Malaysia Airlines Loses Contact With 777 en Route to Beijing

[BlueMax]

Enough with the cell phones, they will not work at altitude. And I doubt there are any towers out there even if they could.

I apologize and should have just asked the simple question, can the pressurization system be intentionally turned off at altitude?

[AndyToop]

Kuala to Beijing, I would venture to say not much other than passenger baggage.

... Unless it was known the landing wouldn't be in Beijing. Ohhh let me just grab my tin foil hat

[sjwk]

Could a rouge pilot/person in cockpit also turn off pressurization system to disable passengers (which may explain no cell phone contacts) and others or is this system automatic except for temperature?

The lack of phone reception out in the middle of the ocean is also a pretty good explanation for lack of mobile calls. And, assuming whatever went on did so without the passengers being aware (i.e., noone storming up the aisle with a gun), they probably wouldn't notice any change in course as being abnormal so wouldn't be rushing to make calls to tell someone.

That said, if the plane was flown and landed at another airport, then - unless it was really remote and nowhere near any mobile transmitters at the airfield or along the approach, you would expect someone to realise they weren't in Beijing ('I thought China had less polar bears') and try sending a message, or for mobiles left on in the hold to check in to a transmitter, which would presumably get logged by the phone network and would happen regardless of what state the passengers were in. I'm assuming that this would have already been checked by officials in any country within range and we'd have heard about it.

So, sadly unless there was a huge conspiracy consisting of the flight crew, workers at an airfield, and staff at all mobile phone networks in and around wherever it landed, most likely outcome is that it did not make it to land.

[BoeingBobby]

I apologize and should have just asked the simple question, can the pressurization system be intentionally turned off at altitude?

Yes it can.

[starchyme]

What if?

One of the "Entertained" ladies reported the officers were smoking in the cockpit during flight. What if they smoked again, and what they smoked were not exactly "kosher", making them do things like:
- Switching of transponders?
- Flying erratically?
maybe not hijacking at all ,but purely incapacitation without time for the PAX to realize something amiss. Just another theory. only the recovered plane and black boxes will tell.

[Brainsys]

One would presume that if the aircraft flew for an extended period after it went dark and changed path then the cabin crew would be the first to become aware something was amiss. If so is there anything they could do? Would they have access to any emergency transmission apparatus?

[BoeingBobby]

AFAIK, you only need to shut down the SBD transceiver to silence ACARS, and that would be circuit breaker P11-1, Position C9.

And that's from someone with only pretty good knowledge of the internet.

I am not a 777 pilot so I am am going by what is on the 74 and I assume (I hate doing that) they are similar. ACARS uses all three communications radios for transmitting data. VHF, HF and SATCOM, depending on the instillation. There is a hierarchy for the band used starting with VHF then to HF and finally to SATCOM. This is done for a cost per session use. SATCOM being the most expensive. AS far as the FDR goes, there are NO c/b's for that in the cockpit. It is on a rack along with the FCR way back in the tail and the c/b's are mounted on the rack. There is an erase button in the cockpit for the FCR but will only work with the A/C on the ground and the parking brake set.

[Gabriel]

Agreed. But understand that saying the aircraft transmitted no data does not mean that the communications link was not still enabled. That is to say there might have been a satellite or radio link still connected (up to even just the the data link layer of the OSI model - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSI_model) but with the transmitting system disabled. Satellites or other infrastructure may still have some record of those data link connections? Enough just to say the aircraft was still "on", not crashed (yet)...

How do you define "connected" if one of the parties doesn't transmit a thing?

A "ping" is data.

[AndyToop]

I apologize and should have just asked the simple question, can the pressurization system be intentionally turned off at altitude?

Good rule of thumb - every system can be intentionally turned off.

[Gabriel]

AS far as the FDR goes, there are NO c/b's for that in the cockpit. It is on a rack along with the FCR way back in the tail and the c/b's are mounted on the rack.

Is this c/b reasonably accessible in flight?
I mean, if you are the pilot of a passenger flight and you want to do it, can you do it without involving highly suspect things like starting to disassemble the plane?

FCR?

[BoeingBobby]

Is this c/b reasonably accessible in flight?
I mean, if you are the pilot of a passenger flight and you want to do it, can you do it without involving highly suspect things like starting to disassemble the plane?

FCR?

Gabriel, I can't answer that with any authority on the 777. On the freighter 747's I could go downstairs to the main deck cargo area, walk all the way to the tail, find something to stand on (It is about 7' off the floor) and try to find the breakers or just pull all of them. On the PAX birds I have no idea where they are buried.

[starchyme]

One would presume that if the aircraft flew for an extended period after it went dark and changed path then the cabin crew would be the first to become aware something was amiss. If so is there anything they could do? Would they have access to any emergency transmission apparatus?

Good questions. This is going to become a huge novel one day no matter what the cause.

[AndyToop]

maybe they've been eaten by the langoliers

[EconomyClass]

Now that they know the plane could have headed west, is the highjacking theory on the table? And do Malaysian Airlines planes have reinforced cockpit doors? Flight 93 had people talking to relatives on the ground. Would highjackers have let the plane leave the proximity of towers, then take over the plane and maybe collect all the cell phones? I'm imagining the plane setting down on some island in the Indian Ocean, the passengers emptied out of the plane, and then it took off again for another destination. I don't know the flaws in this, but it seems a lot of things weren't done exactly right from a security standpoint, so I could imagine a scenario of this working. Anybody remember the pre-9/11 plan to highjack a whole bunch of airliners in Asia and use them to attack some jihadist targets? This was our first red flag for what later happened. I could totally see jihadists looking for any opportunity to do some part of that plan again much later. Malaysia's Prime Minister is Najib Razak. He might feel less threatened by the global jihadist war.

[Peter Kesternich]

(...) it seems a lot of things weren't done exactly right from a security standpoint, (...)

How would you know that?