As an ex Lear pilot (23s & 24s), I have (had) the utmost confidence
in the airplane and it's systems ... but would be extremely hesitant
to fly an aircraft that could be controlled externally.  Almost all
of the Lear accidents of which I'm aware were rooted in human error,
not systems failure.  The Lear is a suburb airplane ... Bill Lear
way over engineered his design.  The company I flew for regularly
operated a LR-23 (certificated for 41,000 ft.) at 50,000 feet on
photo mapping missions in Latin America, and often cruised the
24s at mach .85 or .86 (certificated for .82).

This accident is difficult to understand ... both pilots should have
had their oxygen masks around their necks during climb out and had
no difficulty in donning their masks in the event of an explosive
decompression.  If there was a failure in the pressurization system
causing a slow loss of pressure there should have been at least
two cockpit indications before hypoxia became a problem ... a
cabin altitude warning alarm and the cabin altitude indicator
which the copilot should have been monitoring during climbout.  If
the cabin altitude warning failed, and the copilot wasn't being
alert, there are still all of the physiological symptoms of hypoxia
which should have alerted the flight crew to the problem long before
they became incapacitated.  The flight's assigned cruising altitude
was F.L. 390, so they were apparently incapacitated somewhere in
the mid 30s ... making it even more difficult to understand.

Many corporate pilots have not been through a military altitude
chamber training course (although they are available), but even
without training a rapid decompression should not have caused them
any problem other than having to divert to an alternate airport
or continuing at 12,000 feet.  As a new copilot I once accidentally
dumped cabin pressure while at F.L. 410 ... and the only problem was
the captain's anger (we were flying freight so there were no pax
problems).

Pure off the wall speculation:  In these days of weird behavior I
wouldn't be too surprised if it turns out to be murder/suicide.  Dead
pilots cannot fly the plane, and several bullet hole would be more
than the pressurization system could overcome.  Weirder things have
happened ... remember the attempted suicide some time ago in a C-421?
He eventually crashed at sea and survived after shooting himself in
the head.

'enough of this,
 - Nick -


Brian Kraut wrote:
>
> You forget that today's technology is not used in most avionics because of the
> approval process from the FAA.  Most avionics are 70s technology.  This is one
> of the main reasons that I got a degree in avionics and decided to work in
> marine electronics.  I wanted to work on something a little more cutting edge
> than 1972 circuits.
>
> It may sound like a good idea on modern designs to be able to control them
> remotely, but the chance of that going wrong and crashing a plane is about 100
0
> times more likely than of it saving one.
>
> William Chops Westfield wrote:
>
> >     With today's technology, mainly communication technology, I JUST CAN NOT
> >     BELIEVE that in 5 hours flying in automatic pilot, it is not possible to
> >     download information from a Learjet board computer and understand why
> >     everybody aboard is dead or unconscious, and otherwise try to land it
> >     even in a bad landing, better than wait it to crash.
> >         :
> >     I don't want to start a discussion here, not even a fight about [OT]s
> >     but just transmit the idea, that when you develop something, please
> >     think about safety and how it can impact human lifes, even being a small
> >     PIC unit using a powerful explosive NiCad or Lithium battery.
> >
> > "Safety" is usually at odds with other values that people claim to believe
> > in, such as privacy, affordability, accessability, and a large number of
> > factors that are usually lumped together under the heading of "freedom."
> > While the situation you descrive above is sad, it is also preferrable, I
> > think, to crackers posting pictures of famous people looking weird as they
> > sleep in airline seats, or assorted types of espionage carried out by
> > similar mechanisms.  (rather like that revolution that succeeded because
> > there was no back-door to the encryption algorithm that sealed the existing
> > goverments armaments.  Sad, but better than the alternative.)
> >
> > "Those who would trade their liberty for safety deserve neither."  (Or
> > something like that.  Ben Franklin.)
> >
> > OTOH, even as I type over here, there is source code over there that I'm
> > working on which will add the off-requested "tap" feature to cisco terminal
> > servers, to aid in "debugging" of complex async problems and such, where
> > you'd like to see the data stream that's happening on some other terminal.
> > For years I've fought this on privacy and "attractive nusiance" values, but
> > I'm finally giving in based on the "there are a lot of other ways to do
> > basically the same thing, anyway."  There's little doubt that elsewhere in
> > the company, people are working on other parts of the federally mandated
> > wiretap features...
> >
> > BillW