Air France crash: plane may have broken up in mid-air

Telegraph UK ^ | June 3, 2009 | By Henry Samuel in Paris

[Oldeconomybuyer]

The vast area over which debris has been found suggested there was an explosion while the aircraft was in flight.

Unnamed experts quoted by the Le Monde newspaper said the "wide dispersion of wreckage discovered suggests that the Airbus (A330-200) exploded at high altitude".

Terrorism has not been ruled out but they said the most likely scenario was that the break-up was caused by massive depressurisation inside the plane.

If such depressurisation had occurred at high altitude, passengers would have almost certainly fallen instantly unconscious and may have been unaware of the their fate.

Professor Philippe Juvin, head of casualty at Beaujon hospital west of Paris, said: "It would have been as quick as the moment when one falls asleep."

[y6162]

“Must have been one of those lighting strikes that blows up airliners..”

What motive for a bomb?

There’s no point in a terrorist blowing up a plane and not taking credit for it.

Kill someone for the insurance money? Maybe. But why take all those innocent people?

Wonder what they know about the bomb threat?

[r9etb]

Practically brand-new airplanes don't "blow-up" at altitude without some kind of intervening action or cause.

You mean like, say, flying into a line of big-ass thunderstorms?

[research99]

Victims of the Lockerbie crash, were found still strapped in their seats.
Some were clutching crosses.

[Churchillspirit]

The instant they mentioned a 3 mile spread of debris, all my questions were answered.

I have no idea what is a normal distance of a debris field is when a plane explodes in midair, but when PAN-AM 103 was blown up over Lockerbie, Scotland, debris was found as far away as Keilder Forest in Northumberland - more than 60 miles away.

RIP the victims of this Air France disaster.

[txhurl]

Has anyone heard if any passengers contacted loved ones?

---

The dog that didn’t bark.

The plane was blown up, no time to text or call.

[LikeLight]

Actually, the bomb threat was on a different Air France flight (out of Buenos Aires, Argentina for Paris, rather than Rio, Brazil for Paris). But same continent, same airline and uncannily close in timing. Certainly suspicious.

[Robe]

If such depressurization had occurred at high altitude, passengers would have almost certainly fallen instantly unconscious and may have been unaware of the their fate.

Pure BS, Anyone that has been through a high altitude chamber , has been exposed to a instant decompression. Mostly from around 20-25 thousand feet.(In the NASA chambers, available to private pilots through the FAA) Military chambers routinely decompress from 30-35 Thousand feet.

Although you only have less then a min (usually 30 sec)to get oxygen before passing out, you are well aware of blowing all the snot out of your head (Sorry to be so graphic , but that's the truth

[riri]

Yeah, this desire to call this a terror attack is a bit odd.

The plane was flying into storms and high winds, correct? That alone tells us something, probably not, terrorist related caused this plane to come down.

The attack is coming and it won't be the taking down of a plane full of Brazilians and French.

[Moose4]

They couldn’t, unless they had satellite phones onboard. The plane was 400 miles from the nearest land, no way a cellphone would get a signal.

}:-)4

[roses of sharon]

Well, of course a cell would not work....but a Sat phone would, I'll have to peruse some news stories to see. It seems like we would have heard from families by now.

[jaydubya2]

“instantly unconscious”, like “instant death”, are terms I don’t quite believe are possible.

[LikeLight]

The dog that didn’t bark.

While there were rumors of "I'm scared" texts from passengers having been received, the plane was hundreds of miles out at sea, no cell towers, etc. Only a sat-phone might have worked out there.

[Big_Monkey]

"You mean like, say, flying into a line of big-ass thunderstorms?

Maybe. But, unless they find the wreckage of that plane, and given the depth of the waters and the size of the debris field that seems unlikely, this will be the stuff of an endless supply of conspiracy theories. And, given the fact that there was a bomb threat for this very flight just days before, that is only going to be an accelerant for the tin-foil hat crowd.

[posterchild]

If you are over the ocean you will not have cell phone service. If something is happening fast you probably don’t have time to use the back of the seat phones if they had any on the plane.

[dalereed]

From the looks of the weather charts they flew into a thunderstorm which is sure disaster!

[Cementjungle]

Now I think this was a test of some new method of getting a bomb aboard by the terrorists. Now that it has proven to be a success for them, they can proceed with plans for the main, bigger plot.

[sionnsar]

which would explain why the aircraft didn't have time to send an alert signal."

But there were reports of several automatic alerts being sent.

[txhurl]

You think trans-oceanic planes don’t have 250 sat-phones on the back of every seat?

[Rutles4Ever]

Actually, the bomb threat was on a different Air France flight (out of Buenos Aires, Argentina for Paris, rather than Rio, Brazil for Paris). But same continent, same airline and uncannily close in timing. Certainly suspicious.

They say it was a "false threat". But it may have been test of security procedure. Or they placed a dummy unit on the plane and wanted to see if they could find it or not...

[Gay State Conservative]

But there were reports of several automatic alerts being sent.

The Air France website made mention of at least one automatic transmission having been received at their headquarters.