Most cogent analysis I’ve seen so far.
One question most people haven’t thought to ask I believe: Do pilots know that their engines are sending pings to the satellites? If so, can those pings be shut down from the flight deck?
I’m wondering this because the locus of possible landing locations is bounded by a circle defined by the radius of the aircraft flying at max speed from the center of that circle defined by its last ping. It has from the time of the last ping until the next expected ping to hide the plane and shut it down before it pings again.
If it pings over land, then the hijackers would be at risk of being found and caught.
You’d want to ‘make your escape’ from your last ping, ending your flight as close to your next ping as possible.
Or, you’d want to shut the engine health satellite ping off.
Where ever you land, you’d want holes for both the bodies and the luggage, even if you intended to burn or dissolve both first.
I would not be surprised if Malaysian Air isn’t in talks with Boeing to have each of those aircraft repainted in a brand new service mark and color scheme on some sort of rotating basis.
The one very highly impractical thing for the hijackers to pull off is a repainting of the aircraft. They can do such a thing, but it would be difficult.
You pull the seats out of something like a 777 and you can get a terrifying number of nuclear weapons aboard. Making them go off all at the exact same time would be a tougher trick than you’d think.
Putting on the tinfoil hat for a second, if there is any truth to the rumor that we use commercial heavies to perform weather modification work on their routes, and that they are equipped with tanks and nozzles for distributing the material used for that purpose, it may mean that the plane has the means to distribute chemical or biological weapons without being either suspected or detected.
It’s funny how we find out, after the appropriate amount of time, that many conspiracy theories turn out being correct. McCarthy was right. Government WAS full of communists. The listed goals of Communism for the US were legitimate, and the new Soviet Union is still working toward them, etc.
Anyway, the havoc you can wreak with a 777 isn’t limited to crashing it into a building.
Sobering thought.
>> “One question most people haven’t thought to ask I believe: Do pilots know that their engines are sending pings to the satellites? If so, can those pings be shut down from the flight deck?” <<
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Yes, and no.
The data come directly from the engines, powered by the engines. There would be no reason to run a switch to the cockpit, as that would increase the chance of a short, not decrease it.