Posted on 06/04/2009 1:26:35 PM PDT by traumer
Air France pilots battled for up to 15 minutes to save the doomed flight that went missing over the Atlantic this week, electronic messages emitted by the aircraft have revealed.
Details have emerged of the moments leading up to the disappearance of flight AF 447 with 228 people on-board, with error messages reportedly suggesting the plane was flying too slowly and that two key computers malfunctioned.
Flight data messages provided by an Air France source show the precise chronology of events of flight AF 447 before it plummeted into the sea 400 miles off Brazil on Monday.
These indicate that the pilot reported hitting tropical turbulence at 3am (BST), shortly before reaching Senegalese airspace. It said the plane had passed through tall, dense cumulonimbus thunderclouds.
At this stage, according to a source close to the investigation cited by Le Monde, the Airbus A330-200's speed was "erroneous" - either too fast or too slow. Each plane has an optimal speed when passing through difficult weather conditions, which for unknown reasons, had not been reached by flight AF 447.
Airbus is expected to issue recommendations today to all operators of the A330 model to maintain appropriate thrust levels to steady the plane's flight path in storms.
At 3.10am, the messages show the pilot was presented with a series of major failures over a four-minute period before catastrophe struck, according to automatic data signals cited by the Sao Paulo newspaper, le Jornal da Tarde.
At this time, the automatic pilot was disconnected – either by the pilot or by the plane's inbuilt security system, which flips to manual after detecting a serious error.
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
Sounds like the got turned into a giant ball of St. Elmo’s fire by the T-storms, and then the plasma currents started leaking through every ground fault they could find.
Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do...
Global warming!
Oh boy. Now the speculations will go into higher gear.
Garde la Foi, mes amis! Nous nous sommes les sauveurs de la République! Maintenant et Toujours!
(Keep the Faith, my friends! We are the saviors of the Republic! Now and Forever!)
LonePalm, le Républicain du verre cassé (The Broken Glass Republican)
Ping.
It was Senagalese airspace at that point?
In any case, this is a horrible scenario. Prayers for all those poor people.
If you think that's a joke, think again.
And no voice traffic? Something sounds fishy about that.
I don’t think they’ve recovered the “black boxes”, and I haven’t heard that there were any distress calls, so how are they determining this? Pure speculation?
Wow.
No matter what happened I pray for the passengers, crew and families of the flight.
I fly — A LOT — and can picture what happened and what they were thinking in their last moments. My wife and I both know the importance of that “last” statement: “I love you.” It may be our last statement.
But so may be your drive to work — so let the people you love know how much you love them. Frequently.
They were out of range of VHF communications (400 miles offshore). They would’ve had to use HF shortwave, which is borderline useless in thunderstorms—think of your car AM radio. Besides, if things are going to hell in a bucket in the cockpit, the first rule pilots follow is simple: Fly the plane. *Everything* else, including radio, is secondary to keeping the airplane moving forward and not hitting anything.
}:-)4
Actually it looks silly anyway.....
What the hell is wrong with you guys?
This ain’t funny at all — or does mass death just get you your jollies?
Huh. Failures in air data inputs can give erroneous airspeed indications and kick off the autopilot. I’m not familiar with this aircraft though...
This could have been wind shear: i.e. the plane was flying into a strong headwind and then suddenly found itself in a tailwind. This is what caused the Delta crash at D/FW back in the 80's.
However, the Delta plane was on final approach to the airport near the ground. This plane was presumably at high altitude and cruise speed, although they may have slowed to "maneuvering speed" because they expected heavy turbulence.
The "flying too slow" may have been an erroneous measurement, or it may have have been when the plane first went out of control.
I don’t know how they’d know about “erroneous speed” unless it was transmitted in another ACARS message that they didn’t tell us about at first. Apparently Airbii “phone home” with a lot of information (see all those fault messages between 0210 and 0214 GMT) but I wonder if either an overspeed or a near-stall is one of them.
}:-)4
I knew that would be some ‘scientist’ bent on destroying civilization would say after reading that.
It would be funny … but they are the same group that would believe the world is flat and would force ships to stay near land.
>>I don’t think they’ve recovered the “black boxes”, and I haven’t heard that there were any distress calls, so how are they determining this? Pure speculation?<<
Read the OP — they are basing it on the Computer-to-Computer communications.
I suspect there was no reason for the pilots to call in since there was nothing any airport controller could do for them. Better to keep your craft in the air.
Here’s what happened, it broke apart in flight
http://www.nypost.com/seven/06042009/news/worldnews/jets_horrifying_final_14_minutes_172538.htm
Computer failure?
Someone that knows more fill me in onf “fly by wire”. Is that where everything is controlled by computer/electronics or is that where there is a physical connection (so you can still fly the plane even if the electronics fail)?
I heard some concerns years ago about computer/electronics failures, but don’t know what came of it.
Newer airliners constantly transmit maintenance data and system faults to their maintenance facilities. This is done to reduce repair time and dispatch delays at their destination.
Is that the plural for Airbus?
Anyone remember the wing tests that Airbus failed. I wonder if that had anything to do with this.
It was in international airspace, but in Dakar Oceanic’s ATC sector.
As for the lack of radio transmissions, when you’re over the open ocean, transmissions are done over HF frequencies. HF is somewhat unreliable, so even if they wanted to broadcast a mayday, there is a chance that Dakar wouldn’t hear it.
there is nothing funny
Wouldn’t your NAVCOM and GPS give you true data? Assuming it is still operational at this point...
There’s a bias in these stories that the reporter wants to blame the victim if they can, that an Airbus can’t just fall apart in the sky without some pilot error. It helps people feel it couldn’t happen to them, that these were just dumb people. People fear random uncontrollable death much more than stupid death.
Oh, OK, that’s interesting. Thanks!
I don’t think Dakar was responsible for this, btw, I was just surprised that this was their airspace.
I’m sure they had satcom voice — the messages over ACRS were via satcom.
But they had multiple failures by the time they plummeted so they were probably too busy to try it, or by then it wasn’t available.
Truly a nightmare scenario.
Flight data messages provided by an Air France source show the precise chronology of events of flight AF 447 before it plummeted into the sea 400 miles off Brazil on Monday.I hope the peabrains who criticized me when I ruled out terrorism, and suggested that the plane had blundered into severe turbulence associated with a thunderstorm which, along with possible systems failures, spelled doom for the plane, will read this.These indicate that the pilot reported hitting tropical turbulence at 3am (BST), shortly before reaching Senegalese airspace. It said the plane had passed through tall, dense cumulonimbus thunderclouds.
At this time, the automatic pilot was disconnected – either by the pilot or by the plane's inbuilt security system, which flips to manual after detecting a serious error.
At the same moment, another message indicates that the "fly-by-wire" electronic flight system which controls the wing and tail flaps shifted to "alternative law" – an emergency backup system engaged after multiple electricity failures. This system enables the plane to continue functioning on minimum energy but reduces flight stability. An alarm would have sounded to alert the cabin crew to this.
Two minutes later, another message indicates that two essential computers providing vital information on altitude, speed and flight direction ceased functioning correctly.
Two new messages at 3.13am report electricity breakdowns in the principal and auxiliary flight computers.
ML/NJ
Pure speculation?
No it is ZerO praying to allah it isn’t a bomb.
GPS gives Ground Speed.
Ground Speed is absolutely useless for maintaining control of an airplane.
So now it's a extremely difficult to turn at high speed????
The Airbus is more limited than I thought
Pure BS
The wing tests that failed were A380 wings.
Few, if any, commercial aircraft are equipped for voice satellite communications as its prohibitively expensive. Instead, we have ACARS which uses satellites, but only transmits data — that’s how their maintenance base in Paris got the error messages from the aircraft.
Wow,100mph updrafts and thunderheads to 50,000
I pray those poor souls didn`t suffer when it broke up
Horrible tragedy
Usually that means a bomb. Unless some genius figured out a way to transmit a virus into the Airbus computer system to confuse it and cause massive failures in flight.
I pray to God not.
I’m starting to settle in on very severe turbulence, perhaps with additional lightning strikes, being at the root of this. There’s some interesting datapoints in this story. Stuff was breaking, systems were failing and it was just getting worse and worse... losing power to more and more things... suddenly there’s just a cascading failure of the structure. We’re not talking about one bad thump of bad air... but a series of really, really hard bangs. Stuff can break when that happens. It sounds to me like it broke up in the air, or something important came off, like the tail or a wing, and/or the cabin broke open.
Just an opinion, but that’s what it sounds like to me.
RIP to all on board. I too fly a lot for work; i.e. have flow twice around the world in the last four months. In March one of my flight segments was Hong Kong to Paris on Air France, which brings this whole tragedy a bit close to home.
While flying over China we hit major turbulence and for the first time in a long time I began to get a bit nervous. The Captain finally announced that he had requested a change in course, but the roller-coaster ride continued for 30-45 minutes; a couple of the overhead bins popped open.
Obviously it’s too late to save this flight, but perhaps it would be wise in the future for airline pilots to avoid flying their aircraft into severe thunderstorms.
I still don’t fly the Airbus.
At least a, "Mon deau", or a "merde", you'd think!
It's certainly possible. But I would think that an intentional bombing isn't going to be left waiting until it had already been in flight for a few hours. One would think it would tend to be set off early in the flight, bringing it down over land instead of out in the middle of the ocean. But of course, lots of things are possible.
It would also tend, I think, to just be a single abrupt event... then nothing follows... not a string of cascading system failures. This suggests to me that the cause was something other than a bomb.
There are a whole bunch of ways that aircraft break apart in flight in severe weather.
Take it from a flight instructor.
When faced with a catastrophe while in flight, the primary thing is to fly the jet. Nothing else matters. nothing. Communicating is dead last in priority, as the voice at the other end of the radio can only promise to send your widow a Christmas card, they can't save you.
I've been in a few IFEs during my time as an Air Force fighter pilot and talking to ATC was something I did only when I had the situation under control, and knew I could maintain control.
After losing nine loved ones in the past seven years, I agree with you; I always say “love ‘em while you got ‘em.”
Mmmm. The distress call is 1st done by setting the transponder to 7700.
Radar picks up that without radio.
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