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.
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