Germanwings plane crash tinfoil hat society meeting

I'm not usually one of the people who think everything is terrorism, but this time...it looks a lot like terrorism.

I've been trying to figure out how you could take over a plane post-9/11 without getting torn into tiny, gross shreds by a plane full of passengers fearing for their lives. My best theory is that you stand up with a trigger (fake if you like) and say "NOBODY MOVE or I release this trigger and blow us all to hell! I'm redirecting this plane to Outer Elbonia!" (choose reasonable nearby location). You'll need a first-class ticket to do this ($$$$$) -- you'll want to be near the front of the plane and the curtains will minimize the number of people who see what you're doing, and give you some time before attendants in the rear of the plane message the cockpit. Also people in this section value their lives more and should be less...heroic.

I figure you have about a 70% chance of surviving that. Next you quickly make your way into the cockpit on the same ruse and lock yourself in with the pilots. You tell them you'll be flying the plane to Elbonia yourself and you tie up the two pilots. I figure there's a 20% chance that you'll make it into the cockpit and that they'll take their chances with your flying skills instead of your bomb-building skills.

So if the odds have been in your favor this far, you're now free to say "PSYCH! I'm gonna crash this bitch!" and yell praises to your deity of choice into the flight recorder as you run the plane into the ground at a low rate of descent as not to startle the passengers who could break in and turn you into ground beef.

All I know is if it was a flight with US Federal Air Marshals on it there's a 100% chance of the terrorist being shot and killed by the time he made it to the cock pit door.

In reply to GameboyRMH:

I give your taking over the plane scenario a 99.999999% chance of not happening with out a distress call from the cockpit a long time before they reach the cockpit door.

What if the guy builds a jammer? It's not rocket science, it just has to look like a piece of commercial electronics and run from a commercial power source. Maybe it could be built as a laptop internal piece.

I'm afraid of flying, and hearing about commercial airlines disasters doesn't help, except knowing that with every tragedy comes a better understanding of what can go wrong. I still feel like airlines put too much faith in the statistics being their favor.

PHeller wrote: I'm afraid of flying, and hearing about commercial airlines disasters doesn't help, except knowing that with every tragedy comes a better understanding of what can go wrong. I still feel like airlines put too much faith in the statistics being their favor.

You're like 8kajillion times more likely to slip and fall in the shower and die, than you are to die in a commercial airline flight.

There are more than 50,000 flights worldwide per day, with more than half of those in the US.

Also Gameboy, I give your scenario absolutely no chance of working.

Initial talks on pilot forums are pointing to something like depressurization of the cabin happening slowly enough that the pilots and passengers blacked out, hence no radio chatter for the last 8 minutes.

My (uneducated) opinion is getting close to condemning the airplane. Is it true that an Airbus 320 can override the pilot? From what I understand this was a nice normal decent. It doesn't look like anything broke, they decended faster than the glide path, they could have landed at a bunch of airports on the way down, and it didn't stall.

tuna55 wrote: Is it true that an Airbus 320 can override the pilot?

I don't think there's any plane in existence that can "override the pilot" except as a bug (I remember one Airbus first-flight ended in a crash because of this). The pilot can disable any system that could override any control inputs.

(and it would be a big shock if there was still a bug in the plane's code at this point)

Depressurization could make sense...but are there still no alarms that could notify the crew, after there was a crash from this within the last couple of decades?

There was a similar incident:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helios_Airways_Flight_522

8 year old Boeing 737 in 2005

Sensors fail. Crew could ignore the alarms. Etc.

(I've been doing a lot of reading the last few months on airplane crashes for some reason.)

We can only hope that nobody aboard was awake when it down. Just a gentle, deep, sleep, forever.

PHeller wrote: There was a similar incident: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helios_Airways_Flight_522 8 year old Boeing 737 in 2005

That's the one I was talking about.

Nobody would have felt the crash before they died. There's not enough time at that speed. If anything, the people in the back might have felt a slight pinch.

The interesting question here is why did the plane go off auto pilot?

I am assuming they were doing the climb in autopilot (most modern planes are not flown hands on much) to altitude, but once it got to altitude is seemed to do an uncontrolled decent.... strange.

Perhaps it was hands on in the climb? Seems unlikely.

In reply to aircooled:

Yes, this. If it was depressurization, the plane would have just kept going on autopilot like the 522 flight mentioned earlier. I am thinking more of the $40M chainsaw issue.

I wanna see what the black boxes have in them. At least this one is not at the bottom of the Indian Ocean.

The safety record for the A320 is approx. 0.14 deaths per million take offs. Multiply that up and it's one death per every 7,142,857 take offs. Seems safe to me. Compare that to climbing out the shower or putting up shelves.

GameboyRMH wrote:

tuna55 wrote: Is it true that an Airbus 320 can override the pilot?

I don't think there's any plane in existence that can "override the pilot" except as a bug (I remember one Airbus first-flight ended in a crash because of this). The pilot can disable any system that could override any control inputs.

The chatter from the DURP’s (Drastically Uninformed Reporting People) on the news is that Airbus aircraft give the computer system ultimate authority over the pilot’s inputs.

I can’t believe that’s true given the risk from lightning strikes, malware, unanticipated emergency requirements, etc. but that’s what they’re saying.

They might be talking about a fly-by-wire system, which could have ultimate control over how certain control inputs are executed, not if they're executed.

For example I know on some fighter jets you don't have individual control over the ailerons, elevator and flaps like you would in a simple small plane, but if you tell it to pull up or roll left, the plane's going to do that with some combination of control surfaces (Fun fact: some fighters wouldn't be controllable without the computer controlling this, such as the Eurofighter Typhoon)

I hate those comparisons of safety. It's not how likely I am to die, it is the method in which I shall be aware of eminent death.

If I fall getting out of the shower, or in a car accident, I don't have time to say "well berkeley, this is it". I've been in a high speed accident. I had long enough to say to myself "I'm going to hit this guy, well berkeley." I didn't think about death, I just knew it was going to be bad. In those seconds, something in the back of my mind said "this will be bad, but you'll survive."

If I'm awake and going down in an airliner, I've got 8 minutes to contemplate why the heck I got on this flying metal tube in the first place and why the hell I'm so damn uncomfortable in my last moments. I'm aware enough to know that "we're still traveling at 500mph, and it looks as though we're traveling into a mountainous area. Why hasn't the plane turned? Why haven't they warned us? This isn't normal. I'm gonna die. I wish I had more legroom."

PHeller, at least you'll have time for a beer, if you have five bucks cash, that is.

Brilliant idea.

"Stewardess? Stewardess? Yes I'd like a bottle of vodka. The whole thing. Put it on my tab. What, we're in an emergency? Ok, hurry up then."

I think we’ve set a new world speed record for the time required to make a phrase cliché.

Aviate – navigate – communicate.

I cringe every time some fat old businessman tries to sound badass by working tactical vs strategic into his vernacular and now we’ve got a bunch news yahoo’s that couldn’t keep a COX 0.49 control line model in the air talking all pilotie with A-N-C.

Gebus, everything just keeps getting dumber and dumber.

On the topic of safety stats, the airlines like to mislead using statistics to calm people's fears. They measure safety per passenger or safety per mile, which look great because there are a huge number of passengers and miles involved...but if you look at safety per trip, flying on a commercial airliner is only slightly safer than hopping on the back of a random motorcycle. That doesn't sound so great now, does it?

A friend who was a long-term Navy fighter pilot and then a long term commercial airline pilot sent this earlier today:

I was told this plane just came out of phase ck maintenance and was washed before the flight. Possible suspect is static port system water freeze problem simalar to Air France 330 off Brazil.(-of course leading to erroneous airspeed/ altitude sensing.) Result: Computer takes away from pilot. In case of BOTH overspeed and alpha floor(stall)signals ;computer software causes the pilot to be locked out of any control inputs from the cockpit until these sensings are no longer interpreted by the ADC computers.