Page 25 - Flight Controls News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

Pinpoint on it and that car -- the gps system will actually help you get to that point. it's not much different than what we can do in the air. that's one way of doing navigation. another way is to use conventional ground-based navigational aids which send up beacons and magnetic signals in which the airplane can orient itself off of. >> can i ask you a question? have you or anyone you know as a pilot ever had occasion in a plane to make a turn like the kind of turn off course that we are increasingly led to believe happened in this case? >> well, yes. i mean, on occasion, sometimes if you pro...

Have a potential nexus where you can cross over from a, a nonsecure system into a secure system. >> has this been evaluated by any of the governments involved, of whether or not even another passenger may have hacked in? because the problem is, that once we went digital, in cockpits, the only way to overcome by a pilot someone that takes over the controls remotely, is analog. is there anything analog in that cockpit any more? >> no. just about everything is digital flight controls and fly by wire controls. so you no longer have for example, mechanical linkages running back to the rudders and t...

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...

We're now hearing that authorities will confirm that the flight did take this veering off course of some several hundred miles. you say it's still most likely it was a catastrophic event maybe dealing with the directive about the cracks in the fuselage but then how would it make it hundreds of miles? >> because the 777 has an interesting system. when you start losing systems, they shut down other systems. it's intended to do this. it preserves the flight controls as best that it can and the -- it tries to preserve what systems it has to keep that plane in the air. it's the same thing the air b...

Flying pilot was out of the cabin on a rest room break. they actually got into a struggle in the cockpit to get control of the plane. and unfortunately, the co pilt pilot turned the engines off and the plane crashed into the north atlantic. so you do have two cases where pilots have deliberately flown their planes into the ocean. >> and is it that -- is it that easy, peter, to simply push a button and the transponder goes off and then no one can monitor where that plane is heading? >> it is not difficult. you can either -- you can either turn the transponder off in the flight controls and in f...