Quote Originally Posted by carl View Post
American Pride:

There is probably a plain magnetic compass in the cockpit. Every airplane I've flown had one and there appears to be one in the 777 cockpit photos on the net. It was mandated on the smaller planes I'm familiar with and probably is on a 777 too.

If that didn't work I'll bet at least one of the pax had a hand held gps in their carry on bag. That would be good enough to find your way.

(The above is if the primary nav systems all fail. I should have said that.)

There have been at least two accidents that I know of where the crew and pax passed out due to oxygen deprevation due to depressurization. Both planes eventually crashed. But that probably doesn't account for the transponder not working.

Beyond that I don't know anything.
Not only would they have a backup set of rudimentary aviation and navigation instrumentation, they have a lost-comms approach procedure for KL which they'd be very familiar with.

The pressurisation system is one of the checklist items, and if I recall correctly, it's a simple mechanical knob that you turn to increase or decrease the pressure. It's pretty unlikely for a crew to miss setting it up correctly on the ascent, so the question is what caused the depressurisation?