Which is why I said that sometimes 'the situation makes it easier to have one reaction over the other'. This is (apparently) hundreds of innocent people on a plane falling out of midair and crashing into the ocean. They are pretty different situations, and (for some people) are going to invoke different reactions. But really, your first sentence here is the whole point. Some people have reaction A, some reaction B. You say you would have A. The fact that the A people and the B people don't relate to each other very well should not be surprising.
Aviation guru that you are... you come to the Hangout part of a basketball forum for updates? I agree with the first line of your post tho.
I suspect that it was a perfect storm of being at the wrong place at just the right time to cause a catastrophe. 35,000 feet, out over the open ocean in the middle of the night, right smack into what must have been an incredible thunderstorm. Add, perhaps, just enough of a design flaw, or a mechanical and/or electrical glitch, and you have over two hundred stunned people falling to their doom. Heck, they may never find the black box. It's a big ocean. Usually, a crash occurs on takeoff or on landing. The odds of something like this happening are astronomical. That's assuming it wasn't deliberate sabotage. Unlikely, but we live in a mad world.
Its terrible and I feel for the families. As Deckard notes we might never find the black box or know exactly what happened to the plane.
Oh man, if they never find the flight data recorder or cockpit voice recorder that's about the only thing possible that could make this already catastrophic event any worse. To have a disaster like this with an enormously popular yet possibly flawed jetliner, and then to not even know what caused it at the end of the day? Again, what's really bothering me is how the aircraft lost cabin pressurization. I have a sneaking suspicion that the pilots may have been rendered unconscious somehow. This could explain how these system failures (electrical/cabin pressure) were reported only by the system itself and not confirmed by the flight crew. According to Wikipedia: Last known verbal contact: 0133 GMT Last known contact with aircraft: 0214 GMT How do you explain that 45 minute gap? There's only two scenarios that add up: either the pilots were unconscious or [more likely] their communication system was down. I could be wrong on my unconscious theory too. It's entirely possible a lightening strike could have induced some sort of freak incident circuit short which, in turn, could have wiped out the plane's electrical system. No electrical system means no communications systems or radar. Flying without radar and communications is pretty much a nightmare scenario for a pilot flying alone let alone when responsible for 200+ people.
I think you read the whole contact thing wrong. The last known verbal contact could be around during the takeoff. After that pilots don't usually keep in verbal contact with anyone but within their plane. The last known contact was given out was an automatic signal in an emergency when something goes terribly wrong given off by the plane. They will find the black box. It's like looking for a needle in a haystacks. BUt it would be very tough depend on how deep that part of the ocean is. Body recovery and plane recovery would be very difficult if the that part of the ocean is too deep. So piecing the plane together would takes yrs but hopefully the black box can identify something that would greatly solve what actually could of happen.
Air France says they were making half hour checks with flight control. Here's an article about the disaster from the LA Times... Airbus jet leaves few clues before vanishing Pilots on Rio-to-Paris flight ran into storms but did nothing to signal distress. By Peter Pae and Ralph Vartabedian June 2, 2009 There was no word from the pilots, no sign that anything was wrong with Air France Flight 447 as it streaked over the dark waters of the Atlantic on its way to Paris. And then it was gone. All it left behind were automated pings signaling that something had gone wrong. The plane had been battling through ferocious thunderstorms. But what caused one of the world's safest commercial jets, with 228 passengers and crew, to simply vanish over a vast expanse of ocean may never be known. "It's like going into a black hole," said Robert Ditchey, a Marina del Rey aviation consultant and co-founder of America West, now part of US Airways. "The airplane is pretty much on its own. It's hours away from help." The disappearance of the Airbus A330 has fueled speculation that lightning, faulty electronics or pilot error may have brought the plane down. A navigation device used on the same type of plane recently malfunctioned on two flights, causing one to lose control. The investigation is likely to be especially complex, made more vexing by the possible difficulties of finding wreckage that has either sunk to the bottom of the sea or dispersed over hundreds of miles of water. The plane was probably traveling about 500 mph, and the pilots were checking in with traffic control about every half-hour, meaning the search area is likely to include hundreds of square miles of open ocean. According to European investigators, the last voice communication from Flight 447 came when it was near Fernando de Noronha island, about 200 miles off Brazil's coast. The missing airliner was about to enter Senegal's air traffic control space when it vanished. On Monday night, search aircraft looked for signs of the plane in the Atlantic about halfway between the Brazilian and African coasts. Brazilian Vice President Jose Alencar said he had received information that the pilot of another airliner had seen glowing spots, possibly fire, in the sea more or less at the time the Air France plane disappeared. Pilots flying a commercial jet from Paris to Rio de Janeiro for Brazil's largest airline, TAM, spotted what they thought was fire in the ocean along the Air France jet's route early Monday, the airline said in a statement e-mailed to the Associated Press. Brazilian air force spokesman Col. Jorge Amaral said authorities were investigating the report, according to the Agencia Brasil official news service. Investigators have been particularly baffled by the lack of any sign of distress or communication from the pilots before the plane vanished. "This was so catastrophic, no signals, no nothing. Then bang, it is gone," said Robert E. Breiling, an air safety expert in Boca Raton, Fla. Breiling said that in many catastrophic airliner disasters, events unfold too quickly for pilots to send messages. That was the case in the 1996 explosion of TWA Flight 800, he said. Airline officials said the Air France plane transmitted numerous automated messages of system failures. Officials on Monday were unable to determine whether any of the failures caused the plane to crash. It's not the first time that a passenger jetliner has vanished over the ocean, leaving investigators few clues. In many cases, extraordinary detective work narrows down what happened and the cases are solved. But in 1962, a Lockheed plane en route to Vietnam plunged into the Pacific Ocean with 107 people aboard. Investigators never found the plane or determined what caused the crash. Such catastrophic events are unusual, Breiling said. According to federal data, only 6% of commercial airliner accidents occur during the cruise phase of the flight. Accidents during landing and approaches account for 65% of the crashes. One of the most urgent tasks for Air France investigators is to find the flight data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder, known as black boxes, which could be thousands of feet below the surface of the ocean. Those devices have sonar beacons that can operate as deep as 20,000 feet, according to manufacturers. The region of the accident is a particularly dangerous stretch for jetliners. "This accident occurred in the Intertropical Convergence Zone, which is a breeding ground for thunderstorms and cyclones," said Thomas Anthony, director of USC's Aviation Safety and Security Program. "If you look at satellite imagery, you can see lines and lines of thunderstorms sometimes that stretch for hundreds and hundreds of miles. You can see tops of thunderstorms in the 55,000-to-60,000-foot range." Those storms produce violent turbulence, hail and lightning. Initial speculation centered around the possibility of a lightning strike, but safety experts said planes are built to withstand such strikes. The metal in the fuselage and the wings conduct electricity and keep the lightning from damaging the plane, said Vladimir Rakov, professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Florida and an expert on lightning. In fact, Rakov said every commercial plane is hit by lightning about once a year, on average. Even if lightning did damage the plane's electrical system, modern aircraft are built with multiple backups in case of an electrical failure, said Hans Weber, president of Tecop International Inc., an aviation technology consulting firm in San Diego. "Circuits are often triple redundant so you can work around a problem," Weber said. "What is a complete mystery to me is how a problem in a circuit -- if that is the case -- could lead to a loss of an airplane with all the redundancies built in." On Monday, experts were digging into two recent incidents involving the same Airbus model in which an electronic system failed, in one case causing a plane to dip uncontrollably while at cruising altitude, injuring 70 passengers. The pilot was able to regain control and land safely at a nearby airport. The electronic equipment, known as an Air Data Inertial Reference Unit, determines the plane's speed and location. European aviation authorities issued an emergency airworthiness directive in January alerting A330 operators who had the unit installed on their planes to follow revised procedures for operating it. The Federal Aviation Administration issued its own directive in March, saying that the equipment failure "could result in high pilot workload, deviation from the intended flight path and possible loss of control of the airplane." http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-plane-mystery2-2009jun02,0,6105408,full.story
You still report to various ATC command centers, though. They were less than an hour away from Senegalese (word?!) airspace at the time of their last known contact which means Brazilian ATC was keeping tabs on them before preparing to hand over responsibility to the next ATC zone on deck. At 01:48 UTC the aircraft left Brazilian Atlantic airspace and entered the next airspace zone. That 1:48 is right in the heart of this 45-minute communication discrepancy zone.
So does this not fall on Brazil? I remember a couple of years ago they were having crashes non-stop. RIP Though... There hasn't been a large plane crash in a while.
Well, it looks like they found it. http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/brazil_plane BRASILIA, Brazil – Brazilian military pilots spotted an airplane seat, a life jacket, metallic debris and signs of fuel in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean on Tuesday as they hunted for a missing Air France passenger jet that carried 228 people. They found no signs of life. The pilots spotted two areas of floating debris about 60 kilometers (35 miles) apart, about 410 miles (650 kilometers) beyond the Brazilian island of Fernando de Noronha, roughly along Flight 447's path from Rio de Janeiro to Paris, said Air Force spokesman Jorge Amaral. "The locations where the objects were found are toward the right of the point where the last signal of the plane was emitted," Amaral said. "That suggests that it might have tried to make a turn, maybe to return to Fernando de Noronha, but that is just a hypothesis." Amaral said authorities would not be able to confirm that the debris is from the plane until they can retrieve some of it from the ocean for identification. Brazilian military ships are not expected to arrive at the area until Wednesday. The discovery came more than 24 hours after the jet went missing, with all feared dead. Rescuers were still scanning a vast sweep of ocean extending from far off northeastern Brazil to waters off West Africa. The 4-year-old plane was last heard from at 0214 GMT Monday (10:14 p.m. EDT Sunday). If no survivors are found, it would be the world's worst aviation disaster since 2001. Investigators on both sides of the ocean are trying to determine what brought the Airbus A330 down, with few clues to go on so far. Potential causes could include violently shifting winds and hail from towering thunderheads, lightning or some combination of other factors. The crew gave no verbal messages of distress before the crash, but the plane's system sent an automatic message just before it disappeared, reporting lost pressure and electrical failure. The plane's cockpit and "black box" recorders could be thousands of feet (meters) below the surface. The chance of finding survivors now "is very very small, even nonexistent," said the French minister overseeing transportation, Jean-Louis Borloo. "The race against the clock has begun" to find the plane's two black boxes, which emit signals up to 30 days. Borloo said lightning alone, even from a fierce tropical storm, probably couldn't have brought down the plane. "There really had to be a succession of extraordinary events to be able to explain this situation," Borloo said on RTL radio Tuesday. French police were studying passenger lists and maintenance records, and preparing to take DNA from passengers' relatives to help identify any bodies. France's Defense Minister Herve Morin said "we have no signs so far" of terrorism, but all hypotheses must be studied. Alain Bouillard, who led the probe into the crash of the Concorde in July 2000, was put in charge of France's accident investigation team. President Barack Obama told French television stations the United States is ready to do everything necessary to find out what happened. On board the flight were 61 French citizens, 58 Brazilians, 26 Germans, nine Chinese and nine Italians. A lesser number of citizens from 27 other countries also were on the passenger list, including two Americans. Among them were three young Irish doctors, returning from two-week vacation in Brazil. Aisling Butler's father John paid tribute to his 26-year-old daughter, from Roscrea, County Tipperary. "She was a truly wonderful, exciting girl. She never flunked an exam in her life — nailed every one of them — and took it all in her stride," he said. The Airbus A330-200 was cruising normally at 35,000 feet (10,670 meters) and 522 mph (840 kph) just before it disappeared nearly four hours into the flight. No trouble was reported as the plane left radar contact, beyond Brazil's Fernando de Noronha archipelago. But just north of the equator, a line of towering thunderstorms loomed. Bands of extremely turbulent weather stretched across the Atlantic toward Africa. France's junior minister for transport, Dominique Bussereau, said the plane sent "a kind of outburst" of automated messages just before it disappeared, "which means something serious happened, as eventually the circuits switched off." The pilot had 11,000 hours of flying experience, including 1,700 hours flying this aircraft. France's parliament will hold a moment of silence later Tuesday, and the French soccer team will wear black arm bands and hold a moment of silence ahead of a match against Nigeria on Tuesday night.
the wind must have pushed the plane to the water extremely hard.. RIP to the victims, and my condolences go out to the victims' families...
Eh, it's more like they just know where to look now. There's a pretty good chance the bulk of the wreckage will be scattered between the points of the two debris fields that they were able to locate. Let's just hope they can find the black box so we know what the hell went wrong and whether or not this is a potential design flaw.
I'm not sure about wind man. A jet flying at 550 mph from 35,000 ft crashing into the ocean.. water becomes like concrete then. The debris field was ~3 miles long which is like Toyota Center to River Oaks. Apparently the black box has a homing beacon for 30 days - enough time to find it. You'd think they would design it so it would be easier to float.
A floating black box kill the purpose of locating the true crash site. I mean what's the point of finding a black box that's been floating for days and 100miles from the crash site? Now they have the black box and it will take them months to search the ocean floor because the black box didn't go down with the plane.
The main purpose of finding the "black box" (the Flight Data Recorder and Cockpit Voice Recorder) is to recover a record of the vital stats and performance of the aircraft (as well as what was going on in the cockpit) when it went down. Together these items are crucial in the investigation to find out what happened, especially when it is unlikely all of the wreckage will ever be recovered.
Yes but a moving object doesn't help at all. Lets say they know that the plane crash around certain proximate radius so they will use that to track the black box. It's like a systematic grid that they use to scan the ocean floor. So now you have a floating black box that now free to float outside of the radius is going to make it even more difficult to scan for that beacon since now it could be anywhere in the ocean floating to any direction. It's not like they are searching/scanning with their eyes for a small floating box on the surface. Yeah, of course the black box is crucial to the investigation to find out what happen. But the main also is to find where the plane resting place is because that is very important to the family members who lost their love ones. Finding a floating black box without knowing where exactly the plane crash resting place is not a good idea. Now it going to take weeks and months and a lot of money to scan the huge ocean floor. Best is that you kill 2 birds with one stone. Track the black box and you will also have a better chance of finding the plane resting site. It's going to take less time to find the black box if it's resting in one area.
