Hi
I'm posting this so that if I turns out to be right I have proof I knew it when it happened. LOL
There has been a lot of speculation and most of it is crazy.
I've been a pilot since 1972.
I sold my airplane and haven't done much flying since the early nineties but I still have friends who fly and stay connected to what's going on in aviation and of course I have a flight simulator.
Here's what I would bet money on is the correct answer.
Just after leaving Air Traffic Control and totally by a stroke of bad fortune he aircraft had a sudden depressurization before they contacted the next controller.
It could have been hit by a meteorite, a piece of space junk, a door or window blew out, or just had a structural failure in the skin.
I suppose it could have been a bomb in the cargo hold, but I'm betting on it being just some kind of fluke accident.
The air at 35,000 feet is very thin and cold, the next thing to being in space.
The pilot had time to do one thing before he died, and it wasn't to talk on the radio.
He hit the emergency flight plan on the Autopilot!
It's not required but it's not uncommon for a pilot to pre-program alternate flight paths in case of an emergency.
Especially one like the pilot of this airplane because he was a real aviation geek who flew his own simulator when he wasn't working.
The emergency flight plan would have turned the airplane back toward land.
That's exactly what the airplane did.
The problem is that someone needed to intervene once they had time to respond and take it off or autopilot.
By that time everyone on the airplane was already dead.
That's why no one made any cellphone calls, and there was no further communication from the pilots.
The catastrophic even also cause the electrics to start going down, so everything started failing.
The airplane just kept flying until it ran out of gas.
The autopilot or some configuration of the plane after the event may have let it drift off course and it flew until it ran out of fuel hours later.
It's not like it never happened before.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_South_Dakota_Learjet_crash
This airplane was headed for Texas and ended up in South Dakota.
Mike
I'm posting this so that if I turns out to be right I have proof I knew it when it happened. LOL
There has been a lot of speculation and most of it is crazy.
I've been a pilot since 1972.
I sold my airplane and haven't done much flying since the early nineties but I still have friends who fly and stay connected to what's going on in aviation and of course I have a flight simulator.
Here's what I would bet money on is the correct answer.
Just after leaving Air Traffic Control and totally by a stroke of bad fortune he aircraft had a sudden depressurization before they contacted the next controller.
It could have been hit by a meteorite, a piece of space junk, a door or window blew out, or just had a structural failure in the skin.
I suppose it could have been a bomb in the cargo hold, but I'm betting on it being just some kind of fluke accident.
The air at 35,000 feet is very thin and cold, the next thing to being in space.
The pilot had time to do one thing before he died, and it wasn't to talk on the radio.
He hit the emergency flight plan on the Autopilot!
It's not required but it's not uncommon for a pilot to pre-program alternate flight paths in case of an emergency.
Especially one like the pilot of this airplane because he was a real aviation geek who flew his own simulator when he wasn't working.
The emergency flight plan would have turned the airplane back toward land.
That's exactly what the airplane did.
The problem is that someone needed to intervene once they had time to respond and take it off or autopilot.
By that time everyone on the airplane was already dead.
That's why no one made any cellphone calls, and there was no further communication from the pilots.
The catastrophic even also cause the electrics to start going down, so everything started failing.
The airplane just kept flying until it ran out of gas.
The autopilot or some configuration of the plane after the event may have let it drift off course and it flew until it ran out of fuel hours later.
It's not like it never happened before.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_South_Dakota_Learjet_crash
This airplane was headed for Texas and ended up in South Dakota.
Mike
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