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On #4, that's one thing I noticed too. No mayday. No emergency declared. No contact. The flight just failed to show up. I can think of three cases where th
by einhverfr 13y ago
On #4, that's one thing I noticed too. No mayday. No emergency declared. No contact. The flight just failed to show up.
I can think of three cases where this could be. The first is where the pilots tried to communicate that something was wrong and were unsuccessful, but I would expect that someone might have heard something.
But the other two are more catastrophic. The plane could have disintegrated in the air, giving no time for communications. Midflight breakups are uncommon but they do happen.
Finally it is possible that the pilots for some reason didn't know they were descending and could have crashed into the ocean without ever knowing they weren't at altitude. This apparently happened with AF447 to some extent. It has happened before as well (static ports get clogged, pilots get disoriented at night, etc). In this case the first sign that anything was wrong could have been impact.
- lbsnake7 13y agoThey were talking to a retired pilot on the news and they asked him how it was possible that no distress call was made from the plane. The pilot said that pilots are trained to keep the plane in the air, if something starts to go wrong they start troubleshooting and focus all their energy on fixing the problem. If they then have time to send out a call, they do, but their main priority is to try and keep the plane in the air. So it's possible that if the problem they experienced was complicated or happened too quickly, they never got a chance to send out a distress signal.
- einhverfr 13y agoAs I think about it, with the growing complexity of automated systems on the aircraft, the things that can go wrong multiply, and the chance of getting a distress call out diminish :-P
- marcosdumay 13y agoThe plane has a set of automatic distress signals. No pilot intervention is required for those.
- einhverfr 13y agoBut those don't cover a staggering number of possible electronics, avionics, and such mishaps.