re: Official Thread: Missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370

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Also, authorities have 100% confirmed (As far as I have read) that the "Turn" to which the plane took was pre-programmed into the system.

The guy proposing this theory says that they did that to try to make an emergency landing. Wouldn't they be manually controlling the plane and not relying on programming in turns if they were in an emergency?

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This one actually makes sense.

It's easy to punch a turn into the computer and can be done fairly quickly, faster than executing the turn. If they are trying to resolve an issue with another system, they can quickly punch in a turn and have the autopilot make the manuevers for them while they get back to resolving the issue instead of having to maintain focus on the turn throughout the manuever.

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Also, authorities have 100% confirmed (As far as I have read) that the "Turn" to which the plane took was pre-programmed into the system.

The guy proposing this theory says that they did that to try to make an emergency landing. Wouldn't they be manually controlling the plane and not relying on programming in turns if they were in an emergency?

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Kind of shoots down the pilot looking for a safe airport theory.

Also, fire does not just 'appear.' There is such a thing as smoke, and it starts small, where you can smell it, but not see it, and grows.

It's a leap to say the smoke just instantly disabled everyone on board.

There would have been any number of distress calls.

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So all the other electronics have limited them from communicating, SOS, etc... But they are going to rely on the computer system to fly the plane?

Im not saying this all didn't happen, it just makes 0 sense to me.

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This goes back to the post I made about the issues with this theory. He is saying that a fire on board took out a number of systems to do this, but there was still enough electrical to use autopilot and the fire didn't cause a structural failure prior to the plane running out of gas (remember it flew for another 7.5 hours.)

I don't know enough about the fire suppression system or the redundancy of the electrical systems and their locations on the 777 to even begin to say if this theory is plausible or not. That would take an experienced 777 engineering team to determine if it could happen.

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That would take an experienced 777 engineering team to determine if it could happen.

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Agree... But you would think if his theory was truly plausible, one of the dozens of other 777 pilots who have been interviewed regarding the situation would have mentioned it.

Instead, like I've repeated over and over again, all you hear is that this plane had so many redundancies that technological failure could not have happened.

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It's not like it can fly undetected into American territory.

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I keep hearing this, but we do not have continuous land based radar coverage of the coast of the U.S. There are several significant gaps that could be exploited by someone that knew what they were doing. They would probably be picked up, but it would but too late to be reached by scrambled fighters before they hit a major coastal city. The military quit worrying about coastal air attacks when ICBMs became the major threat. Since 9/11 more focus has been placed on this type of attack, but the odds of detecting one is a long way from 100%.

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The transponders and other tracking equipment have nothing to do with autopilot. Each system has its own breaker basically.

ie - you can still watch tv in your living room or have lights in your kitchen if the outlet in a bedroom tripped the breaker.

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But if this theory is true and they were soooo panicked that they didn't try to get out communications via another means.... They had enough faith that even though all the other systems had failed, the auto-pilot would definitely work.

Im not judging the theory, Im just saying the autopilot could easily have been working even though other systems were down.

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Im just saying the autopilot could easily have been working even though other systems were down.

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I agree it could work, but I'm just thinking logically here...

"Oh shite, theres a fire, we've got major issues.... the transponder isn't working and we can't contact the tower... Lets throw on the auto-pilot"

Boeing has good fire suppression systems on board a 777.

LINK

look for air force bases on the coast. also look for naval air bases.

I don't know about the air force, but looking at our flight line at this second, we have 0/50+ F18's that are air/air capable.

it will take over 30 min minimum to get those 18's loaded with live ordinance and launched for A/A warfare.