during 316 crash

lapidus, sun, locke, ben, etc. seem to land in present real time, right? alpert even says to john locke that it has been 3 years since he disappeared in front of his eyes.....so how do we hear the numbers repeating when the plane (316) crashes? i am watching season 5 over and just saw the crash, paused, and wrote this..

perhaps during the 3 years since the O6 left, Richard turned the message back on for some reason ... the runway was finished also in that time.

it is more likly that jacob turned the tape back on. perhaps to bring more people to the island. It is possible that dharma uses the transmission just like the underwater beacon. and they will be able to find the island again.

why would jacob need a recording of the numbers to get people to the island. it seems he was doing just fine by touching people. Could this mean that somehow time has been altered, and jack et al never went to the radio tower to turn it off? in the final scene we see jacks eye open. could this be him waking up after the 815 crash, but now with his new knowledge, he does not turn of the numbers message. ya ya ya i get it, what happened happened. would love to hear more theories on why the recording was back on. i never even realized this when i saw the epi.

maybe the dharma have come back to the island in the three years since everyone left and turned the numbers recording back on.

Or the past has changed, and Reusseau never had a chance to put the numbers up

Why they are on again, could only be answered if we knew why they were being broadcast in the first place.
I don't think Jack turned the numbers transmission off. He turned off the French distress call that has been playing for 17 years. The numbers were there prior to the distress call. I doubt Richard and crew would turn them on . I was under the impression that the DI had broadcast them, I don't know why. In any case the broadcast was turned off in 1987 by Rousseau. So how did they get turned on again?
This leads us again to has the future been changed?

the radio transmitter was turned off.

nnot hard in 3 years time for Richard to go turn on the radio again ...

it was much harder to finish the runway ...

with the Others unpinterupted they had 3 years to finish the work assigned to them by Jacob ...

isn't it silly to think they were just sitting around doing absolutely nothing for 3 years, as if the whole purpose of the Island since the beginning of time served only the drama of the Losties ?

I do ...

the Others went about their business and got things done.

the numbers were playing because they were supposed to be.

just my opinion.

you guys are talking about rousseaus message with the iteration counting. I am talking about the numbers being repeated. Hurleys numbers and the numbers that nut in santa rosa was saying. Did we ever find out if they were stopped or if they are still playing....i cant get a handle on whether or not i have ever heard about the numbers being turned off or still going

We are talking about the same numbers. Rousseau's group heard the numbers that's how they got to the island. She turned it off to broadcast her distress call. It played for 17yrs, then it was turned off by Jack and co. in order to call the boat people.
However if those numbers were playing again for flight 316, that is a mystery.

Richard and the others would not play the numbers, these numbers were part of the DI's mission and had nothing to do with the others.

my initial thought would be that the numbers transmission must serve as some sort of beacon to direct people there...somebody turns them on when they need them to know how to get there....Jacob, is said to "hate" technology, so I don't think he has anything to do with the transmission, plus like you guys said, can just "touch" or "think" people to the island...but MM has to go about it a different way. Maybe the transmission is MM's way to bring the people to the island he needs for his master plot. The numbers are evil, MM is evil...