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’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.
Well, they do, of course. Why this one was in such a severe storm, we don't know. I think sometimes avoiding a big line of thunderstorms is possibly not as easy or obvious as it sounds. If the weather radar was among the early malfunctions he may have been blind anyway. Dunno.
“Usually that means a bomb.”
No, it doesn’t. Knock off the melodrama.
Thunderstorms contain all kinds of hazards to aircraft and can rip one apart like a buzzsaw going through a tin can.
So the tail fell off?
“Usually that means a bomb.”
Usually, but not always. T-storms can tear apart a jet as fast as a terrorist event.
>>After losing nine loved ones in the past seven years, I agree with you; I always say “love ‘em while you got ‘em.”<<
OMG, EgA — My prayers are with you so much! :(
My Dad and Mom are gone (as is all the grandparents). It makes one fell a little lonely.
Very rational approach. Remember, an Airbus lost a tail on takeoff in NY just after 9-11, and it was because the aircrew over-applied rudder inputs beyond the structural limit. T-Storms yank and twist an airframe in all sorts of ways it was never really designed to endure. A rapid turn rate could have sheared an engine clean off the jet, for example.
I’ve read that certain types of TS are basically invisible to onboard radar, making it possible to drive right into danger.
HF? I've transmitted on HF almost 8000 miles to the other side of the planet, during thunderstorms with barely 100 watts of power.
I might as well speculate along with others...Seems rather suspect that at this altitude, with several minutes prior to impact, not one word was radioed out by the crew. Even struggling with the aircraft, there are at least two pilots in the cockpit that should have quickly transmitted a signal of distress. Would have taken about 5 seconds to do this.
One of two things here, an explosion affecting critical controls and electronics occurred, or there was an immediate breakup of the aircraft caused by something else, like severe turbulence.
If these pilots were presented with a series of problems they have no less than 3 ways to alert and/or make contact with control.
They are setting this thing up to be some mystery just like the Jet over Long Island.
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