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To: DuncanWaring

Perhaps you have a better explanation of what happened?


82 posted on 06/07/2009 8:42:42 PM PDT by UCANSEE2 (The Last Boy Scout)
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To: UCANSEE2; DuncanWaring; expat; Gandalf_The_Gray; Old_Professor
Here is the actual ACARS printout:
90 posted on 06/07/2009 10:37:21 PM PDT by gandalftb (An appeaser feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last......)
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To: UCANSEE2

1. Flying a healthy airplane in bad weather or at night is difficult.
2. Flying an unhealthy airplane in good weather is difficult.
3. Hand-flying an A330 in good weather at cruise with the autopilot disconnected is darned near impossible.

On AF447, it appears that either the pitot tubes went bad or one of the ADIRUs that was driving the cockpit displays and the autopilot went bad (or both), causing the autopilot to disconnect and depriving the pilots of critical information necessary to hand-fly the airplane.

So there they were:
a. trying to hand-fly an airplane that couldn’t be hand-flown in the best of circumstances
b. not knowing which of their conflicting sources of attitude, airspeed and altitude was correct
c. in the middle of a gawdawful thunderstorm at night

From there, it’s a short step to either getting too slow and stalling/spinning, or too fast and loosing the wings to an updraft.


91 posted on 06/08/2009 4:24:40 AM PDT by DuncanWaring (The Lord uses the good ones; the bad ones use the Lord.)
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