Re: Malaysia Airlines Plane is Missing
True, but what's baffling about the mystery is the plane was at cruising altitude, basically at the safest moment in the air, the computer virtually does most of the work, so what else can the pilot do to cause such a catastrophic descent?
Take Air France flight 447 for example. This was also an instance of a state of the art modern passenger aircraft mysteriously disappearing while crusing over the ocean, and then taking a week to be found and 2 years to be recovered.
With Air Fance 447 The plane was also cruising. Gradually a few of the pitot tubes iced up. The flight control computer determined this would prevent it from accurately determining the speed and angle of attack of the plane necessary for completely computer controlled flight, and also prevent it from displaying correct information in the cockpit instrumentation. So the flight control computer reverted from normal, full function computer control mode to a standby, pilot override mode. In this mode the plane allows the pilot to do whateve he wanted, sharpened the plane's response of the plane to inputs from the pilot, and blacked out all the data display on cockpit instrumentation which the computer deemed to now be no longer reliable. But the pilots didn't realize this had happened, and was alarmed by sudden change in the plane's handling characteristics, and began to wildly overcompensating with control stick input. So the plane started to gyrate and climbing. The plane began to stall, and the computer stall warning began to buzz. So the pilots put on full power. But now disoriented, and with vital instruments blacked out, the pilot didn't realize the plane is continuing to climb, so he continued to apply nose up in put. This caused the plane to climb more and stall more deeply.
This process continued for several minutes, as the plane lost virtually all its forward speed, adopted a 35 degree nose up atitude, while the engines were on full power, and plane was falling like a stone. During the entire period the experienced, but panicked, pilot didn't do the two critical things every student pilot is taught on day one:
1. Always trust instruments, even if only some are working, over your physical sensation and gut feeling of what the plane is doing. If instrument and you disagree, you are wrong. End of story. The pilot here refuse to believe the stall warning from the computer for over a minute as the plane lost 38000 feet of altitude and pancaked onto the atlantic ocean.
2. Always put the nose down and dive to gain air speed when you have altitude to lose and are in danger of stalling. The pilot continuously held the control stick back, nosing the plane up, precisely the worst thing to do, instead of pushing it forward, nosing the plane down, and solve the problem in about 3 seconds.
Modern passenger aircraft are immensely complicated systems with many different modes of failure, both within the machine or human side of the system, and in the interaction between the two sides.
Just because they are typically so well engineered that they seldomly fail does not mean there nonetheless exist many, many different ways it can fail if it ever fail. So when people ask "how can a modern passenger plane .... unless some dark conspiracy.", you have to laugh. You have no idea how many different ways a passenger plane can .... without the intervention of any nefarious conspiracy.
