Page 24 - Flight Controls News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

You can see here, we'll give them a little commercial, collins radios extensively used. hamilton standard makes lots of controls on airplanes and some electronics. we saw cabin pressure controller on the other side. we have here control units for certain actuators. the 777 is a digital airplane. it's run by electronics. even connections from the pilot, there's only i think seven cables in the whole airplane for the flight controls. it's a fly by wire airplane with minimum backup. >> you can see some of them labeled here. here is the traffic alert and tcas, as they call it. when you get too clo...

Matter of routine by its flight management system, and this will guide the airplane to wherever it has to go along its waypoints. now, greg is absolutely right. this could have been a manual or a semi-manual turn. either way. using the autopilot or manually turning the plane using the flight controls. however, the subsequent track that the aircraft flew following standard navigation waypoints would strongly suggest that the navigation system was reprogrammed and used during the course of this flight. >> and on that point wnyc put together a map here, and we just played of course some sound fro...

Mechanical failure, fire on board, for instance, which gradually shut down systems or the pilots felt like they had to shut down systems, correct? >> anything is up for grabs at this point. we can go back to twa 800 where it was attributed to fuel pumps in one of the tanks, because of dry tanks to ignited the vapors. that could be a possible scenario. i very much doubt it because these airplanes have been modified so that never occurs. but, you know, when we talk about catastrophic failure, it progressively might have turned into that where they were trying to troubleshoot the system. if this ...

Is what a lot of people thought early on. that seems to be ruled out if you believe the satellite data that this plane was flying around for hours afterward. but there could be some kind of mechanical failure, fire on board, for instance, which gradually shut down systems or the pilots felt dolike they hado shut down systems, correct? >> anything is up for grabs at this point. we can go back to twa 800 where it was attributed to fuel pumps in one of the tanks, because of dry tanks to ignited the vapors. that could be a possible scenario. i very much doubt it because these airplanes have been m...

Would lose flight controls because the spread above that air speed is about ten miles per hour -- >> what does that mean? >> in other words, the airplane is flying so high the max performance of being able to stay in the air, and the speed controlled he would have, let's say 500 miles an hour, if he went 505, he would get a high speed buffet. if he went 490 miles an hour he could endanger the plane with a stall. but if he did anything like pulling the plane up with a zoom cloud for altitude, the airplane would become uncontrollable. >> and your thoughts on whether the passengers on board the a...