I don't fly the 767, or any other airliner. In fact, I no longer fly for a living. But I know through long experience with flight that such machines are usually docile, and that steering them does not require the steady nerves and quick reflexes that passengers may imagine. Indeed, as we saw on September 11, steering them may not even require much in the way of training—the merest student-pilot level is probably enough. It's not hard to understand why. Airplanes at their core are very simple devices—winged things that belong in the air. They are designed to be flyable, and they are. Specifically, the 767 has ordinary mechanical and hydraulic flight controls that provide the pilot with smooth and conventional responses; it is normally operated on autopilot, but can easily be flown by hand; if you remove your hands from the controls entirely, the airplane sails on as before, until it perhaps wanders a bit, dips a wing, and starts into a gentle descent; if you pull the nose up or push it down (within reason) and then fold your arms, the airplane returns unassisted to steady flight; if you idle the engines, or shut them off entirely, the airplane becomes a rather well behaved glider. It has excellent forward visibility, through big windshields. It has a minimalist cockpit that may look complicated to the untrained eye but is a masterpiece of clean design. It can easily be managed by the standard two-person crew, or even by one pilot alone. The biggest problem in flying the airplane on a routine basis is boredom. Settled into the deep sky at 33,000 feet, above the weather and far from any obstacle, the 767 simply makes very few demands.And that's what happened to MH370: it was at cruising speed, all systems go....then what? Baffling.
Saturday, March 15, 2014
Deliberate action
The inevitable theory on MH370 is that it was hijacked or there was some other deliberate action by the crew. And, by way of context, I want to copy a paragraph from William Langewiesche's excellent article about the crash of Egypt Air 990 and the stability of a modern plane at cruising height:
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The Daily Mail is today speculating that the plane was hijacked and flown to Pakistan, based on eek boo a booga booga. But a sidebar includes some valuable information about how a jet could go missing:
Radar coverage of the area where flight MH370 went missing is patchy and often not even switched on, according to aviation experts.
It has emerged today that civilian systems do not cover large swatches of the areas the plane could have gone, and that military systems are often left off to save money.
Air Vice Marshal Michael Harwood, a former RAF pilot, said: ‘Too many movies and Predator [drone] feeds from Afghanistan have suckered people into thinking we know everything and see everything.
‘You get what you pay for. And the world, by and large, does not pay.'
Air traffic control teams rely transponders signals to track planes- but investigators believe that the device was intentionally switched off on the missing aircraft.
Military systems, meanwhile, are often limited, switched off , or routinely ignore aircraft they do not think are suspicious.
A Rear Admiral in the Indian armed forces, which are aiding search efforts over the Andaman Islands, said: ‘It's possible that the military radars were switched off as we operate on an "as required" basis.’
However, experts have suggested that a disappearing transponder signal would be treated more seriously over Europe or America, and that a parallel situation would be unlikely to develop.
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