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 ...
>>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.
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