Green Eagle's Two Cents on the Malaysian Airliner
A couple of things I learned doing airplane movies:
First of all, the autopilot on a Boeing jet is so straightforward that you could teach someone to set it in 15 minutes. If they had the heading, altitude and airspeed written down, anyone could do it.
Second, I must admit that I do not have a clue about what it takes to turn the transponders off in mid-flight, but I do seem to remember that they are held in by a few screws, and that anyone with a screwdriver could remove them entirely.
Here's a 777 cockpit, if you are interested, showing the autopilot in the center just below the windows, and the transponders aft of the throttles, between the seats.
So much for the universally accepted theories that only a trained pilot could have done what we know at this point. As usual, the mainstream press is too busy shouting for attention to manage to learn anything about the subject.
First of all, the autopilot on a Boeing jet is so straightforward that you could teach someone to set it in 15 minutes. If they had the heading, altitude and airspeed written down, anyone could do it.
Second, I must admit that I do not have a clue about what it takes to turn the transponders off in mid-flight, but I do seem to remember that they are held in by a few screws, and that anyone with a screwdriver could remove them entirely.
Here's a 777 cockpit, if you are interested, showing the autopilot in the center just below the windows, and the transponders aft of the throttles, between the seats.
Comments
This is about the defence force monitoring capabilities of all the nations in the area, including the US installations in Australia, and how much to reveal about what they can do while ‘co-operating’ with one another.
Malaysia does not get on fine with Thailand, due to the South Thailand Insurgency. They have a territorial dispute with Indonesia, with whom they also have issues concerning militants.
They’re bloody feeling this, the Malaysians…. Everyone’s eyes are on them.
It’s now come out the Thai military had data which they didn’t pass on to the Malaysians because ‘they weren’t asked’.
China could run this as a propaganda op in their endless exploration of how many buttons they can push in the region.
US, Canada, UK, Australia, New Zealand are part of “Five Eyes’ which is an agreement to share intelligence but Malaysia is on the outer of that, but Australia does billions of dollars in trade with Malaysia and we don’t have nukes so we care what other countries think about us.
It’s all extremely political.