Eddie P

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009...sh-a330-brazil

Terrible news, hope for the best.

olnico

They're talking about lightning strike. Highly unprobable. They were flying at FL410...

Shok

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I would put money on this plane breaking up at altitude.

rcjets_63

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Let's see if we can avoid the speculation this time; a couple of hundred people are missing.  My prayers go out to the passengers/crew and their families.

Shok

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What?? Why do people say this?

Speculating on a cause of an incident does not hurt anything.
Infact I find it very intersting the varied points of view that comes from speculating.

ianober

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It was reported that it flew straight into a tropical thunderstorm, which at times reach as high as FL500, so this could have happened indeed. Reports came in from the aircraft as it having electrical failures and loss of cabin pressure.

I just hope they find the site and get some closure.

olnico

Well I'm flying all the time in tropical and sub tropical conditions. Never seen a ligthning that high. This could theretically be possible though.

I heard that they were on datalink when they lost them. If this is true, they have the exact position of the last contact and all the system failures prior to the loss.
They should already have a good picture of what happened, when and where.

Eddie P

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I won't speculate blindly, but I'll add a few thoughts.

To be honest, I was stunned at the comment the official spokesperson was creditied to have given about the lightning strike. Aircraft I've been flying have been struck by lightning a couple times over the years. It's common in certain areas and times - not desirable, not at all, but it happens. It's been as little as a slight discoloration around a static discharger to a hole burned in fiberglass from the exit location. The hole burned in the fiberglass fairing was the result of clear air lightning - we were visual and the nearest cell was 35 miles away.

There are certainly worse lightning scenarios out there for sure, but to surmise at such a thing as lightning that "might have" brought the aircraft down, that was very suprising to hear. I can only hope that the official comment was taken out of context, gotten wrong, etc. by the press.

What can potentially bring an aircraft down is flying inadvetantly through extreme turbulence causing structural damage, or more likely, a high altitude aircraft upset that exceeds the ability of the pilot, or aircraft, to recover successfuly before structural failure. Both circumstances leading to structural failure are very - VERY unlikely when you examine the vast majority of situations with highly qualified, professional cockpit crew and aircraft like contemporary Airbus or Boeing.

The automated aircraft messages they are talking about - I have a feeling they are quoting ACARS (aircraft communicating and reporting system datalink) messages the aircraft routinely sends back to the company. Everytime a maintenance issue or aircraft anololy ocurs, the maintenance computer diagnoses it, logs it, and sends messages back home to the company so they can get on top of working out a solution for the next departure in advance. In this case, I wonder if they had a temporary electrical failure, got it back, the maintenance computer sent the messages back home, and then they flew for some time again before failures kicked in again or the aircraft met it's demise. There could be other aircraft messages from the crew, but they didn't seem to mention anything in the criptic reporting that indicated anything outside of automated aircraft messages or non specific text messages from passengers.

In this A330 situation, I'm certain several conditions, some probably latent, lined up perfectly for that one in a billion situation to occur. I am very sad for everyone involved, their families & friends and for Air France.

FL510

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I had a strike at FL410, flying a Lear 60 out of Dallas, heading home to BHM. One strike isn't going to bring down plane, though. We also had a US Air Fokker 100 here in Birmingham about 11 years ago take 50 plus strikes going through a line. They lost everything, but engine power. Slid off the runway on landing.

Jed

FalconWings

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I have a question,

Why on earth, having all these new GPS technology, large airliners are still using ELT's transmitting on 121.5 Mhz??? Isn't it time to have a transmitter that can provide a GPS with the exact impact location?

David

Eddie P

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You have a valid question, but it's already been answered years ago with satelite communications and locating technoligy. That's why 121.5 ELT beacons are not used anymore except for domestically in the USA only, and even then, it's nearly been eradicated here, the last holdout in the world for 121.5 ELT's. All modern airliners have multiple sat comm emergency beacons, ect.. They work great as long they have not been destroyed or under 5000 feet of water, before a signal could leave and also be received by an appropriate sattelite. Some timing is involved.

It's hard to accept in this day and age that you can walk into a hospital alive and kicking and the next day be dead from a disease we cannot overcome or a human mistake. It's also hard to accept that some areas of the earth are not easily accesible, and we are just like small bacteria on the surface of the earth, easily distroyed and lost in the massive openess of expanse. We still are not masters of the universe - we just fit in when the circumstances let us. Events like these remind us.

siclick33

This system already exists.

121.5 is old technology. 406Mhz is the new system and it can encode GPS position.

Cospas/SARSATisn't geostationary, therefore it can take several hours to get a position. It is not out of the realms of possibilty that even if the search crews are looking in the exact location, there may be nothing for them to see.

I don't believe that a lightning strike is any less likely to have caused the loss than structural failure. IMO, both are equally improbably but something horrific has obviously happened. It could also bethat the weather is a red herring and the failure was entirely unrelated.Hopefully the tech messages received will give some idea what has happened. From what Ihave read, they seem to have reported multiple electrical and control failures. Whether this was the cause or result of the accident god only knows.

Yak18

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My speculation is he inadvertantly flew into a thunder storm perhaps after losing his weather radar in the electrical system failure.  Last year, we had two aircraft (MU-2 and C421) fly into thunderstorms and shed their wings.  One had weather radar and the other did not.      

Shok

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No radio calls from the crew from what I understand. No mayday or anything.
Whatever happened, happened very fast.

Rider-60

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I'm not a pilot but have spent some times in cockpits. I can only see 4 situations where the plane would "suddenly" disappear while in cruise

siclick33

Rider-60,

What makes you think it suddenly disappeared? It appears that this may have been the case but there are other explanations that the accident investigation team will have to consider.

Why don't you believe the lightning strike theory?

There are lots of theories running on this at the moment, most of which could have some element of truth and at the same time are very easy to pick holes in. Maybe Air France have info that gives them a good idea what happened but, from the info in the public domain at the moment,noone cando anything but speculate.

FalconWings

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They were in the middle of the Atlantic, I'm not sure that they can talk to ATC where they were. If the airplanewas equipped with an HF Radio then they could have contacted the airline Operation Control, but that's about it. I know some A-330's have SATCOM, those could probaby maintain communication worldwide. You can tell by the big plate on the top of the fuselage. US Air has them, don't know about Air France.

sideshow

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I'm not sure about that part of the Atlantic, but in the Pacific we use Controller Pilot Data Link Communication (CPDLC) for advanced aircraft, such as the Airbus 330. These have a bunch of standard messages for clearances and requests, but there is also a "free text" feature for non-standard communication. They also have sat-phones for contacting us as well. The communications are not as contemporaneous as domestic communications with radar controlled aircraft (which this flight was not).

To my knowledge, they have released no information on what they may, or may not have received via these various communication methods. Hopefully they will be able to nail down exactly what happened, so it can be prevented in the future.

Prayers to the families....

skyhawknut

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You guys should really read about positive lightning. 1 Billion volts and 300,000 amps.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning



"Positive lightning is also now believed to have been responsible for the 1963 in-flight explosion and subsequent crash of Pan Am Flight 214, a Boeing 707.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-asn_39-0">[40]</sup> Due to the dangers of lightning, aircraft operating in U.S. airspace have been required to have lightning discharge wicks to reduce the damage by a lightning strike, but these measures may be insufficient for positive lightning.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-40">[41]</sup>

Positive lightning has also been shown to trigger the occurrence of upper atmosphere lightning. It tends to occur more frequently in winter storms, as with thundersnow, and at the end of a thunderstorm.<sup class="reference" id="cite_ref-GHCC_primer2_13-4">[14]</sup>

An average bolt of positive lightning carries a current of up to 300 kA (kiloamperes) (about ten times as much current as a bolt of negative lightning), transfers a charge of up to 300 coulombs, has a potential difference up to 1 gigavolt (one billion volts), and lasts for hundreds of milliseconds, with a discharge energy of up to 300 GJ (gigajoules) (a billion joules)."


I don't really think this is it - but it could happen.

I personally think they had a massive strike that knocked out everything except the very few backups. Then as they lost cabin px - the first thing is to decend to 10,000 feet, but in the middle of a stom, with no autopilot - they probably were disoriented and bucked around untill they lost control and either it impacted the water or they exceeded max speed and it broke up. Absolutley the last thing on their mind was to make a radio call.

skyhawknut

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erbroens

A interesting article wich may not help people sleep better...

http://www.time.com/time/world/artic...902421,00.html

Eddie P

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http://www.weathergraphics.com/tim/af447/