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Comment by bandyaboot | Hacker News Reader

Anyone have any knowledge of what would have happened had he successfully pulled the fire extinguisher handles? I have to imagine it would still be recoverable? Though I do understand that you’d be having to deal with recovering the engines at the same time as dealing with a hostile individual in the cockpit.

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At FL360 (36,000') the plane has a glide ratio of 20:1; so they would have been able to glide 136 miles.

the only problem is that if there is no running jet engine, there is no more oxygen (produced from bleed air) and the oxygen masks last for 10-20 minutes...

The APU would still be able, to an extent, to provide pressurisation even if both engines are disabled.

I would guess that the cockpit has a longer supply and perhaps they could descend faster to a safely survivable altitude. You’ll be able to pick up speed doing so and so a lot of that energy for gliding is still available, though some extra would be wasted due to the higher speed and longer time spent in higher pressure atmosphere.

According to discussion about this on avherald.com, yes the engine can be restarted after the fire suppression handle is reset.

https://avherald.com/h?article=510218dd&opt=0

Depends what stage of flight they were in. The engines will shut off as the extinguishing system is activated, so if they were shortly after takeoff, they might not have enough time or enough energy to do an emergency landing back at the airport.

In a worst-case scenario, your plane becomes a glider (see some famous fuel-starvation incidents which result in flare-out).

I suspect the jets have restart procedures available and can "flush" the fire extinguisher "juice" out.

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