Canadian fighter jets sent to intercept British plane

"nobody" wrote:

Plane declares hijack. . . . Then, the pilots
confirm verbally that there is no hijacking taking
place, but are unable to reset the switch.

I'm confused. My understanding (someone please correct me if I'm
wrong?) was that once an aircraft's transponder has been set -- even
momentarily -- to "squawk" the hijack code (7500), a hijacking is
presumed to be in progress regardless of any subsequent changing of
the code or statements by the flight crew. (This, AFAIK, is so that
a hijacker can't cancel the alert by resetting the transponder or
forcing the crew to claim it was just a mistake and all is well.)

So plane lands in Halifax, they spend time working
out the glitch.

Do we know yet exactly what the "glitch" was?

Was the aircraft equipped with a switch -- separate from the regular
transponder controls -- that, if activated, would force the unit to
squawk 7500 regardless of the settings on the dials? If so, perhaps
this switch failed in an "on" position, was accidentally bumped,
etc., and the "squawk 7500" functionality was locked.

Or did the pilot or co-pilot accidentally turn through 7500 while
resetting the transponder, one digit at a time, to a new code? (I
understood pilots were supposedly trained to be very careful =not=
to do that, but . . . .)

Rich Wales http://www.richw.org

Rich Wales wrote:

"nobody" wrote:

Plane declares hijack. . . . Then, the pilots
confirm verbally that there is no hijacking taking
place, but are unable to reset the switch.

I'm confused.


You are responding to "nobody" aka the infamous "JF Mezei" troll of
rec.travel.air. He *absolutely* does not know what he is talking about
this or any other subject....

--
Best
Greg

Dave Smith wrote:
Tchiowa wrote:


If you trusted the ability of US fighter pilots and their command
structure to direct the plane to, say, Bangor Maine (presumably a
place with not a lot of tall buildings) then this wouldn't be an
issue. Any attempt to fly beyond Bangor, then shoot them down.
Plenty of time to do that.

Object is to get the plane out of the air as quickly as possible. Not
let it fly around to various countries to do it.

It was a London to NY flight. It had nothing to do with Canada. We should
have kept out fighters on the ground and let the US deal with it.

The fighters were dispathced from NORAD command, a joint US-Canada
venture designed to protect North American space....