ChemE Stewart <[email protected]> wrote: Things happen fast at 500 MPH. They had just reached cruising altitude > maybe one of them was back in the head and got sucked out...
The airplane continued to fly for many hours after the event that caused the IFF to go off and the airplane to deviate from the assigned flight path. I assume that "event" was a pilot action, but whatever it was, hours elapsed after that and the plane flew for thousands of miles. Therefore it could not be a case of the pilots being incapacitated or dead. They could not have changed course the way they did if they were incapacitated. After it deviated the first time, it flew a complicated course including zig-zagging. Again, no autopilot would do that. It is extremely unlikely that the radio, IFF and the emergency radio beacon in the tail (SARSAT) were destroyed by a fire, yet the aircraft could still be controlled and flown for hours. Any fire bad enough to destroy all communications would also crash the plane. Airplanes have multiple redundant communication systems and other vital systems. - Jed
