If You Wanted To Steal A Boeing 777, Here's How You'd Do It

Business Insider ^ | 03/14/2014 | Jeff Wise, Slate

[SeekAndFind]

Whenever a plane goes down, experienced air craft investigators look at the general circumstances and mentally draw up a list of the most likely causes — not to leap to conclusions, but to prioritize lines of enquiry and organize competing hypotheses.

As information comes in, it should be possible to eliminate those hypotheses one by one until at last a full understanding of the circumstances remains. The goal is to make sure that the problem will never again bring down an airliner.

This philosophy works: Year by year, fewer commercial airliners are lost to accidents.

The downside is that, as likely sources of aircraft accidents are eliminated, what’s left behind are increasingly arcane and bizarre, once-in-a-million combinations of bad luck, incompetence, and malice. And the longer we go without any significant clues regarding Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, the more likely that its true cause will fall into that category.

For instance? Some airline pilots have begun to speculate that one of the flight crew might have intentionally caused the plane to disappear and flown off with it to an undisclosed location. This line of speculation, outlandish as it may sound, was only bolstered when it was reported Wednesday that investigators were actively pursuing the possibility that the plane had been diverted "with the intention of using it later for another purpose.”

[PGR88]

investigators were actively pursuing the possibility that the plane had been diverted "with the intention of using it later for another purpose.”

What, like a kitschy diner or novelty hotel?

[Teacher317]

Problem in article says one person could steal a 777. I would say it would take two. One to fly and one to take away phones. That is the key to this-the phones and the pings on towers!

Not too many towers in the Pacific

[martin_fierro]

lol *head shake*

[ImJustAnotherOkie]

Simpler than that.

Copy the Face of copilot onto someone else.
The new copilot injects poison into the air supply.
The new copilot lands the jet wherever he wants.

Plot courtesy of Ian Fleming i.e. Thunderball.

[EQAndyBuzz]

Seriously? Let’s say the plane safely landed somewhere. Let’s say the passengers were offloaded, slaughtered and buried.... Or put on ice until they cann be used as hostages. Let’s then say the plane spent the next several weeks being repainted, refitted with bombs or whatever.

Now the plane, after being in hiding for however long needs a nice long runway to take off from, with every friendly intelligence agency throughout the world figuring out which airports can have a 777 take off from it.

So now the plane takes off. Where is it going? Because if it is going to the west it will have to fly under the radar for a couple of thousand miles. With qualified pilots who are trained 777 flight operations doing it. Let’s assume that both the pilot and co-pilot were in on it.

Sorry, not buying this. I am more apt to think that the Chicoms fried the planes electronics from space and the pilots in their confusion tried to turn the jet around and nose dived into the sea.

[mfish13]

Where would you find a runway long enough to handle a landing (And takeoff) of a 777 that would have no people working at or living next to this runway??

[Vermont Lt]

Or they know where it went down because they put it there.

Somewhere in the basement of some building with lots of dishes on it, there is a fat guy watching TV saying, “ warmer, warmer, warmer...oh! Colder, colder,...”

[Vermont Lt]

Crappy EMP device. Unless you want to take out a block or two.

[Two Kids' Dad]

And if it’s on the ground in hiding, they’ll need to have sufficient fuel to get it back in the air and to its next (final?) destination. It should be easy to track if there are any smallish airports that suddenly have a need for a lot of extra fuel.

[AU72]

Where would you find a runway long enough to handle a landing (And takeoff) of a 777 that would have no people working at or living next to this runway??

Iran

[MeganC]

why would Boeing build in a means of turning off the emergency O2 masks?

If a fire broke out on the plane you'd want to be able to do this.

[barmag25]

We island is one place that can handle it.

[mfish13]

Didn’t think of Iran. Is it in range??

[WildHighlander57]

I didn’t put forth that scenario you posted.

A question was asked whether there was tech on the plane that someone wanted, & I surmised it was to obtain knowledge, since there were 20 people from one company on the plane:

To: SeekAndFind

Does the plane have tech that certain countries want that can’t be obtained any other way except to hijack it, crash it or just make it disappear?

21 posted on 03/14/2014 11:38:31 AM PDT by Dallas59 (Obama: The first “White Black” President.) [ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies | Report Abuse ]

To: Dallas59

Knowledge ?

20 people on that flight worked for one company.

26 posted on 03/14/2014 11:46:22 AM PDT by WildHighlander57 ((WildHighlander57, returning after lurking since 2000) [ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 21 | View Replies | Report Abuse ]

[I am Richard Brandon]

Langoliers?

[WildHighlander57]

Ping to my post

[WildHighlander57]

Ping to my post #54

[WildHighlander57]

Getting turned around doesn’t account for the course set between those waypoints in the west side of Malaysia.... or does it?

[chrisser]

Any 777 entering a country’s airspace will receive severe scrutiny for at least the next 6 months or so.

I'm only asking because I don't know but...

How does air traffic control know what kind of plane it is?

I assume the transponders have something to do with it - can they be spoofed?

If the plane was stolen, it's a pretty impressive bit of logistics.

Here's a possible scenario.

Say a commercial flight takes off from the general area of where this plane is located, headed for the U.S. or another western country. The stolen plane takes off and intercepts somewhere along the route where radar is sparse.

Pilot of the commercial plane "accidently" turns off his tranponder and slows down or circles to kill time. Stolen plane turns on transponder and takes on identity of commercial plane and heads towards target armed with nuke, suicide pilot, whatever.

In the confusion at the target, commercial plane is able to redirect to another airport without anyone noticing the duplicate transponder in time for the pilot to slip away after landing.

I imagine if the target was something like the UK, incoming flights would be redirected elsewhere - possibly to the continent. Would airports in France notice that the same transponder that hit London was heading into Paris, for example?

[barmag25]

http://www.livemint.com/Politics/tFeN430YM9ibmum8BdeQ7H/Search-for-Malaysia-Airlines-plane-may-extend-to-Indian-Ocea.html