Here's one potential problem with that theory... that plan was equipped with an onboard GSM microcell, right? So people could still use their phones? These should run over a different set of antenna, so if the other set was ripped away, this satellite link should have still worked.
So, if something like this theory happened, why didn't someone in the main cabin use their phone to call home?
Unless everyone suddenly lost oxygen at the same time...
> Like was it really just good luck nobody sat there?
Another point of good fortune was the altitude. Since the aircraft was still climbing, everyone was sitting down and wearing seatbelts.
At cruising altitude, people would have taken off the seat belts, started moving around the cabin and got sucked out due to extreme pressure differential.
I agree that it's a likely theory and fits much of what's known, but there can be other reasonable explanations for the things mentioned above. The aircraft was already assigned 35k feet, was a climb to 40k feet really necessary to ensure the passengers and crew would be incapacitated? Might he not have been trying to avoid traffic in established flight corridors, since the transponder was not operating and he wasn't talking to anyone? Anyway, to be clear I'm not challenging the overall conclusion. It's the best theory I personally have heard, but I am also not an expert on any of this. I just felt like the article didn't make it clear enough that the depressurization event was complete conjecture.
The plane passed back over land, so the absence of cellphone contact from passengers seems to rule out this idea, unless the plane was depressurized and everyone, or almost everyone, became unconscious quite quickly.
>Several major accidents (including the top of an airliner coming off and sucking a flight attendant out over the pacific on the way to Hawaii)
It was actually an inter-island flight so lots of short flights (and therefore pressurization cycles relative to flight hours or miles). The amazing thing was that the plane was able to make an emergency landing.
>In any case, who knows what would have happened if he’d stayed on board, considering that nobody seemed to care about the limits the doctor set?
He would've been much safer, though maybe he would've passed out (which I fully recognize as an unpleasant experience.) Ejecting from a jet would be a very hazardous day for any job.
Sadly, I find it hard to believe that passengers wouldn't have tried to use cellphones, and I'm inclined to think that the cabin became depressurized before the last report of contact (a ping off of an inmarsat sattelite) which is reported as 7.5 hours after takeoff.
> 1. Is unlikely as door is very secure now. Passengers can't get in.
The passengers and aircrew would have had seven solid hours to try to break through that door, though, unless the plane landed somewhere first. Alternatively, hijackers (if hijackers there were) might have damaged the door or disabled its locking mechanism on their own way into the cockpit. Some desperate passengers might even deliberately start a fire in the fuselage, I suppose, as dangerous as that would be.
One big problem with 4 is that to believe this you probably have to discount the primary radar reports of the airplane heading west over Malaysia/Thailand and then north up the Malacca Strait and Andaman Sea. It's hard to imagine the plane getting feet-dry on that northern SATCOM arc, at about the end of its fuel endurance, and then then heading far out to sea again. (Unless it landed and refuelled somewhere...)
(EDIT: On second thoughts, I suppose you could turn east after the last radar contact and then go south, past the west of Indonesia, to the southern arc.)
But even if you do that, where would you be headed if you were on that southern Indian Ocean arc after 7 hours in flight? It's not exactly an efficient route to Australia or Indonesia, and everywhere else is either hopelessly far or in the wrong direction.
> You have way more time than you might expect after a plane crash. "Finally, [Captain] Sullenberger walked the cabin twice to confirm it was empty" [1]. If anybody had grabbed their hand luggage (especially from below their seat) they would've still had time to evacuate.
But if they had taken their backpack or suitcase, and had dropped it, they could have blocked other people; knocked other people out; broken someone's ankle making them harder to evacuate etc etc.
And this was a calm evacuation. Imagine a fire, low visibility due to the smoke, the sense of urgency, and you trip on some dimwit's suitcase, pushing the people in front of you down, some of them hitting heads, then panic sets in, the path towards that emergency exit is blocked, etc etc etc.
Leave your fucking luggage behind. If everything is fine, it will get to you afterwards. If the plane is on fire, you won't, but you'd also not kill people by not taking it.
1) It seems pretty clear the plane took hours to crash
2) If the cabin was full of healthy, alive passengers, they could have done something during that time. (It's not a certainty, but it certainly seems plausible. Armored cockpit doors aren't meant to withstand dozens of super motivated people, including cabin crew, with literally hours of time on their hands.)
3) Apparently nothing was done, so apparently it wasn't full of healthy, alive passengers.
4) Although a number of things could have killed or incapacitated the passengers in the cabin, depressurisation is fast, reliable, under the control of the pilot, and doesn't require any elaborate assumptions about third parties or deus ex machina. There are other possibilities that have been discussed elsewhere (poisoned food, perhaps), but Occam's razor suggests depressurisation.
I think that's what the author was getting at with the "circumstances suggest". Given what is known about the plane, depressurisation is the most logical explanation for one of the mysteries.
Based on what? As horrific as it might be it wouldn't surprise me if passengers were conscious all the way down. Even if oxygen masks didn't deploy or work, at 26,000 feet you have a few minutes of useful consciousness after rapid decompression [1]. Combined with the fact that the plane would be rapidly descending.
> The plane was never "going down" as one passenger is quoted saying
- they lost an engine
- the cabin depressurized rapidly
- there was unknown damage to the slats
- there was possible other structural damage to the aircraft
- someone nearly got sucked out of the plane
Given all that it seems like a major exercise in backseat driving to conclude that the plane was 'never going down', at that point in time passengers should be excused for thinking that might happen.
After all the only reason you are writing this is because you know that they landed more or less in one piece but that wasn't a given at that point in time.
> 3000 fpm is nothing crazy, especially for an emergency descent with a depressurized cabin.
Definitely not. Some quick googling suggests that 7000 fpm is not uncommon in emergency situations, and really you are only limited by the comfort level of the passengers (as you come back to a lower pressure-altitude). If they drop spoilers and go for ground you can probably be on the ground within 5 minutes flat, assuming a nearby airport.
(and with a depressurized cabin, the damage is really already done in terms of passenger comfort)
A friend was on a flight where a passenger had a heart attack in-flight, he said it was like being on an elevator and his inner ear was screwed up for days.
> In addition, if indeed 2.7G were encountered, passengers would certainly have reacted and this occurrence would have been all over the media the next day at the very latest.
While it must have been a scary ten seconds, you can't show g-forces very well on video, especially when it lasts a few seconds. If anyone from this flight had shown up on social media recounting the tale, they would be met with a chorus of voices telling them it's just normal turbulence.
well if ti was slow why wouldnt they try to radio. Obviously i don't know anything about airplanes, but one would assume their limits for warning about decompression events will be long before the average crew member will pass out
BTW the Langweiche article in The Atlantic suggests that the passengers and crew were asphyxiated by flying over 40K feet for a period, hence no objections. Also the the end of the plane was seemingly more violent than simple descent.
This doesn't contradict my vague scenario, but I wrote it after having read the posted article (about the clever ham radio hack) but before reading Langweiche's article which was mentioned in another comment.
Shutting down most/all of the electrical systems on the plane suggests depressurization. Also it just makes sense to do so; a plane full of dead people can't engage in heroics to save the day. And he might have seen it as the humane thing to do, rather than leave people in fear for hours up to the actual crash.
But agreed that there's no hard evidence for this, or even for much of the entire story. Just a bunch of circumstantial evidence that suggests a lot.
In this case the decompression blew away the reinforced cockpit door and the rushing air took away their checklist (and almost a headset) so they had to use the reference handbook (and/or do stuff from memory) so it would be interesting to hear how exactly it went. Also their communications were a bit confusing (no mayday?!) perhaps it was discussed in the cockpit.
If rapid decompression occurred, there could have been panic in the plane, making it difficult to establish any kind of communication. Who knows...
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