Posted on 03/18/2014 7:24:02 AM PDT by mandrews222
It wasn’t flying in Chinese air space.
It was flying to Pakistan, through Indian air space.
Details, details...
>> “One question most people haven’t thought to ask I believe: Do pilots know that their engines are sending pings to the satellites? If so, can those pings be shut down from the flight deck?” <<
.
Yes, and no.
The data come directly from the engines, powered by the engines. There would be no reason to run a switch to the cockpit, as that would increase the chance of a short, not decrease it.
“As for the pilots, at FL 430 you need positive pressure O2 masks. I do not believe the crew had such masks.”
All jets have pressure masks for the flight deck crew. Passengers have the continuous flow masks.
The Captain flipped out. He killed the copilot, turned off reporting systems, pulled circuit breakers, turned off the packs and ascended to 45k ft. to kill everyone in back, (the masks didn’t drop because system breaker was pulled). Flight/voice recorders store the last 2 hrs. of data, pilot has no control over that, breakers not located in flight deck so he flies for hours to overwrite data and dumps the aircraft in the deep remote Indian Ocean.
That’s what I think happened.
The comment could have been given on background... and a decision was made to 'run with it' because enough people thought the source was credible. Or it will become one of those memorable 'mistakes' the press makes when a story is breaking. Time will tell.
” As for the pilots, at FL 430 you need positive pressure O2 masks.”
At FL 430 pilots are required to have O2 masks. The 777 is certified to cruise at FL430 meaning passengers would be comfortable without O2 masks.
Interesting take. It makes you sick that Obama is at the table, as it were, discussing this. All part of his new ‘flexibility.’ Man, January, 2017 seems a long way off. .
Same thing, the Indian military would have reacted too?
The 777 pilot caller also said he's talked with the FBI about his concern that, "there are a lot of foreign nationals flying on American carriers." "It used to be you had to be an American national to fly with the Airlines. Oh, we had a few Canadians, but they were all Americans. Sometime in the 90's they started 'admitting' qualified foreign nationals as pilots." He said, "Yeah, I'm a nationalist, hell I'm an ex-Navy pilot, but I think Americans should be behind that locked door." . .
Will anything come of this? Or will the PC police say the Afghani pilot flying for United is fine, nothing to see here, move along. . .
*facepalm*
I appreciate the response. It would seem to me like there would be a desire to prevent a commercial heavy from transmitting anything at all for all kinds of reasons.
I would be surprised if this couldn’t be controlled from the flight deck, but your logic is pretty formidable.
Every inch of cabling on a plane matters.
“Yes, and no.
The data come directly from the engines, powered by the engines. There would be no reason to run a switch to the cockpit, as that would increase the chance of a short, not decrease it.”
The data from the engines is also available to the pilots for them to monitor engine performance. The engine data is then sent via the ACARS system which performs other data transmission activities.
Completely different circuits.
Data feed and power are not the same, even on the simplest devices.
Please do a short refresher on the 777 electrical distribution system. Thank you.
The plane does NOT have to be on or even near the “arcs”. The plane can be anywhere within the area circumscribed by the arcs, which represent the horizon of the satellite, which was located above the Indian Ocean at the location marked on the illustration in Post No. 4.
I initially thought the same - but other reporting (and the search area) have indicated that the satellite ‘pings’ could determine range. Somewhere on here I even saw a graphic which showed the two potential ping locations at each of 6 pings.
I will admit that it looks suspiciously like each ping gave a nearly identical range to the satellite, which seems very unlikely...I assume (I hope) that a ping from the 1st hour of flight was used to validate the accuracy of the ping range finding. It seems the searchers have placed great faith in this, as they are only searching the Indian Ocean in the vicinity of the last ping.
I’ve also thought they could do a degree of elimination, by determining which satellites did NOT ping the plane...assuming there is overlap in coverage, the circular coverage zone of the one satellite that did ping it could be reduced by the overlap zones that did not ping the plane.
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