Posted on 02/27/2010 6:50:15 AM PST by lowbuck
Enjoy.
I know next to nothing about the Airbus but even on smaller aircraft, pitot tubes are heated to prevent these kinds of ice-ups. On a heavy commercial airplane with multiple redundant systems, I would expect the same.
Heated pitot tubes????
Enjoy.......????
Poor choice of words!!!!
Maybe the French Engineers figured “unshaven” would surfice for “heated” to prevent icing.
Reminds me of Microsoft making money from its defective products.
Great article. With the info they have, they really don't need to find the black boxes.
Maybe the rate of ice formation was so high that the pitot heat couldn’t keep up.
Correct.
>>It would be easier for pilots if they could simply switch the computer off in critical situations, as is possible on Boeing planes.<<
That’s why, as the saying goes, “If it ain’t Boeing, I ain’t going”
Tragic loss. Tragic.
I liked this article because it seems plausable given the known facts and the author seemed to have stuck to the facts.
BTW enjoy you link to Caddyshack Quotes!! That was one of our deployment classics many years ago.
Sure, estimated airspeed from GPS and weather data would not be as good as pitot tube data, but, it would be better than no data at all.
Plus, couldn't they have some kind of ultrasonic or radar Dopper system to tell them the airspeed?
Something a little more robust than 1909 pitot tube technology?
On a 320?
“Seems to me pitot tubes are antiquated nowadays, with GPS, Doppler, and all the weather information we have.”
Pitot tubes tell the pressure of the air over the wings, which is all that matters.
...shows that the plane did not plunge vertically into the sea, but rather hit the water like a flat hand, with the nose of the aircraft pointing upwards at a five-degree angle ... it can be deduced that the A330 was brought to a halt with a force more than 36 times that of normal gravity: 36g.
Pitot tubes work when your electrical system has failed.
Well written article. Thank you.
According to this scenario, the pilots would have been forced to watch helplessly as their plane lost its lift. That theory is supported by the fact that the airplane remained intact to the very end. Given all the turbulence, it is therefore possible that the passengers remained oblivious to what was happening. After all, the oxygen masks that have been recovered had not dropped down from the ceiling because of a loss of pressure. What's more, the stewardesses weren't sitting on their emergency seats, and the lifejackets remained untouched. "There is no evidence whatsoever that the passengers in the cabin had been prepared for an emergency landing," says BEA boss Jean-Paul Troadec.
Grrrr! *\:^(
I don't have the Airbus tables, but when you are high and heavy (and possibly encounter non standard temperature conditions) the margin of error between a safe flight envelope and a stalled condition becomes very small.
Add to that the darkness, turbulence and then one after one all of your automated devices deciding to vote “non” and taking a powder these pilots were really in the hurt locker.
If you look at my profile you can see that I flew for one of Uncle Sam's non profit airlines. On several occasions I have had a nightmare that I was flying and no matter what I did the plane was still “going in”. I suspect that the pilots on AF did all that they could do but lived a real nightmare.
The pitot tube kvetching entirely misses the point: the Airbus has no manual controls and its computers kept shutting themselves down.
Yes, they may have shut themselves off because of the conflicting pitot tube data, but there was no other way to fly that Airbus other than via computer.
All that the pilots could do was restart (reboot) the flight computers, which they did, twice.
The Airbus was only flying at 95mph...it was at overload condition at take-off...it stalled, flat-spun, and crashed horizontally.
Perhaps a total fly-by-wire system isn’t so clever (Toyota, anyone??).
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