You don't have all the facts. However, the land was not very flat and there were large trees, which were struck by the plane.
About 20 years ago there was a night-time dead-stick landing of a United flight, in a sparse residential area of Portland Or. Most passengers walked away from the mishap.
There was a landing gear problem and the pilot flew around to get rid of fuel in order to prevent a major fire if the gear failed on landing at PDX. The pilot did not maintain a realistic altitude, and when both engines starved the pilot "landed" in an area showing the fewest lights.
So I believe it could happen again, in the future.
Let's assume we have a critical situation, the pilots are foced to attempt a (dead-stick?) landing in the nearest flat piece of land, and the hw takes over and foils them during their only possible attempt.
Or, what about skyscrapers in Denver, Mexico City or some other high-altitude location.
The proper response to 9/11 style hijackings were discovered within an hour: It is better for both crew and passenger to die trying to kill/subdue the hijackers than to die flying into a target.
Terje
--
-
"almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"
I don't believe that. Actually, there was even an X-file sequel around that was talking about some black helicopter types taking planes to hit the WTC towers. Agend Mulder prevented this beforehand, but it's quite obvious that people did think about that scenario. At least people in Hollywood.
Also remember that Spiderman used a giant spider net on WTC to catch a helicopter which was trying to fly into the towers. This szene was removed from the Spiderman movie (made in 2001). The Spiderman comics were 1970s or
1980s stuff.
--
Bernd Paysan
"If you want it done right, you have to do it yourself"
http://www.jwdt.com/~paysan/
We already have more than 100 people killed by this strong door. A few weeks, a machine from Helios crashedn near Athens, because the pilots lost conciousness (low pressure), and it took too long to enter the cockpit to land the plane.
--
Bernd Paysan
"If you want it done right, you have to do it yourself"
http://www.jwdt.com/~paysan/
Well the US Army intel folks had been doing plenty of "checkout" on Mr Atta but were forbidden from passing that onto FBI by their own lawyers some time before 9/11. If all the intel had been together, the picture would have been more obvious, and already was to some.
When people start to do things of interest like learning to fly planes who come from certain countries, buy certain components, attend certain schools in certain countries, of course we damn well check them out. IIRC 2 of those UK bombers went to such schools to get radicalized.
What checkout achieves is to make things that might have happened NOT happen. The intel folks don't tell us when this and that never happened, we don't need to know as that gives away their capabilities.
Ah, that's how they can fly from Liverpool to Rome for GBP 2.99 (about US $5.50).
Best regards, Spehro Pefhany
--
"it\'s the network..." "The Journey is the reward"
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Complex solution again, though I grant that it eliminates the possibility of remote control. For any such system, the flight crew would need an override method, and there's no practical way to prevent its use by others.
-- | James E.Thompson, P.E. | mens | | Analog Innovations, Inc. | et | | Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus | | Phoenix, Arizona Voice:(480)460-2350 | | | E-mail Address at Website Fax:(480)460-2142 | Brass Rat | |
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| 1962 | I love to cook with wine. Sometimes I even put it in the food.
Well most of the flying lessons for commercial jets they took were not beginning, middle, end lessons as would usually be taken, just the bit about steering, no need to take off or land. That was plenty enough to raise suspician and it did.
Also they were not traditional air force type backgrounds or affiliated with national government programs to train pilots, another clue, background all wrong.
Now rich folks flying planes usually learn in smaller planes nothing to do with commercial planes, another clue, these guys weren't rich. Very few people learn to fly commercial jets just for fun.
I am sure it does work most of the time but we don't need to know, we find out only when no checking ever got started or got messed up on 6pm news.
*prevented*
I am sure every agency learns, shares with other countries, hopefully.
BTW half my life was in UK growing up with IRA, Eta, baader mienhoff news etc.
These new guys are just plain monsters on a scale far beyond the IRA pettyness, and worse they make us get into issues of mistrusting your neighbor, figuring out a foriegn culture in your midst etc. Monsters have a hard time to act natural though but still pass. Also I hear that many of the 19 may not have known the full extant of their mission, they were just the muscle, making it even more important to track their leaders.
You are assuming absolute altitude. You don't have to include that to keep most of the large buildings in the world safe. This was the goal. If the aircraft has a radar altimeter, the 3000 feet could be the height above the surface thus keeping all buildings currently in existance safe.
A map of the surface of the earth with fairly low resolution does not take very much memory. It is not as you say "very very complicated" even if the map has to be used for the altitude information, which chances are it would not.
If that happens everybody dies. No-one has ever landed an airliner in "a flat piece of land" and it is very-very unlikely in future.
Airbus already includes systems on the aircraft that override the pilots inputs in some situations. These systems are judged to save more lives than they kill and thus are an improvement in safety.
Ever hear of a radar altimeter?
No, it is better to not let the hijacking happen in the first place.
Well, since the odds of an airplane being hijacked or bombed are about one in a million, the odds that there will be _two_ bombs is one in a million million, or an American trillion.
So, just carry a bomb with you, and you'll be a million times safer!
---------------- I noticed there are a lot of specialty airlines these days. For example, Hooters has its own airline targeted at horny men, and Virgin has an airline targeted at virgins. My idea is to start Atheist Airlines, targeted at non-believers who want to avoid security delays. At Atheist Air, prior to boarding, passengers would be required to spout blasphemous remarks at a display of artifacts from all the major religions. This effectively weeds out anyone who has a secret plan to meet the Creator in the next few hours. Blasphemers would be allowed to carry-on pickaxes, blowtorches, chainsaws, nun chucks, whatever, under the theory that atheists generally try to avoid hurting other people in any situation where there isn't a clear escape route. --
It seemed to take quite a while until the cabin crew realized that they didn't, and managed to take actions. In the old "open door" situation, it would have been far easier to take these actions. It's not really that uncommon that both pilots have problems; that's why at least one cabin crew member must have some aircraft knowledge.
He was apparently able to take the machine down, and tried to approach Athens airport, but the machine ran out of fuel first.
Me, too.
--
Bernd Paysan
"If you want it done right, you have to do it yourself"
http://www.jwdt.com/~paysan/
Alas, there are lots of "exceptional cases" (more frequent than nasty-people-at-the-controls) where this could convert an "incident" (something is wrong) into an "accident" (bent sheet metal, dead people). For example:
rader altimeter failure
failure of deice system combined with severe icing at higher altitudes forces the crew to decend to below 3000 ft AGL to continue safe flight
onboard fire or structural failure --> need emergency landing NOW at "the closest vaguely-flat piece of ground, whether it's an airport, a drag strip, or a corn field"
less-urgent situation (weather, fuel leak, medical emergency, ...) requires landing at a little-used or small airport (where typical traffic is smaller planes which don't have the "magic box")... followed by the discovery of a map-database bug --> oops, can't land :(
There are good reasons the aviation community standardized long ago on "trust the judgement of the pilots" as their basic exception-handling philosophy...
And since this really has very little to do with comp.arch, I've set followups to comp.risks and sci.aeronautics.airliners.
ciao,
--
-- "Jonathan Thornburg (remove -animal to reply)"
Max-Planck-Institut fuer Gravitationsphysik (Albert-Einstein-Institut),
Golm, Germany, "Old Europe" http://www.aei.mpg.de/~jthorn/home.html
"Washing one\'s hands of the conflict between the powerful and the
powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral."
-- quote by Freire / poster by Oxfam
Al Haynes and his colleagues landed a crippled DC-10 that way on
19 July 1989, near Sioux City, Iowa:
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I will admit that using the word "landing" is a bit generous here, but 184/296 people did survive the event...
--
-- "Jonathan Thornburg -- remove -animal to reply"
Max-Planck-Institut fuer Gravitationsphysik (Albert-Einstein-Institut),
Golm, Germany, "Old Europe" http://www.aei.mpg.de/~jthorn/home.html
"Washing one\'s hands of the conflict between the powerful and the
powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral."
-- quote by Freire / poster by Oxfam
I read in sci.electronics.design that Ken Smith wrote (in ) about 'Taking back control of the flight computer ?', on Thu, 15 Sep
2005:
I'm not sure that that is true; it depend on how small an 'airliner' can be. I don't have time for extensive Googling to cite cases.
--
Regards, John Woodgate, OOO - Own Opinions Only.
If everything has been designed, a god designed evolution by natural selection.
http://www.jmwa.demon.co.uk Also see http://www.isce.org.uk
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