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 ...
“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.”
How long did it take the authorities to determine the Lockerbie crash was caused by a bomb? Seems like they figured it out pretty quickly, but then again they had an actual crash site to analyze.
*shrug* I always try to sit next to someone who looks tastier than me...
I fly into DFW monthly with no problems most of the time. DFW is fine.
Denver, on the other hand, can be pretty wild.
“If it ain’t a Boeing, I ain’t going”
Good rule to live by. I do get on Airbusts occasionally when necessary, but I prefer Boeing and MD.
Stay off of planes made by socialists.
It is my understanding that under certain circumstances it is better to allow autopilot to control the aircraft.
On the other hand, if they knew that this storm was as high, wide, and strong as it was, why didn't they delay the flight in the first place?
I am concerned more about an engineered computer failure triggered by severe turbulence. Don't you guys see the T-storms coming on your instruments so you can fly around it? Or maybe this was just unavoidable??
The black box will tell all, but if they don't find it this will have to stay a mystery.
It was night-time but their weather radar would have warned them of the thuderstorm, even if they didn't see the lightening strikes.
I think if they delayed flights every time there were thunderstorms in the tropical Atlantic, they’d never take off. Besides... this storm was some several hundred miles away, something like four hours into the flight, IIRC.
It would be an unusual bomb that just took out the electrical systems and left the plane to limp along for fifteen minutes without a radio report.
If you'd like to see what bombs do to airplanes, have a look at these tests, in which small amounts of semtex were detonated in airplanes pressurized as if at altitude but actually sitting on a runway in front of cameras.
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=5ef_1183275834
How many messages would the computer in the falling fragment manage to send back to Air France before splashing down?
what if someone knew how one or two small charges could cause a cascading sequence that would cause catastrophic failure?
It's just a nice coinky-dink that it happened over water. Very hard to find anything in deep turbulent water. Even the American aircraft with the center fuel tank accident happened close to shore enough where it could be recovered. If it had happened 1 or 2 hours later, very difficult recovery.
I hate flying anymore. My fear is based on irrational "feelings" but every time one of these big planes goes down I think of all the children left behind. Just a sad thing. God rest their souls and comfort their families.
It was night-time but their weather radar would have warned them of the thuderstorm, even if they didn't see the lightening strikes.
I also wonder why you would reply to my post without reading all of it. I point out that wind shear is generally a "low and slow" problem.
But, there are a number of issues:
I’d still like some examples of modern passenger jets being “torn apart” by thunderstorms at cruising altitude. If it is common, there must be examples of other aircraft lost in this fashion.
Why would a terrorist try to bring down a plane in such a way that it doesn’t look like a bomb, in a place that makes it even less likely to be widely known as such?
Terrorists aren’t trying to make people afraid of mysterious mechanical failures on airplanes. They’re trying to make a big splash headline-grabbing displays that makes people afraid of *them*. They need credit for it first, or their whole mission has failed.
I’ve only done Denver as a passenger, but Colorado Springs is usually quite a ride.
I used to commute from DFW/DAL to Houston, so I was on those flights all the time. Usually the only time it gets interesting is in the spring and summer when there are a lot of isolated thunderstorms. It’s annoyingly funny when your ride home turns into twenty minutes of flying, an hour in a holding pattern, an hour-long diversion to Waco, and then a twenty minute flight to Dallas.
I can't find it at the moment, but I believe I read an article a couple of days ago that implied the plane had a problem in the recent past, which might have caused the radar to be inoperative if it had not been completely fixed.
It's not common, at least not recently. Someone posted a list of three known occurrences on an earlier thread. I believe they were in the 60's and 70's.
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