Anyone watching Flash Forward?

jasonb

I know the title doesn't seem like it's anything to do with Aviation, but my question does...

For those of you not familiar with the programme 'Flash Forward', it deals with an event where humans lose consciousness for 2 mins and 17 seconds. Obviously, during this time a lot of people die ( car crashes, falling, drowning etc. ). There are also a lot of aircraft crashes depicted in the programme.

Now, I'd imagine an aircraft on final ( for example ) might have a big problem if the pilot suddenly loses consciousness, but am I right in thinking that the majority of aircraft ( and especially airliners ) that are in the sky, en route so to speak, wouldn't really be affected by their being no pilot / ATC? Wouldn't the aircraft just fly on the heading it was going until the pilot woke up again? In the case of airliners, would the only 'dangerous' time for a pilot / ATC to lose consciousness be while taking off, landing, and in a pattern around near the airport?

Whenever I see all sorts of aircraft just 'fall out of the sky' during this programme it annoys me as I think most of them would just stay up there. So I thought I'd check my logic here!

Thoughts please!

J.

cuterob

i thought the same thing when i saw it.. you are correct in what you have said

pclancy

In theory if a plane was on autopilot without any input from anyone or any sudden change in weather it would fly to the last point on its programmed flight plan and circle until it ran out of fuel.

If it was manually controlled obviously it would probably crash quite soon.

Andrew33

pclancy wrote: »

In theory if a plane was on autopilot without any input from anyone or any sudden change in weather it would fly to the last point on its programmed flight plan and circle until it ran out of fuel.

If it was manually controlled obviously it would probably crash quite soon.

Would it circle? or would it overfly the original spot and then turn around and try to reach the original spot continuously? I'm curious cos its not quite the same thing is it? Or would it just continue in a straight line on the last inputted heading? Do pilots input a heading into autopilot or a destination?

pclancy

Well it depends on the plane, its autopilot and type of autopilot setting used. If just HDG is selected and set to a certain heading it would continue to fly that heading until it ran out of fuel. I'd say if it was using a FMC set to follow a flightplan made up of lots of different waypoints it would continue to circle the last waypoint until it ran out of fuel. Depends on a lot of factors really.

andy_g

perfect example of the example the op stated. heres it is. Helios 522 Pilot incapacitation due to hypoxia brought about by depressurization, leading to
fuel starvation.

but it circled over athens until she ran out of fuel.

Sterling Archer

I was thinking this too, but the i remember a mayday program or seconds from disaster program about a plane crash into a swap, because the pilot had pushed the controls and turned off the auto pilot, in theory not every plane should have just fallen out of the sky, i hate movies and tv shows that portray aviation in such a poor light, just to get a big wow factor

Just found it... Eastern Air Lines Flight 401