Quote:
Originally Posted by Edward64
If it wasn't a catastrophic event and it was rogue pilot, wouldn't the cabin crew or passengers have done something? Is there a way to incapacitate everyone in the passenger cabin?
You would think at the very least the cabin crew would have tried something.
Even with reinforced doors, I kinda believe that it can be broken down after x hours.
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You know that's a good question. Let's look at this hypothetically. If a rouge pilot had done something there would have been a fight in the cockpit first of all. But the cabin crew may not have known anything about it at all. The plane is loud and they may have thought something was up, but could've dismissed it. They call up, someone answers tells them it's all fine and they don't know anything. It was night out and unless the plane was outfitted with tv's and the "where are we now" feature nobody would have know that they weren't flying to China. I question the information about the altitude's that they say the plane was flying at. Let's just say that I'm skeptical. But it doesn't necessarily mean anything anyway. I think what we know is that the plane flew a long time and ended up far away in the Indian Ocean. To me that means that it didn't waste a whole lot of fuel going up and down and pretty much flew a standard planned altitude profile. If it had flown much lower or done a lot of deviations it wouldn't have made it that far.
Is there any way to incapacitate everyone in the cabin? Absolutely. All that needs to be done is the modify the cabin pressure in the plane. The oxygen masks will drop, but they only have about 15 min of air. There are some tanks in the back, but after an hour depressurized at 35k feet there wouldn't be too many people left and a pilot could repressurize the plane again. I'm certainly not saying that's what happened but speaking hypothetically it's possible.
I can't really get into the specifics of the door itself. Except to say that if a pilot was conscious upfront there really isn't anything you can do to get the door open. It's just not happening.
I have no idea what door this particular plane had except that I believe that it had to be the newer reinforced doors that all the US planes have now.