If the descent was controlled gliding, the passengers (at least some of them) should be alive upon landing, shouldn’t they? Where are they now?
Which theory could explain the absolute silence?
Also, if you would get out of the plane, you are then in the middle of the indian ocean with just your life vest and the sharks. You get maybe 3 days, because the water is warm.
And nobody will find you if they don't know where they should be looking. An airplane life vest doesn't have an AIS transponder, only the life rafts/emergency slides do. If those weren't properly deployed, no chance of a vessel finding you. There are reports of shipwreck survivors about ships passing within a few hundred meters of them in calm seas, and failing to see them.
It is absolutely vital to keep the man-over-board in sight. Practically no exceptions.
Doing so will give them 60-90 minutes of extra air, the passengers' masks don't last that long.
If that extra pressure goes away for whatever reason, people are handed oxygen masks and tanks to help them stay alive. What the GP comment says is that the plane may have been depressurized at one point at high altitude. The pilot’s oxygen mask is usually designed to last longer than any of the other passengers’s masks do. So it’s not entirely implausible that the pilot can still guide the plane into controlled descent, while all the other passengers may have already passed out due to lack of oxygen.
Not most people. Nobody can breath if the altitude is high enough. There are some individual variability in how high is too high. That is of interest if you go mountaineering, but not really in a situation where an aircraft rapidly decompresses at the altitude MH370 was speculated to be flying at.
Read generously, they're talking about with supplemental oxygen. At 35k feet, even with pure oxygen, many people will not be able to breathe and most will not be able to comfortably. (Above 40k feet, supplemental oxygen no longer works--everybody needs pressurised oxygen.)
(Obviously nobody can breathe above the Armstrong limit, but that isn't relevant with a commercial airliner.)
That's why they tell you in safety briefings to always put your own mask on before helping others.
On the other hand, the ability to shut down a system that has failed can save everyone on board.
There are approximately 40,000,000 flights each year. Almost all occur without incident. In the entire 120-year history of aviation, only a few accidents have resulted from the pilot intentionally crashing the plane.
At the end of the day, there are so many other ways for the pilots to down an airliner and kill everyone, they are ultimately the only people you can’t practically have the system distrust. The only thing you can do is the rule to always have two people in the cockpit but it doesn’t always help.
Ultimately the pilots have to be able to turn anything off that might malfunction.
Also even if you (try to) take capabilities away they are by definition quite smart people and could probably figure a way round if they really wanted to.
Ultimately the pilots have to be able to turn anything off that might malfunction.
I think Petter's (Mentour Pilot) delve into it is quite good - there's a lot of detail I hadn't known.
https://www.reddit.com/r/CatastrophicFailure/comments/3f7fkk...
(There were a number of survivors in this case, though.)
That makes me wonder if being able to land a passenger plane on water is ever a factor in its design.
https://www.pprune.org/tech-log/358285-airbus-ditching-butto...
Looks to be in a few airbus models.
https://simpleflying.com/airbus-aircraft-ditch-switch-emerge...
If I recall correctly I've read that the bigger the plane the less likely it is to work but I don't have sources.
Because it is possible and foldr is incorrect in stating that it is not possible.
On the video he linked panicked hijackers were fighting with the pilots for the controls. Clearly that is not an ideal scenario for any kind of landing. Even more so for a tricky water landing one. But that is more of a reason to avoid hijackers fighting with the pilots, not proof that ditching is impossible.
Water landings are clearly not the preferred way to land. They are very risky. But they are also not as impossible as that comment makes them out to be. Here is a list of them from wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_landing
The closest example I could find in the list you link was the following. But it ditched a few miles from the coast and had much smaller engines than a typical modern passenger airliner. Also, it was a cargo flight with only the pilots on board, and the captain was seriously injured.
https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/down-in-deep-water-the-d...
In such a case, the emergency oxygen masks for passengers will drop, but those are only rated for 15 to 30 minutes.
After that Oxygen runs out, assuming the pilot maintains cruise altitude above 25000ft, everyone onboard will lose conscious via hypoxia within 1 minute, and be brain dead within 15 minutes.
No one (except the pilot) would be alive to see the plane crash.
Pilot can also re-pressurize the aircraft after 30 minutes, and breathe fine. Pilot oxygen masks are meant to last for at least an hour.
Perhaps the pilot's goal was to hide all the evidence as well as possible, to create a perfect mystery. Then a controlled ditching would make sense, although it kind of failed considering the debris which eventually reached Africa.
Without that, debris would only hint at somewhere in the Indian Ocean, probably.
[1] https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/call-of-the-void-seven-y...
Why of all the possibilities, you choose the most vile one and present it as if you know the facts?
I'm not making any assumptions about the pilot's motives or the final circumstances. I just wondered about the implications of a controlled glide, as the paper suggested. Is there any uncertainty, any margin for error? There certainly is.