Quote:
Originally Posted by housenuts
so basically for it to be unintentional it has to be one of these:
1) something bad happened
2) pilots program in change
3) pilot reports good night - why no report of the something bad?
4) plane gets lost
or
1) pilots program in change - reason unknown
2) pilots report good night
3) something bad happens
4) plane gets lost
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i'm trying to figure out how either of those make sense. the top one really doesn't make any sense cause surely they would have reported something bad having happened. possibly it was something very minor that they weren't worried about at all, that got unexpectedly exponentially worse. still if it's bad enough that it would cause you to program in a course change, you think you'd notify it.
for the second one to make sense, there needs to be a logical reason the change was programmed.
i don't see any other logical orders of events if it was unintentional.
These might seem a bit contrived, and I might have misunderstood how the FMS works, but here goes.
The Captain is filling in his emergency course, putting it into the Standby route on the FMS, but his mind is on other things and he accidentally presses the button to swop it with the Active route. It's obvious at once what he has done, they can both see it. No harm done; he just presses the button again and swops them back. But the time is now 01:07:02 and ACARS has just sent the route change into the logs. Or the Captain has an idiosyncracy, he likes to see the Standby course in the Active route. He swops them over and back, and again the timing just happens to be right. Or the Captain has gone for a piss, and the First Officer is showing off to a new FA, or to a passenger. "See, I just press this button and it swops them over."
It looks suspicious that the course has been changed in the Active part of the FMS, but it isn't conclusive imo. There could be a reason.
I still think the cause of this could be pretty much anything, although alien activity and black holes seem unlikely.
One thing I have seen said is that suicide is unlikely because what would be the point of driving all that way? Well, the point would be money. I'm not an expert on insurance, but I imagine they won't pay out if you commit suicide, especially if you take a couple of hundred people with you. If you just disappear on a flight, on the other hand, they will. There could have been somebody on board desperate enough to clear his family's debts that this seemed the only way out.
Then there's
this:
Quote:
At approximately 1703 Western Standard Time, on 1 August 2005, a Boeing Company 777-200 aircraft, (B777) registered 9M-MRG, was being operated on a scheduled international passenger service from Perth to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The crew reported that, during climb out, they observed a LOW AIRSPEED advisory on the aircraft’s Engine Indication and Crew Alerting System (EICAS), when climbing through flight level (FL) 380. At the same time, the aircraft’s slip/skid indication deflected to the full right position on the Primary Flight Display (PFD). The PFD airspeed display then indicated that the aircraft was approaching the overspeed limit and the stall speed limit simultaneously. The aircraft pitched up and climbed to approximately FL410 and the indicated airspeed decreased from 270 kts to 158 kts. The stall warning and stick shaker devices also activated. The aircraft returned to Perth where an uneventful landing was completed.
Check the pdf out. It's scary.
Imagine a relatively inexperienced first officer trying to deal with all that while the captain is off at the loo. The plane is climbing furiously, the throttle is wide open, and alarms are telling him the plane is sliding off to the side. Even when he disengages the autopilot they still climb because the autothrottle is out of control. He panics, and starts pulling circuit breakers. And then the fuselage fails slightly and decompression begins.
I still think it could have been anything, although as I say, I don't think aliens or black holes are likely to be involved.
Last edited by OodaThunkett; 03-21-2014 at 08:01 PM.