Bodies Found From Air France Plane Crash

SkyNews ^

[traumer]

Bodies from the Air France passenger plane that crashed in the Atlantic Ocean off Brazil have been found by search teams.

The news comes it was revealed the airliner sent out 24 automatic error messages in its final moments as its systems broke down one by one.

The head of the French agency probing the tragedy said signals from the jet before it disappeared showed its autopilot was not on.

Paul-Louis Arslanian said it was not clear if the autopilot had been switched off by the pilots or had stopped working because it received conflicting airspeed readings.

He said investigators were searching a zone of several hundred square miles in the Atlantic Ocean for the debris.

Plane manufacturer Airbus said an investigation found Air France Flight 447 had inconsistent readings from different instruments as it struggled in a massive thunderstorm.

The plane, with 228 people on board, disappeared early on Monday as it made its way from Rio de Janiero, heading to Paris.

The wreckage of the jet has not been found, despite days of intensive searching by air and sea.

[El Gato]

The problem with a shoulder fired missile is that it would have headed into one of the engines and not necessarily downed the aircraft.

Not true for a couple of reasons. Modern IR missiles are "all aspect" and don't rely on the hot engine exhaust, although they probably do favor it, if it's visible to them. Secondly just because a missle is guiding on an engine, doesn't meant it will hit that engine, it could miss, probably would, especially at high altitude near it's service ceiling, due to lack sufficient maneuverability. Even small shoulder launched missiles have proximity fuses, they are set off *before* they hit, or as they would otherwise have passed by the target. Optimum position is actually somewhat before point of closest approach, but in practice that is difficult to achieve.

[Mr Ramsbotham]

We know the aircraft depressurized. Assuming it was at cruising altitude they most likely would have been conscious only a few seconds.

I'm no expert in aerodynamics, or even physics, but the point I was trying to make is that if you're going in one direction travelling a couple hundred miles per hour or so, and then something catastrophic happens to more-or-less instantaneously alter that direction, you're going to suffer some pretty traumatic injury.

[AmericanDave]

Yes I heard a network news reporter say this week, that one airplane went down with the pilot praying to God all the way down. How’s that for a PC translation of Allah......

Don’t want to confuse the sheeple.

[AmericanDave]

The gov’t explained away the bomb residue as due to a pre-flight bomb dog test. But when journalist Peter Lance interviewed the police officer involved his log showed a different aircraft tail number at an adjacent gate was tested by him!

[AmericanDave]

Once the plane came apart the systems all failed together and the computer just listed them off one at a time as fast as it could.

[AmericanDave]

I remember he reported heavy turbulence, which is NOT normal. It was associated with storm activity, which probably killed them.

[1066AD]

Apparently at their altitude, around 35,000ft, the difference between “too fast” and “too slow” is only 25knots or so. So an air speed indicator that was giving bad data could cause a lot of trouble.

[Hulka]

Where are the facts to prove otherwise.

As you said, you have no facts.

[AmericanDave]

Have you read ‘Wildfire’? The premise is that just like the cold war, the US has told the Arab States (like Russia before)that if any weapon of mass destruction goes off in the US, we will strike a couple of random Arab cities. The second attack on us, Mecca gets nuked....

Hey it worked with Russia.....

[Erasmus]

Try adopting the attitude that in the unlikely event that it happens, there’s nothing you can do about it, and you’re not going to suffer any physical agony from the crash itself; therefore, you might as well enjoy the ride down, observing with bemusement your fellow screaming passengers.

At least, that’s my attitude.

[RayChuang88]

The main reason why I discount a MANPAD missile bringing down TWA 800 comes down to this: was there a fragmentation blast pattern consistent with the warhead design of known MADPAD missiles? A Stinger or the modern Russian MADPAD such as the 9k38 Igla (SA-18) has a distinctive blast pattern when the missile impacts the target, but since such a blast pattern was never found on the remains of TWA 800....

[plain talk]

but where is the conspiracy to cover that up??

I didn't say anything about a conspiracy.

[plain talk]

An Air France spokesman says the airline received a bomb threat for a flight from Buenos Aires to Paris on May 27, but that warning proved to be false.

Well seeing how a plane goes down a few days later I am not so sure.

[WhistlingPastTheGraveyard]

Where are the facts to prove it wasn’t man-made-disasterism?

I said nobody had any facts. You included.

[BP2]

Apparently at their altitude, around 35,000ft, the difference between “too fast” and “too slow” is only 25knots or so. So an air speed indicator that was giving bad data could cause a lot of trouble

Yes, it's called the Coffin Corner. I've been at 41,000 in a turn, with autopilot on, ON cruise airspeed, and still have a minor stall buffet in 15 degrees of bank.

At 35,000', AF447 may not have seen the Coffin Corner per se. However, if they climbed to something like 39,000' to get above the storm tops, with a faulty flight data computer and then got buffeted around from the thunderstorms, it's quite possible they could have experienced some stall conditions.

Additionally, if they lost their electrics -- hence their weather radar -- while navigating through the thunderstorms ... well, that would be ugly place to be.

[Mr Ramsbotham]

Try adopting the attitude that in the unlikely event that it happens, there’s nothing you can do about it, and you’re not going to suffer any physical agony from the crash itself; therefore, you might as well enjoy the ride down, observing with bemusement your fellow screaming passengers.

Speaking of screaming passengers, you might want to have a look at this blog, if you haven't seen it already:

http://sandiegoblog.com/archives/2004/06/16/psa-crash-1978/

It's a compendium of eyewitness accounts of the PSA Flight 182 crash in San Diego in 1978. Some very harrowing details here; but the one that absolutely chilled me was the account--confirmed by eyewitnesses--of the so-called "flying man." Evidently at the point of impact, observers on the far end of the street witnessed a man flying through the air with his arms outstretched, "like Superman," who emitted a high-pitched screaming noise as he went. His progress was arrested by a parked car. They found his body embedded in the car with his legs protruding from the rear window and his brains splattered all over the interior. Someone on the site speculated that when the airplane hit, nose-down, the instantaneous compression catapulted him out of the rear of the aircraft with tremendous force. As for the "screaming" sound, I can't make up my mind if he was still alive at that point, but the sound was heard, and someone postulated that he had been screaming on the way down and the scream carried over after his ejection.

Not really pleasant to think about, I guess.

[Netizen]

I was living in NYC at the time and from the early reports, I think TWA 800 was brought down not by a bomb but by a shoulder fired missile that was fired from the Long Island coast.

I remember hearing someone say that when they were interviewed. They broke into Larry King to talk about it moments after it happened.

[presently no screen name]

here’s a list of his books -

http://nelsondemille.net/content/books.asp

[dynoman]

“The news comes it was revealed the airliner sent out 24 automatic error messages in its final moments as its systems broke down one by one.

The head of the French agency probing the tragedy said signals from the jet before it disappeared showed its autopilot was not on.”

I’ve never heard of this, do modern airliners have this kind of telemetry capability?

[dynoman]

Apparently they do;

The A330’s telemetry system, which automatically sends data to the airline’s maintenance computers, transmitted data indicating electrical problems and possible depressurization of the aircraft at 0233 GMT June 1, about three hours after takeoff. The A330 was about 230 miles northeast of the Brazilian coast approaching heavy thunderstorms that line the intertropical convergence zone (ITCZ) at that latitude. The ITCZ is an area of continuous low pressure that lines the equatorial regions.

The aircraft had already flown beyond radar contact and, like all airline traffic in the central Atlantic, was using satellite voice position reports or automated telemetry reports to enable air traffic control to know their locations.”

http://www.spaceflightnow.com/news/n0906/01crash/