Were the pilots portrayed as white, Christian terrorists?
“They’re just such a distraction … These are people that don’t really understand the facts and the data.”
Did they cover the brilliant Don Lemon theory?!
Bahahaha
That is how history is rewritten.
P
I think I saw this movie. Lost Horizon? Atlas Shrugged?
Occam’s razor. The simplest answer that doesn’t involve mysticism, supernatural powers or space aliens is a suicidal Muhammadan (who also happened to have rehearsed the route the disappearing plane took on his home flight simulator).
They’re cruising at 35,000 feet. In a commercial airliner, the captain is god (by both law and company policy) and no first officer who values his career is going to argue when “the boss” sends him out of the cockpit on some sketchy errand.
Or he doesn’t even have to send him out. It was a long flight and the FO was certain to have to take a human factors break before they reached their destination. Crews generally fly together a month at a time so the captain might already have the FO’s bladder break timings figured out. Or maybe it was the captain who took the bathroom break, and when he came back into the cockpit, he buried the fire axe in the back of the FO’s skull, kicking off his homicidal plan.
Once the FO is outside (or dead with an axe in his head), the suicidal Muhammadan captain dumps the cabin pressure overboard (yes, all pressurized commercial jets have this provision). That deploys the cabin oxygen masks.
The emergency oxygen system for the cabin is based around the theory that as soon as the depressurization event occurs, the pilots will descend to an altitude where supplemental oxygen isn’t needed. That’s why there’s only sufficient passenger oxygen for a limited duration (20 minutes, IIRC) and all of the masks in the cabin — both the flight attendants’ and the passengers’ — are of the “partial rebreather” type, which do not deliver an oxygen mole content sufficient to support any sort of strenuous activity above 25,000 feet.
The flight attendants also have small individual “walk-around” oxygen bottles, which give them a little more breathing time but those also have the partial rebreather masks, so they’re not going to do anything vigorous either.
However, there are three full-pressure masks on the flight deck which are fully effective even at 35,000 feet; one for the captain, one for the FO, and one for the jump seater, along with a substantially longer supply of oxygen.
Since 9/11 the cockpit door is armored, bullet-proof, with titanium hinges, strike plate and peep-hole. Even if you tried battering it down with a fire axe, with the low oxygen content the partial rebreather masks deliver, you’d get about three swings in before you blacked out.
There is an emergency cypher lock that can bypass the mechanical door lock to be used in case everyone in the cockpit should become incapacitated from bad food, smoke in the cockpit, etc. Both flight officers and the head flight attendant have the code, however, when the code is entered it sounds an alarm in the cockpit to alert the crew, giving them a 30 second grace period in which to countermand the opening. So if they’re conscious, no one gets in but that they allow it.
After dumping the cabin, the suicidal Muhammadan captain is snug as a bug in a rug. It would take the people outside hours to beat down the armored cockpit door and they’ve only got minutes before they collapse or pass out. Most passengers sitting motionless in their seat will black out in single digit minutes. Whoever was flying the airplane even climbed briefly to 41,000 feet, possibly to accelerate the the onset of hypoxia (maybe while the FO was trying out the fire axe on that cockpit door). Within an hour, everyone who isn’t inside the cockpit and wearing one of those three masks will be dead or passed out and soon to die.
After that the only question becomes whether he should try for a soft landing — in which case he’d be stranded at sea with the dead bodies of hundreds of people he’d murdered, waiting for the plane to fill with water and sink, after which he’d suffer an agonizing death by drowning. Or does he fly until he’s out of gas, then nose it over and fly it into the ocean as fast as he can make it go without pulling the wings off, killing himself instantly on impact.
The details of how it works might be complicated but the actions required by the perpetrator are simple, straightforward and foolproof. And the area in the Indian ocean where it’s calculated he’d have run out of fuel at is deep and has a mountainous sea floor, exactly the kind of place you’d look for if you wanted the airplane never to be found.