The presumed tactic would be to take the aircraft to 45,000 feet and then manually decompress; the aircraft will decompress more rapidly at higher altitude, unconsciousness due to hypoxia will occur more quickly, and even 100% oxygen at that altitude won’t keep you fully alert.
Also, the flight-deck crew positions have pressure-breathing regulators that force above-ambient-pressure 100% oxygen into the the oxygen mask when above 37,000 feet, thereby keeping the lungs at higher-than-ambient pressure and permitting greater absorption of oxygen. Everyone else on the aircraft would – at best – be getting ambient-pressure 100% oxygen, which wouldn’t keep them fully alert for very long at 45,000 feet.
If you hijack an aircraft, kill the pilots, and you’re the only one who can control it on the aircraft, and passengers are unaware that a total newbie could safely land a 777 at a sophisticated airfield, you’d leave the hijacker to their business…
OK … so there’s conjecture … and … some evidence … wait! There’s no evidence at all! That’s why it’s supernattrle - it can’t be explained, so it must be!
Jebus, now I can assign a cause to my brother’s stinking feet. They’re supernattrle!
The flight crew can manually activate the passenger oxygen system. The passenger oxygen system also activates (i.e. the chemical generators fire off and the masks drop) if the cabin altitude exceeds 15,000 feet. The flight crew cannot over-ride this automatic activation.
On the one hand, yes, but on the other, there isn’t really an option that cuts them out of the loop. Boeing and Airbus split nearly all of the market for large passenger jets, nearly down the middle. Neither has the production capacity to take up the slack if the other gets shut out of the market. Vetting new suppliers/factories/personnel/etc. would take many years, and no government (even in the name of fighting terrorism) will shoot itself in the foot quite that much. New requirements for new planes, maybe.
Check out the Chinook Mull of Kintyre crash (1994). Boeing got caught knee-dip in it. Somehow the pilots were blamed (which is something you simply don’t do - they were dead and couldn’t testify).
Boeing knows the pathways through this kind of mess. Very familiar turf - as in, they’ll handle it well. We just need to keep an eye on what they don’t treat nicely.
Anybody know how likely it is that further satellite data will emerge, making it possible to get a more precise fix on the plane’s location around the time of the last known ping? In other words, would it also have pinged other satellites either with the same transmission or around the same time?
I still believe the plane most likely crashed, no matter how it happened (hypoxia across the board, à la Helios 522; a struggle for the controls; deliberate ditching; hostage rebellion; running out of fuel before reaching planned destination…). And if no further data emerge to narrow down its location, it will be a very long time before the location is found.
Still, it is remarkable that a safe landing at a still-undiscovered location remains a scenario that’s apparently being seriously pondered. (Or maybe it’s simply being pondered by way of ruling out all possibilities, no matter how far-fetched.)
The landing-on-an-improvised-airstrip scenario seems to leave the gaping question of how the plane would be refuelled for eventual repositioning, and how that repositioning would happen undetected. This one requires some sort of well-equipped guerrilla facility in the middle of a desert or jungle, unless the highjacker(s) had no intention of flying the plane again…which leaves the question “why bother to land safely?”.
I’ve got to imagine there’s more satellite data. Otherwise, why’ve we all been dropping cash on this super-spy gear?
Jetliners are designed to land in rough places with minimal casualties. They’re intended to be flown in and out of nice airports, but the designers know perfectly well a pilot might have to put down in a field.
It might be one crazy guy who wanted to do it for doing it’s sake.
No doubt. I don’t have any problem with the notion that it could have been landed at any number of non-airport locations, even if we assume a pilot with the ability to get to such a place undetected. I just have trouble believing that it happened in this case. It seems an awfully remote possibility to my admittedly amateur eye.
If the highjacking is/was part of some grander scheme, that improvised location would not be random. It would have to be some kind of guerrilla facility with refuelling and possibly repair/modification capabilities, which brings us back to the whole problem of ridiculously complex scenarios involving elaborate, large-scale activities being carried out without detection.
It’s complex to the point that it would almost certainly require the cooperation of a government. The only one that strikes me as batshit enough to get in on something like this is North Korea, but it isn’t in the right place and is not an enemy of China so highly unlikely to take a bunch of Chinese hostages.
On the other hand, if this was not the first phase of something bigger, I can think of no reason to land somewhere other than an airport and remain incommunicado. Apart from doing it for the sake of it, but again, why stay quiet once done?
Came here to say that the OP’s notion of the aircraft being found at Diego Garcia will definitely not…er…fly. Nothing gets close to that island without the US Navy knowing about it.
