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Comment by bambax | Hacker News Reader

Stealing a plane with 237 people on board is a great story but no version that I have read address the question of how you prevent every one of those 237 people from texting about it?

Even if you're willing to kill them all it takes some time that they could use to try and make some sort of signal.

This plane fell into the sea and we'll find it eventually. The sea is vast.

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Few passengers would notice if the plane changed course during flight and if they did, they would have no cell phone connection anyways. While up in air, all devices could be collected from the passengers. When the plane landed (on land) and the passengers had signals again, all of these devices would have had to be destroyed so that they didn't connect to the local cell towers.

But I think you are right that the plane fell into the sea.

Well, I did actually try to get a cell connection one time at 35000 feet and it wasn't a problem. To be fair it was over Russia somewhere and not in the middle of an ocean.

Cigarette-box-sized GSM/radio jammers, dead cheap and you can disguise them e.g. as a gaming console, replacement battery pack or such.

Additionally, a radio jammer could explain why there were no other radio comms from that plane, except the satellite uplink of the plane GSM picocell and the sat uplink of the engine MCU.

I don't think you know what you're talking about

A GPS jammer will do absolutely nothing to a plane. Edit: A GSM jammer, even less

A "radio jammer"? For what frequency? For what range? VHF, HF?

> A "radio jammer"? For what frequency? For what range? VHF, HF?

Er… GSM?

True, it's GSM that's mentioned

Which makes even less sense in the middle of the sea

that far away from land would you even need to "jam" a cell phone or similar? I would assume the plane has equipment to maintain passenger contact with cellular systems and that would be just as easy to disable as the transponders are.

He/she didn't mention GPS at all...

Couldn't whoever was piloting the plane act like they were still going to the right destination and then land them in a place where none of their phones have connection? Then it wouldn't be a problem to slowly move all the hostages to a holding area or something. Of course I don't think this was the case but it would be an explanation of why there has been no text messages etc if this were to happen.

Make them fall asleep by reducing cabin pressure while you fly with an oxygen mask.

edit - yes, I did nick this from "The Langoliers"

Cabin pressure and O2 are not something the pilot can fiddle with while in flight. Easyjet are often accused of doing it to save fuel/make passengers docile, and it's been debunked.

Which would cause the oxygen masks to deploy.

If you first trigger a fire alarm, it wouldn't.

Cell jammers are relatively inexpensive to buy and would be trivial to deploy for this type of thing

Portable GSM/CDMA/3G jammers are dirt cheap.

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