Posted on 06/03/2009 7:34:01 AM PDT by Clive
PARIS -- Brazilian and French navy vessels rushed on Wednesday to reach wreckage of an Air France flight that plunged into the Atlantic, but investigators warned the truth behind France's worst air disaster may never fully emerge.
The doomed Airbus was carrying 228 passengers and crew en route from Rio de Janeiro to Paris when it crashed into the ocean early on Monday after the pilot reported heavy turbulence.
Debris was sighted by a spotter plane more than 24 hours later about 745 miles (1,200 km) northeast of the Brazilian coastal city of Recife, and the Brazil navy has dispatched four navy ships with recovery equipment to the area.
France prepared to send a boat with an unmanned submarine aboard that can explore as deeply as 6,000 metres (19,680 ft) and will try to locate the Airbus's black boxes, which could shed light on the mysterious disaster.
Paul Louis Arslanian, the head of France's air accident investigation agency, said he was not totally optimistic that the black boxes would ever be recovered and said the probe might not reveal all the reasons behind the crash.
"I cannot rule out the possibility that we might end up with a finding that is relatively unsatisfactory in terms of certainty," Mr. Arslanian told reporters.
"But we will do our best to limit the uncertainty," he said.
A first report will be ready by the end of the month, with the investigation led by Alain Bouillard, who took charge of the probe into the crash of an Air France Concorde in 2000.
(Excerpt) Read more at nationalpost.com ...
Water depth over 3,500 meters, a surface debris field five kilometers long and strong undersea currents.
FWIW I seriously doubt that the cause of this disaster was a lightning strike.
Seems like a rather innapropriate venue for a sporting event.
Mr. Arslanian revealed few new elements, confirming only that the plane's crew had sent a radio message reporting turbulence as it headed towards the equator and that the plane had later sent a series of automated messages over a three minute period reporting malfunctions. He did not specify what these were.
Agreed - not given the warnings they apparently had. And lightning, like empty fuel tanks, just don’t cause planes to crash.
Sorry to rip open a wound there, but I’m sure others were thinking it also.
C’mon
Planes fall out of the sky from cruising altitude on a regular basis - nothing to see here - move along.
I agree - modern planes deal with lightning easily. So, what are some other possibilities? (No distress call - no odd data sent in - no Maydays... nothing.) What's left?
Read the account of BOAC flight 911 over Mt Fuji.
Turbulence can rip any aircraft apart.
Lightening can damage modern aircraft as well, especially those designed around ESD sensitive microprocessors.
Posts over on airliners.net seemed to indicate that the three-or-four minute sequence of automated ACARS messages indicated some sort of electrical faults, followed by an autopilot disconnect, then ADIRU (air data inertial reference unit, I think) and standby instrument faults, then faults on the primary and one secondary flight computer, and finally an excessive cabin vertical speed warning that might indicate a depressurization. So whatever happened to AF447 wasn’t one massive failure like a Pan Am 103 or a TWA 800. Things failed over a span of at least four minutes, apparently in a cascade of increasing severity.
The thing that concerns me is that even if they do find the recorders, if there were electrical problems, it’s possible that they might not have all the data on them. When the Swissair MD-11 crashed off Nova Scotia in 1998, both recorders stopped fully six minutes before impact because they lost electrical power.
}:-)4
Would it be excessively paranoid to think that perhaps they might not want to release an official statement about what caused the crash? If, say, it was terrorism-related?
Well...turbulence is a possibility, as they were cruising in an area of fairly strong thunderstorms, although turbulence hasn’t been directly responsible for the destruction of a jetliner in a long time. Two Qantas A330s experienced recent problems with their air data computers, one of them had an “upset” (a momentary loss of control until the pilots could wrestle it back) as a result. An inflight fire is always a possibility like on Swissair 111 in 1998. And you can’t yet rule out the possibility of some sort of explosive device or sabotage.
All we know is that Air France got a sequence of automated messages from the airplane between 2:10 and 2:14 GMT that morning, listing an increasing series of things going wrong. Sometime after 2:14, the plane crashed, out of voice and radar contact with anybody.
}:-)4
General Bomb threat on Air France flight Posted on 27 May 2009 at 16:27
If that is the case, they probably would have sent a distress signal.
None was sent.
You're right - sometimes they glide to uneventful landings on abandoned airfields.
Is that a legitimate gif of TWA800?
Thanks for the information. Looks like it’s a “wait and see” situation...
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