I have 2 questions that no one has asked about the missing plane...

[louis-t]

1. If the plane climbed to 45,000 ft, wouldn't the oxygen masks automatically drop so the passengers could breathe?

2. Could the pilots de-activate that function from the cockpit?

[Wilms]

1. Third question...

There are reports it climbed to 45,000ft, then descended. How long was it at 45,000ft?

[longship]

2. Q 1: Did it really fly to 45,000 feet?

That should be the first question.

Only when you have that confirmed can you logically ask your questions.

One step at a time and don't make assumptions.

[Lasher]

3. Why is it that people seldom actually run at the airport where they took off?

Just airplanes taking off and such. Mighty suspicious if you ask me.

[closeupready]

4. No answers now would be honest ones.

Most of what is known definitively is likely being withheld.

[Warpy]

5. Well, the oxygen masks that drop

are only good for 20 minutes or so, time enough for a plane even in crowded airspace to find a "hole" to lower altitude into. The pilots have bottled oxygen that can last a lot longer.

If they were to stay at high altitude for 40 minutes or so, they wouldn't need to deactivate them. I don't know that they could, not even in a cabin fire since people would need them to breathe their last 20 minutes in a smoky cabin.

[sufrommich]

6. I've seen the first question answered.

Passenger oxygen masks only work for 20 - 30 minutes. Pilot masks last much longer.

[TexasProgresive]

7. I think the cabin would still be pressurized at 45K'

[Kelvin Mace]

8. The cabin is pressurized

and the service ceiling of a 777 is 43,000 ft. So, 45,000 is probably attainable and as long as the cabin remained pressurized, the oxygen masks would not deploy.

[Bandit]

9. How does anyone know the elevation?

Radar tells the distance away the airplane is but I don't think it can accurately tell the elevation.

[ManiacJoe]

14. You get height, also.

Distance, direction, height (all relative to the radar station).

[krispos42]

26. It's my understanding that search radar does a rather poor job with altitudes

Not enough resolution. that's why the transponders have a height-reporting feature included in the data transmission.

[pangaia]

27. Primary radar can not determine altitude.

Secondary radar can. This is the type of radar that requires a transponder on the aircraft. So once the transponder was turned off, ATC had no idea what the plane's altitude was.

[IDemo]

29. It was Malaysian military radar that determined the 45k altitude figure

Military radar, as one expert explained it the other evening, doesn't expect an enemy to use a transponder to relay identity and altitude info. It relies on a much tighter beam width so the height can be triangulated from the angle and distance.

Standard air traffic radar would not have this capability.

[DURHAM D]

10. Good question your #2

I have been trying to figure out the same thing. If the pilot can deactivate the oxygen while using his own oxygen tank he can quickly kill all of the passengers.

[JimDandy]

12. They can be deactivated in the cockpit.

The only reason I've heard for a climb to that altitude is passenger death.

[tavernier]

13. And then what?

The pilot/s parachute out, let the plane fly till it crashes, then report a successful terrorist action once they are safe with their pals?

[JimDandy]

15. That's a scenario I haven't heard yet.

Wonder if a 777 has a bona fide pilot escape hatch or if it's possible to safely parachute out any other way?

If so, it's just as plausible as Hijack/suicide and more plausible than Hijack/ransom.

ETA: If nothing else, the hijacker has shown the world how easy it still is to hijack a plane, so maybe now there will be REAL safety measures taken to protect the flying public, instead of regulating whether passengers shoes are on or how much liquids they have.

[louis-t]

18. I would think for safety sake, they would make that

impossible. Too easy for a hijacker to knock out the passengers.

[JimDandy]

20. I agree. I don't know why the pilot is given the

ability to disable the masks from dropping down and I hope the cabin crew can manually enable the masks to drop when necessary.

ETA post #17 explains that the pilot can simply depressurize the cabin from the cockpit without having to ascend to a certain altitude to do so. Even worse for the pilot to have THAT capability.

[Travis_0004]

16. A pilot can not depressure the cockpit

He could adjust the level of pressurization, and if he raised it a bit, he could annoy the passengers but he can't just easily turn it off. I don't think he can disable the oxygen system either. I don't see a need to mess with the oxygen to begin with. Cabin doors are designed to be secure. If the plan was to fly somewhere, just keep the door locked. There is no need to depressurize the plane.

[TorchTheWitch]

19. All of the crew know the keycode to enter the cockpit

The 777 uses a typical keycode entry system for the cabin door. For obvious reasons, all of the flight crew know what the keycode is to enter the cockpit since there are times that they need to, and of course in case of some cockpit emergency.

Let's not forget that there are TWO people in that cockpit both of whom would DEFINITELY know the keycode. The very idea that both the pilot AND the co-pilot were in on some scheme to do something nefarious with the plane is ludicrous and even more absurd that the entire flight crew would have farted around doing nothing at all while the plane they were on was doing such outrageous things.

Keep in mind also that no one has EVER said that whatever aircraft that supposedly made all these maneuvers for hours has been confirmed to be the missing aircraft in question. They've continually claimed that they "believe" it was the aircraft in question, and just yesterday I read another article where they claim they're only "over fifty percent" certain it was the aircraft in question.... in other words, it's in the neighborhood of fifty percent Might as well flip a coin then - maybe it is, maybe it isn't. It's been the media that has spun "might be" to "is" right from the beginning.

All this talk about hijacking is nuts when after over a week they can't find one single person on that flight with even a scintilla of anything at all nefarious about them. NOT ONE.

That plane was shot down, and all the rest of this crap is a huge clusterfuck of a cover up. There is no possible way that the Malaysian military saw some unidentified aircraft on the radar and just farted around with their thumbs up their asses. Military jets would have been in the air after that aircraft to find out what/who it was and what was going on with it. It's what they're bloody THERE for.

[Travis_0004]

23. I wonder if the crew does know the keycode.

I would think it would be safest not to let the flight attendants know it, in case one of them decides to do something stupid, or is being held hostage and is forced to give it up. If the crew needs to get in, I would assume the pilot or copilot could hit a button to give them access. Either way, the code can be changed. A jetblue pilot started going crazy, and the copilot locked him out of the cockpit and landed the plane safely.

But I agree with you that some of these conspiracy theorys are a bit odd. I would assume terrorism gone wrong, and the plane crashed, pilot suicide, or mechanical (looking less likely). I find it almost impossible to believe the plane is still intact somewhere.

[TorchTheWitch]

34. The "non flying" crew are part of the crew

They have to know the keycode in order to serve the pilots' needs and in case of an emergency in which something happens to the people in the cockpit which is WAY more common than any hijacking. Most emergency equipment isn't even IN the cockpit but stored elsewhere on the plane that attendants would need to retrieve and get into the cockpit such as longer term oxygen cannisters, emergency medical equipment, scads of plane manuals from everything from plane design to electrical configurations, computer manuals, etc. There is MUCh more reason for attendants to be able to enter the cockpit than there is to not let them in, in and far more emergencies, both the pilot and co-pilot can't remove their hands from the equipment in order to press some button to let an attendant in.

The entire crew IS the crew... if most of them can't be trusted with being able to get in and out of the cockpit without the help of who is in the cockpit flying the plane then the pilots can't be trusted either. In the case of a hijacking it's just as easy to put a gun or knife to the throat of an attendant who doesn't know the keycode and make them ask to be let in as it would be to make them key in the code.

There's a reason there's more than just one person at the controls in any commercial plane.... in even the smallest of emergencies or general mishaps there's one to fly and one to work the instruments, go through checklists and manuals, make calculations, etc. and in many emergencies even those two people aren't enough. After 9/11 with stronger doors being put in (they used to be flimsy and easily breeched) cockpit crew were told to not allow access to anyone they either didn't know or believed to be someone they knew that was being manipulated by someone else such as a hijacker. There have already been countless cases of flight crew needing to assist the pilots in working through emergencies and mishaps that without their assistance the plane would have gone down. They're hardly just waitstaff for the passengers on a plane and need to have unfettered access to the cockpit without having to interrupt whatever emergency is going on in the cockpit to have the door opened for them, and with various technical equipment failures that are by far the most common of emergencies what happens when that button to allow crew entrance doesn't work?

There is no reason to not allow keycode knowledge of the keycode entry that isn't FAR outweighed by all of the many many reasons to allow the keycode knowledge. Even the closed doors of cockpits have been partial cause for a plane going down than when if the crew could see what was going on in the cockpit they could have swung into action much sooner making it far more likely the plane could be saved. I can think of two right off the top of my head - the British Airways flight where the shoddily replaced windshield blew out sucking the pilot mostly outside of the plane in which several flight crew were needed to hold onto his feet to keep him from flying off and being sucked into an engine which would have doomed the plane, and the Helios flight where if the crew had known what was going on in the cockpit (both pilots asphyxiated without oxygen rendering no one at all at the controls) would likely have been able to save the plane as one of those attendants was a licensed pilot. That attendant likely could have saved the plane had he only known what was going on in the cockpit in time though eventually he did enter the cockpit using long term oxygen cannisters and tried to fly the plane, but by that time it was too late. All he was really able to do was acknowledge the fighter pilot and give a mayday signal that no one heard or knew about until the black boxes were checked because, guess what, the comms were down.

Incidentally, that Helios flight was checked out by fighter jets like a plane is SUPPOSED to be to see what was wrong with the plane and would have been shot down had it not been noticed that there was one conscious person in the whole plane that was at the controls though if it flew too close to the city where it appeared to likely crash they would have shot it down to prevent that - one fighter jet was behind the plane ready to shoot while the other flew next to it to see what was going on in the plane (that's the configuration in case a plane has to be shot down to avoid a larger catastrophe of it crashing into populated places - one jet directly behind the plane ready to shoot). As it was since the fighter pilot noticed there was a conscious person at the controls who acknowledged them and it was headed for a bare hillside they only gave a military escort until it crashed in the hope that the person at the controls might yet save it.

[morningfog]

11. 2. Yes.

[FreeState]

17. #2 is a definite yes (link)

http://forum.snipershide.com/bear-pit/241408-any-777-pilots-here-can-cabin-pressure-shut-off-cockpit.html

I fix Boeings for the worlds most profitable Airline, for the most part the systems and logic behind the systems is the same across the current generation of Boeing products, the pressurization and passenger O2 can be turned off in the Flight Deck, the pressurization system has two primary but separate control systems which switch sides each flight, they are completely automatic, the pilot selects his final cruise FL and it does the rest, should both of those systems fail, the outflow valve can be controlled manually by either AC or DC power, the passenger O2 system is completely separate from the Flight Deck O2 system, the pilots have there own O2 bottle, O2 masks with built in microphones, in the passenger compartment each row of seats or bank of seats has a PSU(passenger service unit) the FA call button is there, gasper fan outlets and reading lights, as well as O2 masks for each person in a seat plus an additional for a baby or FA if need be, in the PSU is a O2 generator to supply forced O2 to each user, by pulling the mask when deployed out of the PSU pulls a pin, a plunger pierces the containers inside the O2 generator and the two chemicals mix and make O2, each Lav and the FA stations are all equipts the same as the PSUs, when the passenger O2 system in on, the deployment of the passenger masks is automatic, in the cockpit a cabin altitude warning horn will sound, telling the bus drivers to don there masks and get the plane down to a safe altitude. I would like to point out there is no access to the cockpit on modern airliners in flight from the passenger compartment, lets just say the door has been modified and leave it at that, and can only be opened from the inside, and since 9-11 crews know openning the door is certain death for them and everyone else. During a depressurization event with no forced O2 will deny each person the ability to open his/her diaphram to allow them to breath, accending to FL45(if that really happened) is not required to kill everyone. Transponders do not have an On\Off switch, but each has a circuit breaker in the cock house.

[Capt.Rocky300]

32. I would agree withe majority of this information except......

transponders have a standby postion on the selector switch in the cockpit. Although it is rare, ATC does sometimes request an aircraft to "squawk standby" to help identify it on the radar screen. By going to the standby position, the transponder ceases to send out the designated code. The airplane becomes a "primary target" or in other words, just a dot on their screen without the usual information.

The pilots can turn off the the flow of air into the cabin but they cannot turn off the passengers oxygen supply. Two different things.

[avebury]

21. I am not sure that the plane

went up to 45,000 feet. I have heard too many pilot experienced with 777s that they did not think it was very likely. In theory it is possible but it is more along the lines of experimental flight.

[malaise]

22. At 45,000ft the aircraft would break up

Every pilot has said so.

[pnwmom]

28. If pilots said that, they're wrong. I asked a Boeing engineer, who told me that

the planes are engineered to go higher than 43K. There's some give in those limits, and 45K is just a little higher than the stated limit of 43K.

[applegrove]

24. I think the oxygen for the passengers only works for half an hour. More than

long enough for a pilot to go down to 10,000 feet where the oxygen is fine. They were not built to be used over hours. I heard passengers would go bye bye if they flew at 45,000 feet for hours. Pilots have more oxygen.

[ProdigalJunkMail]

25. operational ceiling of 43000ft...

a couple thousand feet more sounds plausible...

[pnwmom]

30. Yes. I asked a Boeing engineer who confirmed the (somewhat) obvious.

A plane is designed for a certain ceiling, but that isn't the absolute limit. And 43K wouldn't put that much more strain on the system than 45K.

[Capt.Rocky300]

31. I find the climb to 45,000 feet...........

unlikely. In order for an aircraft to attain an altitude that high it must be at a reduced weight. Unless fuel was dumped to lower the weight, it was likely too heavy to climb to what is referred to in the industry as "flight level 450". The other side of that equation is if they did dump fuel, the range would be greatly reduced.

The condition to automatically drop the passenger oxygen masks is based on cabin altitude as read by sensors, not aircraft altitude. If it did make it up to that altitude, the cabin would remain at 10,000' or slightly less which would not deploy the masks. The cockpit crew can drop the masks by moving a switch at any time. No commercial jet I've ever flown has a means to prevent them from dropping or overriding the automatic system.

And no, the airplane would not come apart at only 2,000 feet about the certified service ceiling. There is a generous safety margin built into the aircraft structure.

[Johonny]

33. My only question is WTF can the transponder be turned off to begin with?

you'd think if the plane was on that thing would be on. Why is there an off switch on that thing given only bad things seem to be allowed if you turn it off... just wondering