Why a "Startlingly Simple Theory" is so Startlingly Wrong (opens in new tab)

If the author is hanging around: Good debunking. Wouldn't there be situations where the pilots would be dealing with an emergency and not radio ATC? Given they are so far away from an airport getting priority to landing doesn't seem like the most important thing. E.g. here (http://www.deltava.org/library/B777%20Manual.pdf ):

TOTAL POWER LOSS

- Determine if possible to reach airfield, if not search for an appropriate field or clearing to land in.

- Stay on or above the glide slope at all times during approach. Once you get below it, you cannot get back up above it.

- Use full flaps for landing.

- Set Auto-Brake FULL

- Continue as if normal landing.

(I don't know if this is equal to the pilot's checklist but there's no radio ATC in there, I guess that's a subset of "normal landing")

I'm sure the airplane will be found eventually and the mystery will be resolved. Right now there doesn't seem to be enough reliable data publicly available to form any sort of conclusion.

The author's credentials are impressive, but it's not a very good debunking, IMO. The whole point of the original article was that an electrical fire could have happened that disabled a large amount of the electrical transponders or navigation system.

This author argues that, given this scenario, the pilots would use the interface "with a button press" to know where the nearest airports are; that they would have radioed ATC; that they would have used autopilot! Yet the whole premise of the initial theory was that much of the electronic systems were in failure mode.

He then handwaves detailed discussion of that aspect away: "Even with a large majority of the aircraft's electrical system depowered certain key components would still operate on battery backup, and I venture to guess that includes at least one radio."

I think the important thing to discuss in these speculations is not what the pilots did or didn't do with perfect knowledge and ability, but what they thought they were doing with the limited knowledge they had available to them.

It's a good debunking... but as a piss-poor private pilot, I think he, an advanced test pilot, might underestimate the ability of some pilots to stray pretty far from how they are trained, in a highly stressful situation, and possibly more so in less advanced countries or airlines where they are not highly incentivized to always do everything by the book... see the Korean crash at SFO... And even on AF 447 allegedly the co-pilot was pulling back on the stick in a stall... so was the Colgan Air pilot in the US -

http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/12/14/buffalo.crash.colgan.air/

http://www.ainonline.com/aviation-news/farnborough-air-show/...

This is my favorite theory so far: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_714

The whole emergency theory seems to be shot down for the moment by the "fact" (I use any facts in quotes on this story) that the plane started its turn before the last radio contact from the pilots. It's remotely possible that someone other than the pilots programmed that turn, but it seems unlikely that the pilots would not have noticed the plane turning.

Of course, the evidence of the turn could be wrong. But if it's true, then we're assuming either ongoing pilot incompetence, or pilots who knew the plane was turning and didn't reveal to ground control. Occam's razor suggests the latter.

Wired, do the right thing and print this one, too.