Posted on 12/07/2011 9:55:38 AM PST by ventanax5
For more than two years, the disappearance of Air France Flight 447 over the mid-Atlantic in the early hours of June 1, 2009, remained one of aviation's great mysteries. How could a technologically state-of-the art airliner simply vanish?
With the wreckage and flight-data recorders lost beneath 2 miles of ocean, experts were forced to speculate using the only data available: a cryptic set of communications beamed automatically from the aircraft to the airline's maintenance center in France. As PM found in our cover story about the crash, published two years ago this month, the data implied that the plane had fallen afoul of a technical problem—the icing up of air-speed sensors—which in conjunction with severe weather led to a complex "error chain" that ended in a crash and the loss of 228 lives.
(Excerpt) Read more at popularmechanics.com ...
POS “AirBus” Broke.
what a horrifying transcript
Must be very hard on the families .. very very hard
Ping.
Seems like a terrible idea to have the pilot sticks disconnected from each other, one pilot can be pulling full up and the other not know it.
Negligent homicide by the pilots.
It’s chilling to think the people into whose hands passengers place their lives could screw up so needlessly and badly.
Interesting coincidence, I was just thinking about that crash and the reason for it after my Chevy truck had a wiring harness go bad in the front axle.
55 mph and accelerating on a busy road when my speedometer just dropped to zero. The d*mn thing went into 1st gear, my anti-lock brakes started screwing up and I almost caused an accident. Having all those systems tied into each other like that made it far worse than it should have been and I had no way to correct any of it.
Made me think of the reason for that crash as I limped home in 1st gear.
That pilot picked one hell of a time to take a nap. Sad.
Read an in-depth report on the crash a few weeks back in one of my flying mags.
the net of it all is that despite ALL conventional wisdom, the PIC maintained a deliberate and excessive nose-up attitude on the aircraft and kept it in a stall, in the so-called ‘coffin corner’ of the flight envelope.
NET: The Pilot in Charge, in error, flew the aircraft into terrain (the ocean).
Pretty pathetic that the Captain has to take a nap less than 2 hours after take off all the while knowing his flight path intersects serious storm cells.
Sounds like an elevator trim tab problem.
I think the first post on this thread says it all.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2798577/posts
It seems both you and AF449 were victims of cascading errors/failures that are rarely considered even remotely possible by design engineers. Probably because it never happened to them...
Having all the systems tied in to each other so that a failure of one brings them all down is just stupid imho, but having dealt with GM design engineers my entire adult life I can easily understand how it ended up that way.
It made it easier or cheaper, period.
Re your post #7:
Chevy, the heartbeat of America. Will you stick with the brand for your next vehicle?
Incredible incompetence. The flight should have avoided the massive turbulence that triggered the event. The flight crew was too lazy to study the weather conditions despite the reputation of the area for severe weather. No design engineer could have foreseen the bungling after the problem began. Three stooges in the cockpit brought the plane down.
I will never buy another new GM product, period. My next new truck will probably be a Ford F350 heavy duty, and hopefully by then they will be using the Cummins diesel that Dodge is feuding with now and might be picked up by Ford.
Or so the rumor has it, either way I only bought GM because they were one of our biggest customers and I believe in supporting who pays your checks, but not any more after what happened with the unions and bond holders.
Chilling.
The story makes it pretty clear that the junior First Officer screwed up by stalling the plane and keeping the nose up all of the way down. Elevator trim tab had nothing to do with it.
I think I’d have a hard time sleeping, personally.
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