Liebherr's Corner - The Off-Topic Chat Thread

Shame there's so much bollocks to sit through before he's on.

 

This Malaysian plane story just keeps changing. The communications systems were turned off deliberately and the plane continued to fly for 7 hours after that happened. So basically either the pilot lost the plot and flew off into the ocean or someone decided to steal a plane!

 

If someone stole the plane, they could only want to commit an atrocity like 9/11, hold it for ransom, or do a remake of Lost. I doubt that any have survived whatever the cause...we'd have known by now.

 

Yep your right...nowhere near as good as it used to be, liked it a lot with Tim Lovejoy on it.

 

I did say (jokingly) that the plane was still ok and had been taken. It wouldn't be to hard to hide a plane on some island etc.

 

Landing it would be the tricky part. If someone has actually nicked a plane and landed it somewhere undetected, that person is an evil genius.

 

Agreed. If it's crashed into the ocean then everyone is dead, the ransom option is out because there would have been some sort of message by now and if it's a terrorist organisation who've stolen the plane then the chances are they've killed everyone on board (except maybe the pilots?). I imagine you could hide it on an island or possibly even in a dark corner of Afghanistan or somewhere.

 

Only if the pilot's not involved.

 

You don't tend to land those things on anything that isn't a mile long piece of road lit up like a Christmas tree.

 

So an idiot hijacker...that sadly isn't hard to imagine.

 

True. But you need over a mile of flat land to land it safely. I can't see a remote island having that.

 

I haven't seen the maps of the two areas they're talking about but I think the northern area they're talking about has enough "wild" space that someone determined enough could arrange that. Far more likely it's ended up in the Indian Ocean though.

 

If they didn't figure out the fuel dumping system, they likely crashed when they tried to land.

 

If the plane crashed on land then there is a chance of survivals from the actual crash. It's then down to where they landed and the survival skills of the passengers who made it. If they crashed into the ocean they would have been ****ed pretty much as soon as the plane was going down. Planes aren't designed to land on water, especially a jet of this size.

 

I thought planes were designed to float for a certain amount of time as long as their wings are intact and they land flat. Airline pilot are trained to do this.

 

Yeah I don't understand why people are always so cynical about a plane's chances of landing on water. A hell of a lot of engineering has gone into preparing for it. Obviously when falling from 30000 feet the tricky part would be not hitting the water so hard the plane breaks up, but planes are designed to be able to glide without engines so it should be possible to soften the landing.

 

The one that landed in the Hudson didn't break up if memory serves me correctly

 

Because there is the inconvenient factor of stalling speed. A 747 airliner will stall [ie drop to the ground like a flying stone] at anything below 170mph. Other comparable airliners are similar. That's some glancing blow.

 

Having thought about this a bit more I think the plane probably headed for the northern corridor. This hijack/takeover appears to have been planned by someone. If that's the case the plane must surely have been flown towards the northern corridor - it just makes no sense to hijack a plane and then fly it into the middle of the ocean with no hope of returning. Of course if one of the pilots went mad or the hijacker's plan went wrong somehow then it's still possible.

 

Pilot suicide has happened before and could theoretically happen again but don't think that's the case. Obviously whoever was in control of the plane after the transponder was turned off, pilot or hijacker, doesn't want it to be found. If it's in the ocean we may have a small chance of finding it, but it could be a genuinely impossible task. It could be years before we hear anything conclusive.