Timbo,

Regarding hijacks, I have the impression that some commercial pilots are now allowed to carry side arms. Does this apply to international flights?

Nice!

Everybody pitch in a few bucks, we can fill the belly with hulls and masts and use it to go to regattas all over the world!

That's a US Domestic only program, and it requires a week long training program to get certified, at your expense. The guys who do carry in the US are not allowed to take their guns out of the country. Remember this incident?


http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/03/26/pilot.gun/index.html

We do have Federal Air Marshals who fly on select International flights however. When they arrive into another country, they have to put their guns/ammo in lock boxes and turn them over to the local authorities while they layover, then pick them up on the way out. I don't think any other country, except maybe Isreal, has an 'Air Marshal' type program.

If this turns out to be a hijacking, I've got to wonder about motive, and destination. Especially since it was flying a zig-zag pattern after 3 hours of going straight west, after the initial turn.

I still think all the Malaysian radar data, both track and altitude, is highly suspect, but the week they wasted looking in the wrong ocean is not going to help find any debris field. It'll be widely scattered by now.

we occasionally hear of young police officers doing the same thing, running a speed trap gets boring at times so they have a play with the sidearm......
hey presto instant ventilation hole or dash replacement time

It's getting stupider by the minute, with all the CNN BREAKING NEWS and their self appointed Experts weighing in, and the Malaysian Government trying to save face, and and and....

I'm still going with Aliens, or snakes!

OR...they had a fire in the E/E bay and were over come by the smoke/fumes and it went into the ocean, and all the Malaysian Radar nonsense is exactly that....

OR...they were hijacked. Someone mentioned that two of the 9-11 hijackers came out of Malaysia, I don't spend enough time in Singapore to know what their political issues are, but it might be that some anti government group wanted to make a statement.

However, I would think if that were the case, we would have heard some group claiming responsibility by now.

The most far fetched theory is, someone took it over (or the Capt. with the home simulator was in on it) and landed it somewhere and is going to use it as a guided missile against...someone.

Malaysian Triangle

another possibility........

Can someone in the air-industry verify ??? Timbo


http://www.onlythebest.co/news/world/what-really-happened-to-mh370/

I've not heard about the cracks and the antennae issues, but then Delta doesn't tell the pilots much about any maintenance issues, they just fix it. The article does point out that that airline might have financial issues and not have fixed any cracks.

Here's the part that is nonsense, if all the other normal **** warning systems are working:

"As the cabin slowly loses pressure all inhabitants including the crew would be susceptible to the effects of hypoxia (loss of oxygen, symptoms include confusion, hallucination, disorientation and unconsciousness to begin with, followed by death). A slow loss in cabin pressure would gradually impair and confuse pilots, (due to loss of oxygen), causing pilots not to realize the need for oxygen masks until it was too late. As the crew slowly fall unconscious, this would then explain the "mumbling" heard from MH370 pilots by another aircraft."

Every commercial airliner has a "Cabin Altitude Warning" system to prevent this exact scenario. Remember all those Safety Demo's you've had to suffer through, where the Flight Attendants tell you, "Should the cabin change unexpectedly... (rise up to 11,000' or higher) oxygen masks will drop from ceiling panels over your seats. Pull the mask to the full extent of the tubing, to start the flow of oxygen. Place the mask over your nose and mouth and continue to breathe normally..." Watch the video, at 3:17.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eduNjwNvcH4

OK, the passenger O2 system is completely automatic. As soon as the cabin altitude gets above 11,000' (at a cruising altitude of 35,000' the cabin altitude would normally be at about 7-8,000' if the pressurization sys. is working normally) the O2 masks will drop, by themselves, if the system is working properly. The passengers will have 15 minutes of O2 available through those masks.

Meanwhile, in the ****, as soon as the cabin altitude reaches 10,000' (ten thousand, not eleven, so we have time to fix it or descend prior to the masks dropping) we get a very loud Master Caution/Warning horn, and big red lights in your face. You CANNOT miss this, you cannot sleep through it, as long as all systems are working normally, and they usually are.

Now, we actually practice this scenario in the simulators once a year. The Pilots have real oxygen masks available to them, not the cheese you get in the back. We have real masks with microphones in them, so we can talk to ATC, and smoke goggles, so we can see to fly, and our O2 will last an hour, at 100% O2, not the mix of ambient and O2 you get in the back. As soon as we get a cabin altitude warning, we descend to a lower altitude, so YOU can live. We could stay up at altitude for an hour, you in the back, would be quite dead however. So we practice what we call an "Emergency Descent".

Here's what our O2 masks look like (not a 777, but mask is pretty much the same) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRihhryndDc

With speed brakes extended, we can easily come down at about 6,000' per minute without hurting the airplane (over-speeding it) . You will feel it in your ears, no doubt! If we are at 35,000', it only takes us about 4 minutes to get down to where nobody needs the O2 masks, ie. 10,000', well less than the 15 minutes of O2 your cheesy little masks in the back will give you.

So, the pilots black out on a slow leak? Doubtful. BUT...if there were a fire, with toxic smoke and fumes, the pilots would have their hands full, and they might not have been able to see too well, thus the zig zag course, and they may have been overcome.

BUT...when ever there is a fire on board, we are trained to land IMMEDIATELY! They would have done a 180 and descended back into Malaysia, try to find any runway, what ever is closest. Get it on the ground ASAP and let the local Fire Dept. deal with it. To me, that is what their initial actions looked like. They turned and flew towards the nearest suitable airport. That says smoke/fire to me.

The scenario in the article above, where nobody knows the airplane is unpressurized, would only be plausible if BOTH the cabin alt. warning syst. were inop AND the Passenger Mask Drop system were inop...and if the Pilots were Idiots. As an experienced pilot, you know when your ears are popping, you know what thin air tastes like and you'll know when you start breathing hard. It feels like you are skiing at 11,000', you are out of breath, but you are just sitting there, so why are you out of breath? First thing I check is the PSI. It's highly unlikely, unless Malaysia Air does NO maintenance on their airplanes...and the pilots were morons.

How safe is the 777? There was a brief flurry of alarm when it emerged that the Federal Aviation Administration had issued an Airworthiness Directive after inspectors found corrosion in one model of the 777 that could have led to a structural failure and loss of cabin pressure. It turned out that the Malaysian 777 was of a model not affected.

A laughed as soon as I saw that and here's why...... about the 3:25 mark onwards, I'm sure you'll never think a safety demo is boring ever again

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O53q8MlGAFk

Classic. I'm venturing a guess that since a bullet went through the fuselage, while flying at 8,000 feet, that the gun probably was not handled as per the policy directives.

Rolls Royce figured it out! Their system broadcasts engine data to the sky and they read and monitor it real time for their clients. Granted, their engines aren't on everything in the air...but their system seems to have decent coverage since they seem to be the one legitimate source of data that indicated this flight went on for some time. Too bad that data was focused on just engine info.

I mean, seriously...in today's day and age where you can by 100GB of cloud storage for $1.99/month it's just not THAT much info. Nobody needs to monitor it other than to make sure things are working - it just needs to be available should you want to analyze it.

Insurance companies offer wireless trackers that you can plug into your ODBC port in your car to (supposedly) give you a discount if you are a good driver (that might not be beneficial to some)...obviously that won't work over the ocean but it's just not that hard to collect and maintain data. A ping of data every 5 minutes from a jet relaying speed, heading, altitude, and location isn't that complex.

True, but as we are hearing today, Malaysian Airlines didn't even pay for the Satellite Communications, I've got to wonder how much of the required, and incidental mx they were doing. Did I mention it's about money?

Safety costs money. Training costs money, mx costs money, sat com costs money.

Didn't they do something like that in the Die Hard movie?

Because that could happen.

Then the bad guys already know what Bruce Willis has coming for them which will keep us plenty safe.

read an thought provoking idea this morning...if the plane did actually change altitudes, what are the possibilities they climbed to that absurd altitude to affect the cabin pressurization in some way to incapacitate the passengers? How does the timing of that work out with the supplemental oxygen duration for the passengers vs. pilots?

Can exceeding the service ceiling for the plane do, or allow a pilot to do, something to the cabin pressurization for 15 minutes?

so if some bad dudes were to "capture" the plane, kill the crew/passengers (maybe by this altitude thing Jake proposed), to use it later for some nefarious purpose, wouldn't people be able to track the plane when it's airborne again and over some area with radar?

If it changes its signals (however you could do that) and re-paints the plane...?

Or would it get picked off the minute some radar operator notices an "unmarked" (or no transponder) plane going through their airspace? And send some nicely painted fighter intercept jets to get close-up and personal with the plane?

Storage is not network bandwidth. That said the apparent occasional phone home data stream from the engines wouldn't take that much.