Posted on 06/03/2009 10:30:55 AM PDT by 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."
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
Okay, I'm generally not a tin-foil conspiracy believer, in fact, I consider myself to be a skeptic.
But, this event is really filled with a lot more questions than answers.
My only guess on the lack of a statement regarding a claim of credit is that this event was a test of a new type of explosive or mixture that the terrorists don't want reveal at this time-lest it draw intense scrutiny. It could be a precursor to a much larger event.
Flight 587 (Airbus 300) which went down in Queens in 2001 hit wake turbulence from a previous plane and lost it’s vertical stabilizer due to overly aggressive rudder correction by the pilot. The engines then separated prior to crash.
Could be that the control inputs needed in the turbulence they encountered aggravated the problems.
I wonder if bomb damage, and resulting damage to the plane's aerodynamic characteristics, could have been mistaken for "turbulence" by pilots in a storm as the plane came apart around them.
Couldn’t have been aliens. It was nowhere near the Bermuda Triangle.
There is NOTHING to see here move along. No, the 6 muslims arrested with bomb-making equipment were not terrorists. The radiation leak from the nuclear plant is harmless. Muslims do not discriminate against women. Nothing to see here. Move along!
You assume they didn't take credit for it.
The purpose of terrorism is to control behavior of the target through the use of violence or threat of violence.
What if the French government was quietly told "You just lost a plane. You may be able to keep this quiet. If you do not comply with our demands, you will lose a bunch more planes in a more dramatic manner".
The incident occurred out at sea, far out of cell range.
Very much, and the comments too. Thanks!
Summary (of a comment? and extrapolated): the tail section (empennage) may have broken off due to turbulence, leading to near-instantaneous decompression, and the resulting g-forces would have kept the pilots from doing anything in the few seconds of consciousness left.
I thought Pulkovo 612 was pilot error; they went over the service ceiling for the Tu-154 at that weight, got slow, stalled it and entered a flat spin they couldn’t get out of. They were, however, being beaten around by a severe thunderstorm at the time and trying to get over or out of it.
}:-)4
Why then do you suppose this Air France plan flew into a thunderstorm if all pilots know to avoid them?
There’s an airline pilot forum linked off another FR thread on AF447 today...on there, pilots were saying that the particular type of thunderstorm spawned in the area where AF447 was flying is very hard to spot on radar for some reason, much harder than the storms we get in the US. Something about if you’re pointing the radar straight ahead, you might not get a return, but if you tilt it down toward the bottom of the clouds, they show up better.
}:-)4
LOL, I've wondered what it would feel like. I'm certain it would be nothing like the airline safety videos.
(The funniest was on EgyptAir -- the mask falls down in front of a middle-eastern man and bobs, and his head tracks it for three bobs before reaching for the mask.)
I don't remember seeing seatback satphones in the A330s. Entertainment centers, yes.
HF
According to this discussion the plane did not avoid the storms, but in fact flew through a storm cell. In his discussion on turbulence, the author states, "Young updrafts are particularly dangerous to flights because they contain significant rising motion yet precipitation fields have not yet fully developed and airborne radar signatures are weak, reducing the likelihood the crew will deviate around the cell."
“Terrorism doesn’t work if no one knows it was terrorism.”
That’s not necessarily so ... this situation (so far)leaves everyone not knowing but many suspecting, and that creates another kind of terror.
Absent black boxes or other means of knowing what really happened, I would hope the passengers’ and crew’s backgrounds and associations will be looked into very carefully.
The guy in the story is giving a line of BS -or- he’s just repeating what he heard someone else say...having trained in high-altitude chambers I can tell you that although one would fall unconscious rather quickly (most folks within 15-30 seconds) you do not instantly fall unconscious between 30,000 - 40,000 ft. Unless the high speed aerodynamic stresses got to them first they almost certainly knew what happened...if only for a short period of time.
Probably a french pilot!!!
the planes are equiped with wearther radar for that exact purpose, avoid thunderstorms.
The wind sheer in a thunderstorm can be over 200mph in oposite directions.
I went through a very tiny embeded one and it turned the plane upside down, it ain’t fun!
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