats: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17750236/ > Airplane accident fatalities increase just after newspaper stories about murder and suicide D P Phillips. Science. 1978. > Abstract: Fatal crashes of private, business, and corporate-…

There already was a copycat, the German wings flight that flew into a mountain. Or did that precede MH370?

Re: Final two communications from MH370 support controlled descent scenario (2021)

#64
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What legitimate reason would a pilot have to depressurize a plane at altitude, incapacitating or killing the passengers? Just wondering if and if so why that system / function is available.

I have that same question. Why is there a "kill everyone on board" setting?

Pilots have access to virtually all critical systems on board; if they wanted to kill everyone on board, they could simply fly the plane into a mountain. Pressurization is mostly automatically managed, but if it fails, the pilots must be able to manually depressurize before landing.

Re: Final two communications from MH370 support controlled descent scenario (2021)

#65
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's possible for the pilot to depressurise the plane and use their dedicated oxygen system to breathe while everyone else on board will pass out after using their individual masks. Doing so will give them 60-90 minutes of extra air, the passengers' masks don't last that long.

What legitimate reason would a pilot have to depressurize a plane at altitude, incapacitating or killing the passengers? Just wondering if and if so why that system / function is available.

It's more that they have the ability to control the pressurisation manually in case the automatic system fails.

Ultimately the pilots have to be able to turn anything off that might malfunction.

Re: Final two communications from MH370 support controlled descent scenario (2021)

#66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Malaysia Airlines operations…were tracking the plane on the Flight Explorer website, which, as they would only realize hours later, simply continued to display an aircraft’s projected path if its transponder stopped broadcasting position information.” What in the actual fuck. “…the supposed signals from the black boxes must have been false. Only much later was it discovered that the signals had probably come from th…

After a lot of aircraft accident youtube videos, I can think of a couple where people misunderstanding where their computers get their information from and how they work. * This one where the operations team apparently doesn't understand how their flight tracker works, and/or it fails to inform their users that last contact was X hours ago. * One where the aircraft has a broken altimeter, and the suspicious pilots de…

Which incident are you referring to with the altitude confusion example?

Re: Final two communications from MH370 support controlled descent scenario (2021)

#67
post #59
post #13

What happened to that other research team who used amateur radio network packet metadata that had been saved, to track airplanes including MH370 and showed tracks that also matched the satellite pings? Can't remember the name of that group though...

If they could track MH370 using WSPR (amateur radio), then they could logically track other (similar) aircraft. When asked to prove the above and publish a peer reviewed paper, they were unable to do so. The reader is thus invited to draw their own conclusion.

Publishing a peer reviewed paper would equate to handing their IP over for free. Maybe the right thing to do in the face of such a tragedy is to do that.

Or perhaps they genuinely have some cool technology, and it could be sold into aero, military industries and they want to monetize it.

In that case the right thing to do would be to hand over their projected track data, which it sounds like they did.

Re: Final two communications from MH370 support controlled descent scenario (2021)

#68
post #41

There is a very good book by the french journalist Florence de Changy about MH370, which "solves" all the issues with most of the theories out there and proposes what really happened. So far I've not come across a more sophisticated theory that still passes Occam's Razor.

US shooting down a civilian passenger liner because of hypothesized secret cargo headed for China, and successfully covering it up for 10 years doesn't sound like something that passes Occam's Razor at all -- sounds like the very opposite, in fact. One should look for theories with less sophistication, not more.

I obviously don't believe anything but deliberate murder-suicide by the pilot.

But just know that these things did happen.

There's lots of indications that surfaced recently that the Israeli air force secretly shoot down Itavia Flight 870 in 1980 to stop a transport of nuclear technology to Iran. They had mistaken the correct flight because their intelligence in France (were the uranium was being produced for Iran) pointed them in the wrong direction.

A very interesting book on the topic has been recently released with a deep and thorough investigation across France, Italy and Israel and it is to date the most credible and documented explanation for who shoot down the flight.

The book has been followed by quite a lot of investigative journalism in Italy that gives this theory lots of credit.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/213592261-il-quinto-scen...

Re: Final two communications from MH370 support controlled descent scenario (2021)

#69
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What legitimate reason would a pilot have to depressurize a plane at altitude, incapacitating or killing the passengers? Just wondering if and if so why that system / function is available.

I have that same question. Why is there a "kill everyone on board" setting?

Because if you have control of the aircraft you already can kill everyone if you wanted. Manual control of cabin pressure could be useful if the pressurization system malfunctioned and needed to be manually overridden.

Re: Final two communications from MH370 support controlled descent scenario (2021)

#70
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What legitimate reason would a pilot have to depressurize a plane at altitude, incapacitating or killing the passengers? Just wondering if and if so why that system / function is available.

I have that same question. Why is there a "kill everyone on board" setting?

Same reason the engines have "kill everyone on board" setting. You know - "shut down".
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