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Summary: It’s plausible that a fuselage section near the SATCOM antenna adapter failed, disabling satellite based - GPS, ACARS, and ADS-B/C - communications, a
by imakesnowflakes 13y ago
Summary: It’s plausible that a fuselage section near the SATCOM antenna adapter failed, disabling satellite based - GPS, ACARS, and ADS-B/C - communications, and leading to a slow decompression that left all occupants unconscious. If such decompression left the aircraft intact, then the autopilot would have flown the planned route or otherwise maintained its heading/altitude until fuel exhaustion.
May be I am wrong, but If the gps failed, how can the autopilot work?
- stackcollision 13y agoAutpilots existed long before GPS. Most of an aircraft's sensors would be considered primitive by the standards of this site, including measuring airspeed by literally sticking a straw out of the nose. I'm not too familiar with modern autopilots, but afaik the systems are not the magic machines people think they are. All they do is hold course and speed by monitoring sensors such as the pitot tube, air density gauge, gyroscope, and compass. When the summary says "planned route", they probably mean inputted heading and altitude. The aircraft would carry enough fuel to complete the route from start to finish, so we can infer that he means it will fly in a straight line until it ran out of fuel, not that it would land at the destination airport itself.
- icegreentea 13y agoMost planes don't use GPS directly, but rather combine (with something like a kalman filter perhaps) it with at least the inertial navigation system to get position fixes. That way if the GPS fails, you have more or less graceful degradation of position fixes.