Another Plane Missing

They call it jet fuel, but it's pretty close to kerosene.

Ever seen the inside of a jet engine? There's only one moving part! So little to go wrong. The motor in a Cessna is not much different from what you have in your car -- lots of complicated shit that all has to work perfectly.

 

We don't have to guess your nationality Nono, I'm not dissing americans. It is just a typical american viewpoint. I could say the same about the KLM airlines and pilots (if I didn't knew lots of other airlines and pilots are generally just as good )

 

I've never heard anything about the professionalism of any of the European airlines ever being called into question, except for Air France a couple of times.

 

Was about to say.

It's not about where I'm from, it's about the reality of how different countries handle things, and how different countries are able to handle things.

We've got, arguably, the best military in the world, with the most technologically advanced and trained airforce in the world, which effectively trains our airliner pilots. We have lots of flight experience, we did it first and have generally been reasonably close to, if not at, the forefront of it's development ever since. We have many of the best aviation companies with the most experience and capability. We have no possibility of language barriers with many of the planes we fly, we built the things.

There's other countries with trustworthy proven aviation - malasia is not one of them. They make T-shirts, not jetliners.

It's just reality - sorry, lots of the world really sucks - and when things really suck, you don't want to be depending on lots of very important systems for safety and coordination, which are probably run by sucky people and/or in sucky circumstances with sucky resources to draw from. I'm not saying that they should suck, or that they suck because they're not america - just that they do suck, and in this area, america is the opposite of suck.

I'm not being an alarmist just because of the current fervor about it, planes have gone missing and crashed as long as there have been planes, it's not like malasia is the first to let it happen - and that still doesn't say anything negative about the safety of air travel, but hey, why take chances with trusting very important matters to areas absolutely known for screwing things up?

 

Yeah, they even won the war on terror.

 

Air Asia - images of your half naked mangled body may be broadcast around the world, while a line a photographers capture every angle of your families grief stricken bawling faces.

Is that too long for a slogan?

 

In addition to all that, we're likely to stay in a position of technical leadership in aviation in part because we fly more big jets than any other country on earth, on a typical day, by a wide margin. The EU struggles with the problem of needing to form consensus among member countries. It's hard for them to speak with one voice. Russia operates the world's second largest commercial fleet, and Russian aviation totally sucks. They're just barely getting by. Also, air traffic control all over the world is done in English.

A lot of smaller countries can't afford a true equivalent to the FAA to research anything, so they just translate FAA rules into the local national language and send them out under their name.

The corruption aspect of it bothers me a lot. Technical incompetence has nothing to do with officials in small airports in the Bahamas (and plenty of other small countries, I'm sure) requiring private pilots to pay bribe money in cash, to avoid trouble. Don't bother complaining to the local police or village government, because they all get a percentage.

 

Funny - not pertinent.

Nobody can win an unwinnable war on a tactic of war - a tactic that is inherently effective against large nations or organizations.

That doesn't change our technological ability or training, when compared against others working in the same paradigm.

The war on terror is a blatantly stupid idea, from the ground up. Doesn't have anything to do with having awesome pilots who I trust to have the training to handle things when the shit hits the fan. Terrorists are not competing with us in ability to ditch jetliners without loss of life - rather the opposite.

And if you're saying our pilots are not good at fighting off terrorists.... well okay, whatever.... we're talking about fighting malfunctions and failures and weather and such, not nutjobs.

 

Except... in the AsiaAir, IIRC a 737, it can be switched off. They were not designed electronically for the scenarios you are thinking of. They can be revamped so they could be, yes, but unlikely. However, the Malaysia jet IS set up for a hijacking. You cannot turn everything off unless you know exactly where everything is, and even then good luck as there are sensors and transmitters in the nose & tail boom which you can access only from the outside...unless you are willing to sacrifice your life getting to them. Which is do-able in the tail boom, but not the nose without compromising the hull integrity.
MA was hijacked. And it was planned. Simple. Asia, now that we know about it, wreckage and bodies found.
And I feel so sorry for those that lost family.

 

Don't forget about fuses and circuit breakers.

Also, this recent small plane crash in Kentucky was another case of a pilot taking on weather conditions that should have been avoided. One survivor, four fatalities. They were trying to fly from Key West to Illinois on a day that the entire Southeast was blanketed in heavy storms.

 

aliens. i tell you this is about alien abduction. or somebody probably america or Russia is trying to start another war. or it was a tragic accident. those are my guesses.

 

No, the trannys in the nose & tail are hardwired into the plane's electrical system, but they also have their own power source for times like these. plane wrecks or is hijacked and they lose the electrical to the trannies, and their batts kick in. It's an automatic failsafe. The both are good for 72 hours. Unless you get to the nose or tail from the outside and physically remove the tranny, you will not remove the power source. You can get to the tail from the inside, but there is no atmospheric compensation. If the jet is at 32,000', you're breathing at 32,000'. And it is possible they may have removed that, I dunno. The black boxes will transmit upto 72 hours. One those are activated you can get them via satellite for 36 hours.

ETA: However, whether or not they are wired according to design specs or not is a different story. They could very well have not wired the trannies up as they were designed in order to save a few hundred thousand dollars per plane. Which means they could have snipped the wires and killed the trannies

 

This reminds me of an old story, something a private pilot did to me that wasn't very nice. My husband and I (before we were married) were at the beach, and we took one of those sightseeing plane rides that takes you along the coast for a few minutes for $50. It was a four seat Cessna 172. My guy told the pilot that he used to be a licensed private pilot himself, but that it was only my second ride in a small plane.

The view was beautiful up there, looking down on schools of dolphins swimming just beneath the surface, but then the pilot decided to give me a little initiation. When we got almost all the way back to the airstrip, we were still about a thousand feet up. I thought maybe he was going around to land from the opposite direction. No, he just cut the throttle to idle, pointed the nose down, and we fell out of the sky like a cement truck! I only thought we were going to die for a split second, because my BF calmly said in my ear, "glider landing". I didn't know what that was, but I trusted him. The landing was perfect.

I found out later that Cessna pilots practice those all the time, to stay ready for an emergency situation, but they don't ever do it with passengers onboard. I think that pilot was a total asshole.

My hubby says I might enjoy a glider landing if I knew it was coming, and it was done from a higher altitude. He says it takes about 10 minutes for a 172 to glide down from 10,000 feet, and it's an extremely smooth and quiet ride, and quite an adrenaline rush. He says the 172 has a reputation of being a very well-behaved glider that is fun to fly. Not sure my stomach could take it.

 

I forgot to ask about this until last night. You're talking about low power transmitters, which can be detected in most cases by search and rescue folks overhead, but can't be tracked by ordinary air traffic control centers. In rare, extreme cases, the ATC can't tell S&R where to look.