Originally Posted by
mixture
Utter nonsense. Have you ever tried to use a satellite phone inside of a vehicle ? I have, and you can hardly establish a viable network connection, let alone make a phone call unless you have an external antenna connection, which, lets face it, they are very very very unlikely to have had on a 777 !
IF this incident was a carefully planned and executed hijacking, and IF the hijackers aboard the aircraft were coordinating with accomplices at some destination as yet unknown, there is no reason why they would have to use Inmarsat or Iridium or any other type of satellite network to communicate with their confederates.
The 777 is equipped with at least two powerful HF radio tranceivers, capable of operating on any frequency between 2 and 30 MHz. HF employs simple point-to-point communication directly from transmitter to receiver, and does not require any external network whatsoever. There is no digital data encoded in the signal that could identify the source of the transmission - it is simple single sideband amplitude modulation - a technology that has been in use for decades.
Though an airliner's HF radios are normally used to communicate with ATC facilities on specific frequencies in assigned band segments used for aeronautical communications, there is absolutely nothing to prevent the HF from being tuned to a discrete pre-arranged frequency somewhere else in the 2-30 MHz spectrum - such transmissions are unlikely to be monitored or intercepted in real time, and even if they were, localizing the exact position of the transmissions is quite difficult, due to the nature of ionospheric radio propagation that makes long-distance communication possible at HF frequencies.
Assuming it was indeed a coordinated hijacking, with the aircraft destined for a secret landing at some unknown location, the people awaiting the arrival on the ground would need nothing more than a battery-powered HF transceiver, and a simple long-wire antenna to communicate directly with the aircraft, even if it was still hundreds or thousands of miles away.
As a licensed amateur radio operator, I have done this many times while backpacking in remote areas - communicating with other amateurs around the world, using extremely simple and portable equipment.