re: Official Thread: Missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370

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Again, I'm not saying it CAN'T be done. I'll repeat myself again. I'm saying it would have to be someone VERY SKILLED in piloting to do so with no navigation at night.

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First, my opinion is the plane or its parts are at the bottom of the ocean some where. That being said, and for the sake of intelligent discussion, there are dozens of handheld portable GPS units specifically designed for aviation.

LINK

With one of these guys and the appropriate database for the area of the world you are operating in someone could fly even a 777 to within a few feet of a runway. They could fly a visual approach to the runway assuming the runway was marked with some type of lights. As already discussed, even after towers at controlled airports have closed you can still activate runway lights by keying your radio on a particular frequency. I have landed at BTR in the middle of the night and keyed up the lights myself. One hit of the mic button turns them on, each additional push increases the brightness, there are three brightness levels at BTR.
The specialized skills required to do this in a 777 would be knowing the aircraft systems, approach, and landing speeds, that sort of stuff. Navigating with todays GPS devices is very straight forward, the 9/11 hijackers had portable devices with them which were preloaded with the route to fly them to the trade centers.

So what's the benefit in stealing a plane full of mostly Chinese people?

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So what's the benefit in stealing a plane full of mostly Chinese people?

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Lord knows. Perhaps they plan to use it sometime in the future?

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You're forgetting the 20 experts on cloaking technology.

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So the plan would be to put them in a hole like Jessie on Breaking Bad and make them work?

Maybe it's a country who wanted them?

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Ive played enough Flight Simulator X to know you can land a jet basically anywhere

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But if you want to re-use it you have to land on a runway long enough to take off again.

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With one of these guys and the appropriate database for the area of the world you are operating in someone could fly even a 777 to within a few feet of a runway. They could fly a visual approach to the runway assuming the runway was marked with some type of lights. As already discussed, even after towers at controlled airports have closed you can still activate runway lights by keying your radio on a particular frequency. I have landed at BTR in the middle of the night and keyed up the lights myself. One hit of the mic button turns them on, each additional push increases the brightness, there are three brightness levels at BTR. The specialized skills required to do this in a 777 would be knowing the aircraft systems, approach, and landing speeds, that sort of stuff. Navigating with todays GPS devices is very straight forward, the 9/11 hijackers had portable devices with them which were preloaded with the route to fly them to the trade centers.

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The retired 777 pilot they just had on Fox News said this exact thing.

He said, if he had a GPS waypoint on a 4,000' strip of 100' wide level piece of concrete, he could land a 777 on it in the dark and this pilot could have done the same.

They asked him where you'd find that and he said "all over!" He said "there are strips left over from wars and training strips all over the place that could be used."

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They need to relinquish their investigative authority to a more competent governmental entity.

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An alpha leader would be able to step in and take control, but not Obeta.

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The freaking plane can land itself?!?

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Most airliners nowadays can land themselves.

Maybe it's a Payne Stewart flight type of deal and, until shown, the unknown is driving us, or at least me, crazy?

A Payne Stewart thing is possible, but doesn't account for the transponders being turned off. Assuming there was some sort of rapid decompression, the pilots would only have 30 seconds or so to do anything before donning their oxygen masks which makes turning the transponders off pretty strange.

If it was a real Payne Stewart thing and it wasn't they really didn't know it was happening, the transponders being shut off is even weirder.

A massive electrical/backup electrical failure that takes the transponders out makes it seem even less likely that the plane would be flying four hours and still sending info to Rolls Royce.