
Wonder if they met with a similar fate. How awful. |
It's getting curiouser and curiouser. The Austrian and Italian passengers they were reporting on board actually weren't on board... Their passports had been stolen a couple of years ago. Makes me wonder what is going on... At least two people on board who weren't who they said they were. Got this at from CNN.
Also for those wondering about the kids, they're reporting five kids under the age of five total. So I'm guessing two lap kids, three seat kids. |
I would think this is just coincidence. Passport theft and forgery is very common. If it were terrorism or something, I would find it odd that there would be no distress signal. The plane was not old, and you would think they'd have an "emergency button" or something installed that conveys a signal about an attempted hijacking - something that doesn't require a radio call. Hijackers generally like attention - no group has claimed anything. It seems like whatever happened was EXTREMELY quick - 1-2 minutes max from normal flight, to destruction. Hell, it would take that long just to fall from 7 miles up in the sky. A hijacking would have to have been absolutely instantaneous. It seems very unlikely to me. |
Would pilot suicide matter if there was a co-pilot? |
Anderson Cooper was talking to a former pilot and he said what crossed his mind was a complete electrical malfunction although he said that was a very unlikely scenario. |
Depends on the plane. The controls on some planes work independently, and on others they work together. |
Terrorism isn't always hijacking though. Whatever caused this, I feel for the families and the deceased. So sad. |
The Air France crash was pilot error. A mechanism froze, which automatically disabled auto pilot, and the pilots basically didn't know what to do, and wrongly maneuvered the plane. They should have been able to recover. It was gross negligence on the part of Air France-- they basically sent pilots who did not know how to properly fly the plane when it wasn't on auto pilots. Absolutely disgusting. |
Can anyone explain technically how this can happen? I get that catastrophic depressurization can knock out humans, but how is it that no passive or active sensors would have been tracking the position? Is it just that the plane could fall that distance in between scheduled pings? With modern GPS tracking / equipment / redundancies, it just seems crazy for a plane to simply disappear, unless there is in fact more data that hasn't been released. |
True, but then a perpetrator needn't be physically on board a plane using a fake passport. |
There is some GPS telemetry transmitted by satellite for maintenance purposes, but it's sporadic because that is expensive. It's not designed for tracking. And at 600 mph, the aircraft travels 10 minutes in a minute, so if you get data every 5 minutes, that's 50 miles, and it could glide another 50 on the way down. An example of tracking -- aircraft from Europe to the US have only unreliable High Frequency radio for occasional contact, no radar tracking, and are separated by flying different ground tracks and leaving lots of space in the front and back. So, on any flight abroad, you are basically out of contact for most of the trip. |
If one of the pilots stepped out to use the bathroom, there only would have been one. And on Egypt Air some of the evidence pointed to a struggle between both pilots. |
Read that the pilot had taken a break about ten minutes before they crashed, just before they were entering an area of turbulence. The two, less experienced co-pilots were flying the plane at the time. The plane rolled a little to the right and one of the co-pilots corrected the plane to the left. But the plane was operating in a different flying mode which was more sensitive so the correction was an over correction. So for thirty seconds the plane rolled left and right. The pilots were confused because they didn't understand what was happening and tilted the nose upwards so the plane started to climb. Because they were flying in the regular mode, the auto pilot was off and the air speed information wasn't being correctly reported and I think there weren't as many stall warnings. As the plane climbed higher, the plane was still at an angle. The wings loss lift and the plane stalled causing them to crash. |
A stolen passport is MUCH more likely to be used by a pair trafficking drugs, or trafficking people, or just someone by individuals seeking an escape from where they are. I would guarantee all of us have been on a flight with someone using a fake/stolen passport at some point in our lives - much more likely if you're traveling in certain parts of the world. It is extremely, extremely common. |
Thanks for the explanation. I suppose I'm just surprised that the speed and altitude sensors aren't rigged to transmit location if the rate of change goes outside normal parameters. |