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Comment by wildrhythms | Hacker News Reader

I'm struggling to understand how this would explain the account here:

>Then the master power button up at 1L for the cabin power kept getting I pushed so it would shut off all the IFE, seat power and outlets. I had to push the button on again about 3 times inflight. Then the 2 got a call with the same groaning noise and thought it was one of us playing a joke but it wasn't us.

>It certainly was freaking all of us and the passengers. They wanted off the plane as bad as we did. The 2 be FAs said they had been on the plane the other day and the same thing happened. I had a visual on each FA when the noise would come over the PA and one time when the FO was doing a break so unless the captain was playing a long sick, joke I don't have an explanation.

https://twitter.com/xJonNYC/status/1572358118985633795

Any ideas?

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> Then the master power button up at 1L for the cabin power kept getting I pushed so it would shut off all the IFE

I can't even get passed the first sentence of this. What does any of this mean?

1L is the forward-most door on the port (left) side.

IFE is in flight entertainment.

Uninformed guess: "The master [public address system] power button [located] up by [seat] 1L kept getting pushed so it would shut off all the IFE [(inflight entertainment)]"

This makes sense, because for safety reasons all the entertainment is paused when they use the public address system.

> for safety reasons all the entertainment is paused when they use the public address system.

It's more common for the entertainment to be muted without being paused. I assume that's as a convenience to the passengers.

You're right, I forgot because I have just used my phone the last few years. Now I remember I always found it incredibly annoying because I'd miss part of the dialogue of what I was watching.

Yeah great convenience to miss part of the movie because they want to sell inflight shopping :P

I had totally forgotten about this because I haven't flown long-haul in decades. I suppose these days I would just watch video on my tablet anyway.

> Yeah great convenience to miss part of the movie

Nobody said a feature implemented as a convenience to the user had to make things more convenient for the user. They're barely even related concepts.

https://chainsawsuit.krisstraub.com/20171207.shtml

When I’ve been on long flights watching movies it pauses the movie. Not mute… maybe it depends on the airline.

I think "master power button" probably more clearly means some sort of master control switch for in-seat passenger accessory power, since it's described as shutting off all in-flight entertainment AND seat power. The sort of thing you're supposed to press during takeoff and landing, not during announcements

While it is plausible that the hack compromises the entire comm system, it's unlikely. My bet is that the steward made an incorrect association between the sounds and normal system behavior. These inaccurate retellings are extremely common in ghost stories.

Only time will tell, but I'm almost certain I'm right on this one.

This makes a lot of sense, but I’ll add that it’s also possible that the association was correct, but not for the assumed reason. For example, maybe the plane had a partially faulty breaker for the IFE, and there was a likelihood of tripping every time the PA system was used. (The button probably isn’t a breaker, but there’s a world of similar explanations.)

It's hard to follow what they meant when describing the button pushing.

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