Fascinating article. I had a chuckle at this excerpt:
>The Malaysian investigators did look into whether the cargo could have started a fire, noting that it consisted mainly of ripe mangosteen fruits along with a small number of lithium batteries. Extensive attempts by the investigators to get mangosteen juice to react with the batteries and trigger a fire were unsuccessful.
I'm sure plenty of people here have spent time wracking their brain on a hard problem and the image of a bunch of transportation investigators dousing batteries with juice in a late-night fit of desperation really gets me.
Investigations have some weird bits. I've always wondered if there's a certain title for the person who prepares the chickens for the 'chicken gun' in airplane testing.
This story has been going around the world for 50 years, and in different variations. According to some sources, the first time it appeared in a publication in USA in 1958, in the professional magazine "Meat and Game" of the California Associations of Game Producers (proven fact). The authenticity of the story, however, is questionable.
The FAA has at its disposal a unique device for measuring the strength of aircraft windshields, in case of a collision with birds at high speed (which happens not so rarely). This device is a powerful pneumatic cannon that shoots a chicken carcass into the windshield of an airplane at a speed approaching the cruising speed of a civilian aircraft (for jet aircraft, this is approx. 800 km/h, for piston engines in the 1950s this figure was probably smaller, maybe 400-500 km/h). According to the theory, if the glass can withstand a collision with a chicken at such a speed, then it should all the more withstand a real collision with a bird in flight.
A certain British engineering company developing high-speed trains borrowed this gun from the FAA to test the strength of the windshield of its
a new high-speed train. The cannon was brought to England, installed at the landfill, loaded with a chicken carcass and fired at the prototype train.
The result exceeded all expectations: the chicken broke through the glass, broke the back of the driver's seat and got stuck in the back wall of the car. The British sent test results to FAA and asked them if they had done everything correctly and if the gun was hitting too hard. After studying the description and consequences of the test, the answer was sent by telegram immediately: "Next time, defrost the chicken."
Those guns are not cheap. I once worked in a startup that wanted to put thermal cameras on commercial planes to measure volcanic ash concentrations. The cameras had to be behind a special glass that is transparent for thermal radiation. But as the glass size exceeded certain size, it required to certify against bird strikes. It turned out the cost of the certification was like 500K euros.
I got to take a tour of SWRI when I was younger, and they have one of these chicken guns in one of their testing facilities. They also have a locker full of machine guns for testing bullet resistance of vehicles etc.
Obscure fact: Canada had a show called Royal Canadian Air Farce where, during their year-end special, they'd launch a "Chicken Cannon" at cut-outs of that years news makers.
The person who bought the chickens told me that battery chickens were not suitable because the bones were too soft. Farm chickens were needed. The farmer never knew what the chickens were for.
I have no flying experience but if there was a fire in the cargo hold wouldn't the crew at least send a message? I thought this flight veered off the flight path before disappearing
Yes, my understanding (as purely a bystander) is that even the most aggressive fires in the past have allowed time for a mayday. See for example UPS flight 6, with a huge uncontrolled lithium battery fire: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/UPS_Airlines_Flight_6
In general, onboard fires are one of the most dangerous scenarios in-flight, as I understand it. Crews are trained extensively for it.
I think this is, in part, what the analysis in the article concludes — even a fire would have to cause a very specific, never-before-seen combination of failures to lead to the outcomes observed from the outside.
No, not ion. Lithium *metal* batteries can catch fire when submerged in water. Lithium ion batteries have very little lithium and lots of water is usually the best method to extinguish larger fires. More on safety including information on aircraft fire suppression systems on the more common lithium ion cells: https://batteryuniversity.com/article/bu-304a-safety-concern...
Considering lithium batteries have been known to combust in an impressive firestorm, it definitely seems worth trying to rule out. But the fruit being involved does seem implausible.
Just noticing the medium author, this guy posts fantastic breakdowns of plane crashes on r/catastrophicfailure
Have to say the simulator part makes me lean heavily towards the pilot crashing it purposefully, from the article -
"The most widely reported piece of evidence tying Zaharie to the disappearance was a course he had charted on his home flight simulator about a month before the crash. Zaharie had a number of hobbies, including paragliding and flying model airplanes, but he also spent a lot of time at home on his computer playing flight simulator games. He sometimes uploaded videos of himself playing on his YouTube channel, where he comes off as affable and knowledgeable, if a bit socially awkward.
In 2014, a leaked Malaysian police report revealed that among Zaharie’s saved flight simulator sessions was a very odd route which ran up the Strait of Malacca, turned south after passing Sumatra, and then flew straight down into the Southern Indian Ocean before terminating in the vicinity of the seventh arc. Not only did the track resemble MH370’s actual flight path, it also contained a number of other intriguing details. For example, the track wasn’t really a track — rather, it was a series of brief clips lasting no more than a few seconds each, indicating that Zaharie had programmed it in advance then skipped along it to various points without actually playing through the entire hours-long flight. Furthermore, although initial reports indicated that the track had been intentionally saved by the user, later analysis showed that it was kept only in the system files, and certainly was not meant to be found. Was this a dry run? It seems too odd to be a coincidence."
Imagine one day all of a sudden a low-quality few seconds long video is uploaded to the channel showing only someone filming their feet as they stroll on on a beach.
As a trained pilot, flight planning is a huge part of your job.
Navigation is also a big part of the job. if you assumed you had to turn off parts of your nav equipment to avoid detection, then visual reference (ie flying the path to visually memorise/familirise yourself with wayppoints) would be something you'd certainly do - and a flightsim would be perfect for this.
> it was a series of brief clips lasting no more than a few seconds each, indicating that Zaharie had programmed it in advance then skipped along it to various points without actually playing through the entire hours-long flight
I'd be curious which parts of the flight path those clips represented. Were they at important navigational landmarks? Were they nice vistas, places he wanted to see before a suicidal plunge? If they were only a few seconds each, that might indicate that he was checking those points for intentional reasons, rather than for fun.
what I don't understand is: if the plane could make contact with the satellite, why aren't there automated systems in place to send location info through that channel? can someone explain?
> In the interest of knowing where every plane is at all times, the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) began requiring that all airliners manufactured after the 1st of January 2021 include autonomous tracking devices that broadcast their location once per minute.
Hearing about all the painstaking analysis of this flight made me wonder something: If you look deeply enough, how frequent are inexplicable situations? That is, if you took all the info from a normal flight, and cut it off at the halfway point and gave it to a group of enthusiastic investigators, would they find aspects that contradicted or truly did not make sense? My guess is they would.
This is not to say MH370 was without incident, only that apparent contradiction may be unavoidable if you look closely enough at anything.
It's unlikely, since about 98% of the Earth has transponder coverage, so you at least have position and what the aircraft think's it's altitude is, with pretty good precision and sample rate. It's only in a few spots in the middle the ocean that this doesn't exist.
This was also relevant in that Airbus crash from maybe 15 years ago between South America and Africa.
This is not a problem on the main to/from North America routes because there are enough populated islands along the way (Iceland, Greenland, Hawaii, Guam, etc)
That number can't be right. 98% of the earth doesn't have primary radar coverage, let alone secondary (transponder) coverage.
ATC radar is line of sight. At an altitude of 40,000 feet, you're beyond the radio horizon and lose coverage after about 380 miles - and that's the theoretical best case.
Oceanic air traffic control is primarily a non-radar environment, using procedural separation. Even over land, most of Canada (outside major cities and the airways between them) doesn't have radar coverage. There's a map showing the gaps here: http://ilanreich.com/Public_Pics/Alaska/Section%20One.htm
(The military does have over-the-horizon radar, but that's mostly used for missile defense. OTH radar isn't used for air traffic control.)
I think closer to 80-90% of all landmass has "active" surveillance, with another 40-50% of sea / oceans.
Most of the South Pacific / South Atlantic / Southern Ocean (Antarctic); a lot of the North Pacific / North Atlantic / Indian / Arctic outside of the major islands and direct routes has nearly no coverage.
Not sure what exactly you mean by "transponder coverage", but if you mean primary or secondary surveillance radar, this is not true for most of the Atlantic or Pacific.
Radar (both primary and secondary, i.e. transponders) as well as ADS-B require line-of-sight, and oceanic air traffic control has to make due without that, which means operating either via ADS-C (i.e. planes self-reporting their position, autonomously determined via GPS or inertial navigation, via satellite communications) or effectively dead reckoning, augmented by occasional position reports via HF radio, which is called procedural control:
Even more, I imagine the average flight would look extraordinary. You would always hit some rare event if you looked hard enough. Rare events are so common! What are the odds that this many people on the plane were military / government / communists / CEOs / Jews / elderly? Well, pretty high if you're looking after-the-fact. And if you look into the background of every person and started reaching out a bit it would get weirder. You'd have tons of former whatevers, brother-in-laws of important people, criminals, all sorts. And people would be absolutely certain it meant something.
In the case of MH370, this is why I always found the simulator history of the pilot the most relevant. It doesn't require this long chain of relationships like some other things. It is the most impactful person recently doing something related to the event that is extremely weird behavior.
> But Sherlock Holmes was right: once we have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.
This matter isn't entertainment fiction, and nobody involved is Sherlock Holmes.
Hundreds of people died. Amateurs publicly casting blame on one of the presumed dead seems unfair to the individual accused, and insensitive to the families.
Especially when it depends on bits like this:
> How these aspects of Zaharie’s life could have led him to commit an unspeakable act of mass murder is difficult to understand. But while he was said to be an affectionate and emotionally sensitive person who loved life, perhaps something dark lurked within him, something which he suppressed so thoroughly that no one else knew it was there. It is said that the people who seem happiest are sometimes also in the deepest agony, struggling against demons that they never reveal even to their closest friends.
Why not leave this real, recent tragedy to the professional investigators.
Ignoring the fact the route of the plan is close to the path the pilot flew on his personal computer is more insensitive to the deceased than grandstanding that this was an accidental.
Yeah, this article contains a bit too much editorializing for flavor for my taste. Doubly so after seeing attached patreon links. How much better than the news networks that ran literally everything they could get their hands on about the flight (even when that was nothing) are you really when you do something like this? Sure there's much more factual information present here, but if its job is to generate emotional intrigue instead of inform is there truly a difference in kind? If the facts are so compelling, just state them and at least have the plausible deniability that it's just your readers opining after seeing them.
I'm sympathetic to your point of view -- I remember the "independent investigators on reddit" wrongly accusing Sunil Tripathi of being the perpetrator of the Boston Bombing and causing his family a great deal of distress. But the author provides a few salient examples of why relying on "professional investigators" has come up short:
> The official report also did its best to paper over a number of failings that contributed to the plane not being found. In addition to the long delay in informing authorities — caused by missteps at the Kuala Lumpur and Ho Chi Minh City control centers, as well as at Malaysia Airlines — criticism should have been levied at the Malaysian military. Why didn’t they intercept the unidentified aircraft as it was crossing the north of the country? The military claimed it was because the plane wasn’t a threat. But how could they have known that unless they had identified it as MH370, rather than a foreign incursion? And if they had identified it as MH370, why didn’t they tell anyone until days after the crash? The most likely explanation was that the military simply wasn’t monitoring its own radar at the time that the plane flew through Malaysian airspace. But admitting this would expose a massive security vulnerability by revealing Malaysia’s military to be dangerously incompetent. Probably for national security reasons, the official report had nothing to say about this at all.
Seems like this is a pretty serious omission.
and
> Zaharie’s social life was also not as smooth as Malaysian authorities portrayed it to be. A combination of the leaked police report and interviews with people who knew him revealed that he had separated from his wife on an informal basis and was living alone in the family home.
So in essence Malaysian police were obfuscating the facts around the pilot, for whatever reason they may have. Perhaps they concluded based on further research that the pilot was probably guiltless. But whatever the reason, we do know that what they said in public diverges from what they found in private.
It seems to me that independent investigation and open source intelligence of this kind can be useful when there may be reasons for the official investigators to cover up certain parts of the story.
Lastly, I think there is a substantial difference between a crowd of people online with no real investigatory track record accusing someone (a la Sunil Tripathi) in the days/hours/minutes after the incident, and someone with a proven track record of credible investigatory reporting and some subject matter expertise, laying out some mixture of facts/theories/conclusions (that have already been circulating online) ten years after the fact.
> This matter isn't entertainment fiction, and nobody involved is Sherlock Holmes.
People love to misuse this quotes. Even if Holmes said this, usually it is proven, and with evidences.
It only works if every possibilities are discovered or accounted for. It's wrong to simply disprove all of other possibilities that only some people can account for.
One does not need to be a professional to deduce possibilities and eliminate them. Given the facts, it can only lead to a few possibilities. Facts don’t care about your feelings.
> ... reaches up and flips the pressurization switch, cutting off bleed air to the cabin. The airplane rapidly begins to depressurize ...
I cannot believe that a "kill everyone" switch actually exists, and if it really does this seems like a bug. Especially because not hitting the switch would also kill everyone.
Being able to rapidly depressurize is fairly critical; the doors are prevented from opening in flight by a pressure differential and their construction. In an emergency, being unable to depressurize would mean being unable to evacuate the aircraft.
Passengers would've had their oxygen masks deploy, which works in normal circumstances, but they only last 12 minutes; intended to give the crew time to descend. When the pilot has no intention of taking that measure, you're screwed pretty fast, but they could fly into a mountain too if they felt like it.
In an evacuation event, the aircraft would be at sea level and the interior would not be pressurized relative to outside air. You only need to depressurize if you're going to parachute out, which... is not an option in commercial aviation.
I feel like the need for qualified pilots is essentially that it’d be easier to identify what isn’t effectively a “kill everyone” button in the cockpit if used in the wrong way.
It’s a fricken giant metal tube flying through the air!
Are you also astounded that the pilot controls the plane with a "kill everyone" lever? One that if they push forward for long enough will kill everyone on the plane?
But also, _not_ using the lever during landing would also kill everyone. Wild stuff.
There's many "kill everyone" switches in most vehicles; this is why people get training and screening before being allowed to operate one. It's not foolproof, but there is no such thing as foolproof transport.
edited for brevity. You can't edit the recordings of the black box but you could certainly doctor recordings from either side. It mentions that in the article that it doesn't mean anything nefarious but rather just a matter of fact. If they were edited before release, its probably to cut out silence or something. I wouldn't go conspiracy theory here.
Did you read the article? It seems like it wasn't just silence edited out.
"At approximately 1:14 (a minute, 14 seconds into the audio, which can be heard here), the tone of the recording change to where to me, it sounds like someone is holding a digital recorder up to a speaker, so it's a microphone-to-speaker transfer of that information. That's a pretty big deal because it raises the first red flag about there possibly being some editing," he said.
The next part that raises questions is two minutes, six seconds in, through two minutes, nine seconds in, he said.
"I can hear noise in the room, along with the increase in the noise floor. I can hear a file door being closed, I can hear some papers being shuffled. so I'm further convinced that, beginning at 1:14 continuing through 2:06 to 2:15, it's a digital recorder being held up to a speaker."
"But yet, at 6:17, there's a huge edit because the conversation is cut off. It's interrupted. And the tone changes again," he said. "The noise floor, when you're authenticating a recording from a forensic perspective, is a very important part of the process. All of a sudden, we go back to the same quality and extremely low noise floor that we had at the beginning of the recording."
Audio is super cheap, and easy to index. Releasing it all has zero downside yet enables better investigation. Even things like dead-air pops/hums could potentially offer clues. (And an unbroken timeline is important in and of itself.)
Someone once reconstructed an entire helicopter's location telemetry just from the dead-air hum recorded by a video camera. Don't underestimate the value of any piece of information. It's a failure if there's needless withholding.
Edits should be made clear upon release of the audio recording. The investigation is either incompetent or corrupt if it is not being forthcoming about edits to information released to the public.
In an investigation of this type, there is absolutely not to release the full, unedited copy. Failure to do so is either incompetence or deliberate malfeasance.
If you released something of that importance and edited beforehand, you'd probably say so and release the unedited version as well, wouldn't you?
Sometimes I wonder whether some officials are trolling the conspiracy theory people, by editing something without even changing anything, just so people can freak out over it. Or give overlay specific denials just so people go "aha, they only said they never negotiated with Aliens from Mars, not that they didn't meet Aliens from Mars, nor that they didn't negotiate with Aliens from Pluto".
Readit News
>The Malaysian investigators did look into whether the cargo could have started a fire, noting that it consisted mainly of ripe mangosteen fruits along with a small number of lithium batteries. Extensive attempts by the investigators to get mangosteen juice to react with the batteries and trigger a fire were unsuccessful.
I'm sure plenty of people here have spent time wracking their brain on a hard problem and the image of a bunch of transportation investigators dousing batteries with juice in a late-night fit of desperation really gets me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_gun
The FAA has at its disposal a unique device for measuring the strength of aircraft windshields, in case of a collision with birds at high speed (which happens not so rarely). This device is a powerful pneumatic cannon that shoots a chicken carcass into the windshield of an airplane at a speed approaching the cruising speed of a civilian aircraft (for jet aircraft, this is approx. 800 km/h, for piston engines in the 1950s this figure was probably smaller, maybe 400-500 km/h). According to the theory, if the glass can withstand a collision with a chicken at such a speed, then it should all the more withstand a real collision with a bird in flight.
A certain British engineering company developing high-speed trains borrowed this gun from the FAA to test the strength of the windshield of its a new high-speed train. The cannon was brought to England, installed at the landfill, loaded with a chicken carcass and fired at the prototype train.
The result exceeded all expectations: the chicken broke through the glass, broke the back of the driver's seat and got stuck in the back wall of the car. The British sent test results to FAA and asked them if they had done everything correctly and if the gun was hitting too hard. After studying the description and consequences of the test, the answer was sent by telegram immediately: "Next time, defrost the chicken."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLJ5q3-XJtQ
Dead Comment
In general, onboard fires are one of the most dangerous scenarios in-flight, as I understand it. Crews are trained extensively for it.
I think this is, in part, what the analysis in the article concludes — even a fire would have to cause a very specific, never-before-seen combination of failures to lead to the outcomes observed from the outside.
Dead Comment
Have to say the simulator part makes me lean heavily towards the pilot crashing it purposefully, from the article -
"The most widely reported piece of evidence tying Zaharie to the disappearance was a course he had charted on his home flight simulator about a month before the crash. Zaharie had a number of hobbies, including paragliding and flying model airplanes, but he also spent a lot of time at home on his computer playing flight simulator games. He sometimes uploaded videos of himself playing on his YouTube channel, where he comes off as affable and knowledgeable, if a bit socially awkward.
In 2014, a leaked Malaysian police report revealed that among Zaharie’s saved flight simulator sessions was a very odd route which ran up the Strait of Malacca, turned south after passing Sumatra, and then flew straight down into the Southern Indian Ocean before terminating in the vicinity of the seventh arc. Not only did the track resemble MH370’s actual flight path, it also contained a number of other intriguing details. For example, the track wasn’t really a track — rather, it was a series of brief clips lasting no more than a few seconds each, indicating that Zaharie had programmed it in advance then skipped along it to various points without actually playing through the entire hours-long flight. Furthermore, although initial reports indicated that the track had been intentionally saved by the user, later analysis showed that it was kept only in the system files, and certainly was not meant to be found. Was this a dry run? It seems too odd to be a coincidence."
Also discovering that black box is a misnomer is mildly humorous, these are apparently orange! - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_recorder
I know I did a lot of poor flying….
Navigation is also a big part of the job. if you assumed you had to turn off parts of your nav equipment to avoid detection, then visual reference (ie flying the path to visually memorise/familirise yourself with wayppoints) would be something you'd certainly do - and a flightsim would be perfect for this.
I mean I'd still like to try out the new MS Flight Simulator because it's impressive technology.
https://www.youtube.com/user/blancolirio
I'd be curious which parts of the flight path those clips represented. Were they at important navigational landmarks? Were they nice vistas, places he wanted to see before a suicidal plunge? If they were only a few seconds each, that might indicate that he was checking those points for intentional reasons, rather than for fun.
"Black box" in the sense that you are describing is an unrelated term.
Dead Comment
> In the interest of knowing where every plane is at all times, the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) began requiring that all airliners manufactured after the 1st of January 2021 include autonomous tracking devices that broadcast their location once per minute.
Dead Comment
This is not to say MH370 was without incident, only that apparent contradiction may be unavoidable if you look closely enough at anything.
This was also relevant in that Airbus crash from maybe 15 years ago between South America and Africa.
This is not a problem on the main to/from North America routes because there are enough populated islands along the way (Iceland, Greenland, Hawaii, Guam, etc)
ATC radar is line of sight. At an altitude of 40,000 feet, you're beyond the radio horizon and lose coverage after about 380 miles - and that's the theoretical best case.
Oceanic air traffic control is primarily a non-radar environment, using procedural separation. Even over land, most of Canada (outside major cities and the airways between them) doesn't have radar coverage. There's a map showing the gaps here: http://ilanreich.com/Public_Pics/Alaska/Section%20One.htm
(The military does have over-the-horizon radar, but that's mostly used for missile defense. OTH radar isn't used for air traffic control.)
Most of the South Pacific / South Atlantic / Southern Ocean (Antarctic); a lot of the North Pacific / North Atlantic / Indian / Arctic outside of the major islands and direct routes has nearly no coverage.
Radar (both primary and secondary, i.e. transponders) as well as ADS-B require line-of-sight, and oceanic air traffic control has to make due without that, which means operating either via ADS-C (i.e. planes self-reporting their position, autonomously determined via GPS or inertial navigation, via satellite communications) or effectively dead reckoning, augmented by occasional position reports via HF radio, which is called procedural control:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procedural_control
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447
Deleted Comment
In the case of MH370, this is why I always found the simulator history of the pilot the most relevant. It doesn't require this long chain of relationships like some other things. It is the most impactful person recently doing something related to the event that is extremely weird behavior.
This matter isn't entertainment fiction, and nobody involved is Sherlock Holmes.
Hundreds of people died. Amateurs publicly casting blame on one of the presumed dead seems unfair to the individual accused, and insensitive to the families.
Especially when it depends on bits like this:
> How these aspects of Zaharie’s life could have led him to commit an unspeakable act of mass murder is difficult to understand. But while he was said to be an affectionate and emotionally sensitive person who loved life, perhaps something dark lurked within him, something which he suppressed so thoroughly that no one else knew it was there. It is said that the people who seem happiest are sometimes also in the deepest agony, struggling against demons that they never reveal even to their closest friends.
Why not leave this real, recent tragedy to the professional investigators.
> The official report also did its best to paper over a number of failings that contributed to the plane not being found. In addition to the long delay in informing authorities — caused by missteps at the Kuala Lumpur and Ho Chi Minh City control centers, as well as at Malaysia Airlines — criticism should have been levied at the Malaysian military. Why didn’t they intercept the unidentified aircraft as it was crossing the north of the country? The military claimed it was because the plane wasn’t a threat. But how could they have known that unless they had identified it as MH370, rather than a foreign incursion? And if they had identified it as MH370, why didn’t they tell anyone until days after the crash? The most likely explanation was that the military simply wasn’t monitoring its own radar at the time that the plane flew through Malaysian airspace. But admitting this would expose a massive security vulnerability by revealing Malaysia’s military to be dangerously incompetent. Probably for national security reasons, the official report had nothing to say about this at all.
Seems like this is a pretty serious omission.
and
> Zaharie’s social life was also not as smooth as Malaysian authorities portrayed it to be. A combination of the leaked police report and interviews with people who knew him revealed that he had separated from his wife on an informal basis and was living alone in the family home.
So in essence Malaysian police were obfuscating the facts around the pilot, for whatever reason they may have. Perhaps they concluded based on further research that the pilot was probably guiltless. But whatever the reason, we do know that what they said in public diverges from what they found in private.
It seems to me that independent investigation and open source intelligence of this kind can be useful when there may be reasons for the official investigators to cover up certain parts of the story.
Lastly, I think there is a substantial difference between a crowd of people online with no real investigatory track record accusing someone (a la Sunil Tripathi) in the days/hours/minutes after the incident, and someone with a proven track record of credible investigatory reporting and some subject matter expertise, laying out some mixture of facts/theories/conclusions (that have already been circulating online) ten years after the fact.
People love to misuse this quotes. Even if Holmes said this, usually it is proven, and with evidences.
It only works if every possibilities are discovered or accounted for. It's wrong to simply disprove all of other possibilities that only some people can account for.
Start at https://old.reddit.com/r/AdmiralCloudberg/
If you wish to skip any comments,
https://old.reddit.com/r/AdmiralCloudberg/comments/e6n80m/pl...
and use the Medium links.
I cannot believe that a "kill everyone" switch actually exists, and if it really does this seems like a bug. Especially because not hitting the switch would also kill everyone.
Passengers would've had their oxygen masks deploy, which works in normal circumstances, but they only last 12 minutes; intended to give the crew time to descend. When the pilot has no intention of taking that measure, you're screwed pretty fast, but they could fly into a mountain too if they felt like it.
Don't know if you said that with this crash in mind or not, but: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanwings_Flight_9525
Yes, used incorrectly or maliciously, in the right circumstances, it can do so.
By the same reasoning, a huge percentage of the controls and switches in the cockpit can also have the same result.
Just disconnect the fuel to the engines, or push the control stick forward.
It’s a fricken giant metal tube flying through the air!
But also, _not_ using the lever during landing would also kill everyone. Wild stuff.
Deleted Comment
This switch, just like all others, has very legitimate use cases.
For whatever reason, this doesn't seem to be widely discussed.
"At approximately 1:14 (a minute, 14 seconds into the audio, which can be heard here), the tone of the recording change to where to me, it sounds like someone is holding a digital recorder up to a speaker, so it's a microphone-to-speaker transfer of that information. That's a pretty big deal because it raises the first red flag about there possibly being some editing," he said.
The next part that raises questions is two minutes, six seconds in, through two minutes, nine seconds in, he said.
"I can hear noise in the room, along with the increase in the noise floor. I can hear a file door being closed, I can hear some papers being shuffled. so I'm further convinced that, beginning at 1:14 continuing through 2:06 to 2:15, it's a digital recorder being held up to a speaker."
"But yet, at 6:17, there's a huge edit because the conversation is cut off. It's interrupted. And the tone changes again," he said. "The noise floor, when you're authenticating a recording from a forensic perspective, is a very important part of the process. All of a sudden, we go back to the same quality and extremely low noise floor that we had at the beginning of the recording."
Someone once reconstructed an entire helicopter's location telemetry just from the dead-air hum recorded by a video camera. Don't underestimate the value of any piece of information. It's a failure if there's needless withholding.
Sometimes I wonder whether some officials are trolling the conspiracy theory people, by editing something without even changing anything, just so people can freak out over it. Or give overlay specific denials just so people go "aha, they only said they never negotiated with Aliens from Mars, not that they didn't meet Aliens from Mars, nor that they didn't negotiate with Aliens from Pluto".