If a C172 could penetrate Soviet airspace and land in Red Square before the end of the cold war, I
They had it on radar as it flew along but nobody thought much of it / couldn’t get authority to do anything. The point is that there was radar coverage which presumably would have been recorded. But anyway a GA plane can fly very low. One guy “vanished” in a Vari-EZ over SE UK, there was a big search, found nothing, and he reappeared in Switzerland. He got a big fine.
Even the US military could not respond and locate the 9/11 757 and 767 aircraft and they were a known and ongoing threat at the time, also with their transponders turned off and over land.
True, but they had them on radar and all recorded, for later review. There was very little time to act.
Or we can stick to a more ordinary scenario: electrical fire and crew incapacitation.
The difficulty is how did it manage to fly for another 6-7hrs, on autopilot. No way would the cabin crew and passengers just sit there for that time, too. There would have been daylight for quite a while at the end and it would have been obvious they are going the wrong way.
Peter, why would someone (one of the pilots ?) be interested in deactivating the recorders ?
It was just a thought… if you wanted to go out in proper style, with the ultimate anti establishment gesture, leaving a total mystery behind. Let’s face it, had the ACARS not been turned off, nobody would have been able to stop the aircraft flying anywhere, and once over the Indian Ocean there would not even have been any way to check it visually, due to military jets having a very limited range. So if ACARS was turned off deliberately, you can bet so were the CVR and the FDR.
What is surprising is that weather sats don’t appear to have seen any contrails.
If one goes with the “go out in style, without trace” scenario, and assuming a proper “systems boffin” pilot who this guy probably was (very unusual among airline pilots, looking at the many I know) I’d fly at low level (no contrails) and preferably in IMC. That means the fuel endurance is similar but the range will be maybe 30% less, so they are looking in the wrong place (too far south).
The difficulty is how did it manage to fly for another 6-7hrs, on autopilot. No way would the cabin crew and passengers just sit there for that time, too. There would have been daylight for quite a while at the end and it would have been obvious they are going the wrong way.
Crew incapacitation caused by loss of pressurization would do it. Time of useful consciousness at >30K feet is very short, and if an emergency descent is not made the oxygen system for the passengers only will last so long. This happened to a Greek Boeing 737 a while back, everyone died before the plane crashed.
What is surprising is that weather sats don’t appear to have seen any contrails.
If one goes with the “go out in style, without trace” scenario, and assuming a proper “systems boffin” pilot who this guy probably was (very unusual among airline pilots, looking at the many I know) I’d fly at low level (no contrails) and preferably in IMC. That means the fuel endurance is similar but the range will be maybe 30% less, so they are looking in the wrong place (too far south).
The range would be much lower than that, if you are down to the real low levels, say 5000 ft. In a Citation from FL410 to 5000’ you end up with about double the fuel flow and about 40% less speed as well.
Crew incapacitation caused by loss of pressurization would do it.
Obviously I know nothing about the 777 and its FMS but I read that the (reportedly radar-verified) maneuvers which followed the last radio call and which preceeded the (assumed) major change of direction and the flight to the south, could not have been flown without a live pilot.
The range would be much lower than that, if you are down to the real low levels, say 5000 ft. In a Citation from FL410 to 5000’ you end up with about double the fuel flow and about 40% less speed as well.
In that case they need to look a lot further north…
But you have to either assume it was pilot suicide (or some equivalent process involving human action), or assume something else. Between those two classes of assumptions, the search area moves a long way.
I don’t think you get contrails until about 25000 feet so you could probably still avoid producing any whilst getting a decent range.
Peter, I think your plan sounds a bit too elaborate, kind of like the way baddies in James Bond films like to try and kill him….unsuccessfully ! Suicidal pilot….AP off, lets do some aeros…Maybe a barrel roll at 35k explained the climb and subsequent decent ! But that would very likely end up with an oil slick in the sea directly below.
I dunno, something is weird. Clearly if it did fly for 8 hrs then everyone was dead. TOUC at 35k is about a minute. IF everyone was dead, decompression explains this. Why? Dunno, could something have happened in the cockpit rendering it uninhabitable but still AP operational? Could the initial alt and hdg changes be consistent with someone with a big emergency but were subsequently overcome after making a turn, programming the FMS to a final waypoint (maybe an IAF of an approach), then AP captured HDG mode (bit like that airbus in the USA where the pilots were having a snooze and overshot the airport by 150 miles). Could it be that the radar reports are completely wrong, and no one wants to admit they have no idea where the plane went?
There was a report of another 777 on the ground that had an electrical fire in the cockpit which became an oxygen fire as it was in the vicinity of the copilot 02 feed pipes, which burnt through the hull and pretty much destroyed the cockpit. That would explain electrical failure / breaker pulling, decompression, lack of comms, death to all before an emergency decent was carried out…..but George would keep on flying, possibly.
The reason we have the ability to pull the CB on the Cockpit Voice Recorder is so we can stop the CVR overwriting itself after an incident. They run on a two-hour loop, I think…
There is something VERY fishy about this whole incident. The information flow (if you can call it such) is shambolic at best, intentionally misleading at worst. There are to this day no publicly available radar data from the supposed turn west and then south. For crying out loud – a T7 overflying Malaysia, close to the border of Thailand and then Indonesia and it doesn’t come up on mil radar? Or does come up, but the operators say, ‘ah, shucks, another UFO’, let’s carry on snoozing? Really?
A lot of things just don’t add up here and I wouldn’t be too surprised if years from now some villagers were to stumble across a big hole in the ground in some remote mountains in the border region of Laos/Vietnam/China.
You think the 777 was shot down?
I had lunch with some airline pilots today who think a complicated fire-related scenario could explain it. It would have to eventually burn a hole in the hull and depressurise.
But first it would have to disable the avionics to just the right degree, without affecting the autopilot and everything related.
