There are warning horns that go off if/when the cabin altitude gets above 10,000', just to warn you of a slow decompression, which was not the case in the Paine Stewart jet. They had a slow decompression from the door seal, but no warning system for high cabin altitude.

On the 777, there is one central location where all the electrons come together, that is in the E+E compartment, which is under the floor just aft of the ****. It's a very small space filled with all the computers, for all the systems and the radios, transponders, etc. Everything electrical passes through there on it's way to somewhere else. There is also a 'master computer' which is called the AIMS Cabinet.

Many times when we get on the jet, there are 4 mechanics in the **** trying to do a "Reset of the AIMS cabinet" because the airplane is giving them all kinds of stupid nonsense messages. It's a computer, sh!t in, sh!t out, so like any Microsoft product, they'll shut it down and reboot it, then run all their systems tests, again, and hope the status messages go away. This takes about 30 minutes.

Just last month a Captain friend of mine had to go 'down in the hole' to reset some circuit breakers for the SATCOM system which had quit working. They had to call ATL Maintainance on the HF radios and get instructions on where the CB's were, then go back into the first class cabin, pull up the rug, open the hatch, and climb down into the E+E bay to reset them. This while they were cruising at altitude over the south Atlantic, from Joburg to ATL.

So...it's not unheard of that something in the E/E compartment could go wrong. What other systems it takes out depends on what went wrong. If it was bad enough, it might knock out the transponders and radios, then start a smoke/fire event.

Remember the 787's battery overheating problems? Yeah. And that was a brand new airplane. These Malaysian 777's are 10-15 years old, who knows how good their mx on them is? Do they reset their Aims cabinets when they get a bad status message, or just say, "You can go without it, you'll be ok..." because they don't want to take a 30 minute delay. And what was the history on this particular air frame? They track mx issues specific to airframes. Did this one have a history of E/E issues? Nobody's saying yet.

If that's the case, you can understand why the airline officials would -not- be forthcoming with that info. It puts the blame squarely on them and their shoddy mx....IF that's the case. I'm just speculating here. I don't know what they consider a mx no-go issue. I know I don't leave ATL unless the airplane is 100%, due to my butt being out over the water for 14 hours, or over the north pole.

If the smoke/fire was bad enough to kill the pilots, the pax were dead too. All the air circulates throughout the entire airplane, which is why you would want to descend below 10,000' and shut off the pressurization, to stop the smoke circulation. The pilots have oxygen masks of course, but only about an hours worth of O2, if the bottle was full when they left. Sometimes they are only half full when you leave. Yes, we check it. I don't know if they do however.

If they got it turned around and descended to 10,000' and pointed it west, but then were overcome with smoke...it will fly on autopilot until it runs out of fuel, again, depending on how bad the fire was in the E/E compartment. Even if the autopilot stops working, the airplane is in trim to fly straight and level, it will amble along by itself, just like a sailboat will, going downwind if you've trimmed the rudder pressure to about zero then you fall overboard while taking a pee, it will go on without you, until some air bumps upset it enough to send it into a banking turn, then it will just slowly spiral into the sea.

It is very strange, and the 777 has not had any inflight fires in the E/E bay to my knowledge, but it may have been a hijacking with a couple morons who thought they could make it to Pakistan or...? BUT...if they were savvy enough to know to turn off the transponder, they also should have known how much fuel and what type of range they had to work with, and made it to where ever they were going.

I still think it was some type of mechanical issue and it went into the ocean or jungle.

OR...it was hijacked and ended up in the sea. Either way, that's a lot of water to search. Remember the Air France flight that went down off South America? The search party had a very good radar fix of exactly where they were, but it still took them two years to find it.

If one of the pilots had decided to go rogue, he would have had an airport in mind and been there by now, and we'd have heard about it. You can't hide a 777 for very long, even in the third world. If one of the pilots had wanted to kill himself, he would have just rolled it over and gone straight in, transponder ON, not off, what does he care about radar coverage, he probably would have made a radio call too, like "Adios MF'rs!" I doubt he'd fly along for 4 hours waiting to die.


Now, do we "Trust" the Malaysian radar data? Do we trust the "Pings" they say had it flying along west bound for four hours? Or should they go back and search the last known position again?