Missing French jet hit thunderstorms

New reports of failed or malfunctioning pitot tubes on other Air Bus aircraft in the paper this morning.

Goto:

Several Airbus 330s had airspeed gauge failures | Spokesman.com | Aug 8, 2009

I wonder if more of these failures/malfunctions are lurking in the wings waiting to come to the fore?

 

So they managed to find the plane. Maybe we´ll find out more soon...

A combination image of photographs of plane wreckage of Air ... - Yahoo! News Photos

 

and some bodies still inside.... It should take about a month to salvage the wreckage

 

IMHO, It's beginning to appear that the flight crew spend a lot of time "fighting" with the aircraft flight director software...they didn't fly the plane first. My guess is that while they wrestled with the flight director and its lack of a true override and a very iced over set of pitot tubes, the plane stalled and entered into a flat spin. By the time the crew reacted it was too late. The may be some structural issues as well but only photo recon or dredged up hardware will get to the truth

 

Hopes raised for recovery of AF447 black boxes - Yahoo! News

Representatives of families of Brazilian victims of a 2009 Air France jet crash say French investigators have told them the rear section of the plane has been found — and that the "black boxes" may be attached to it.

Nelson Marinho, president of the family group, told The Associated Press on Tuesday that he and other family members met with officials in Paris the day before.

Marinho says French officials say the rear of the jet was relatively intact, raising hopes that the voice and data recorders could be recovered.

Martine Del Bono is a spokeswoman for the French investigating agency. He cautioned that the boxes have yet to be located.

 

I hope they will find the boxes, I still have my doubts about the official version and this would settle the matter.

 

There was an excellent program on our PBS that developed a pretty good explanation as to how those pitot tubes would all freeze over. At that altitude, extremely pure water can stay liquid at below freezing temps. until it is struck by a foreign object. It was amazing to watch this presenter, he had a number of plastic water bottles filled with very pure water and it was liquid until he inserted a small probe into the opening. It simply crystallized from top to bottom in about three seconds. It was a great show, wish I could find it online or something so I could share it with the forum.

 

I thought the problem with the black boxes was that they could not survive much more than a month submerged. Even if they find them, will they be of any use?

 

Was it that the signal from the boxes dies out in a month or two or would the black boxes be unusable after a longer time??

 

I think the locator signal dies off pretty soon, which makes them harder to find. But since this is one of the newest airliners, it may have the newest type of recording system which might be safe for longer. I'm thinking of digital recordings rather than analog here, I believe those records can survive for a very long time, but I could easily be wrong.

 

The video can be found here:NOVA | Crash of Flight 447

 

Thanks for posting that link buddy! I had forgotten where it was, wasn't that an amazing demonstration? When you couple that possibility with the "computer controlled" fly-by-wire system in the Airbus it could certainly be a recipe for the disaster.

 

The FAA's Technical Service Order governing the design of flight data recorders calls for a survivability of 30 days immersion in sea water at a hydrostatic pressure depth of 20,000ft. (Assuming comparable European standards) My guess is that if the design meets the 30 days @ 20,000 ft requirement, the practical reality is that it would survive much longer. The locator beacon will obviously have a finite life, but hopefully the data will survive if they are found.

 

BBC News - Brazil Air France crash: Flight recorder found empty

Search teams say they have discovered part of a flight recorder from the Air France plane that crashed in 2009, off the coast of Brazil.

But they say they have yet to find the section containing crucial data which could reveal the cause of the crash.

"During the first dive by the Remora 6000 which lasted more than 12 hours, the chassis of the flight data recorder was found, without the module protecting and containing the data," France's Bureau of Investigation and Analysis said in a statement.

They said a second dive was under way.

 

Here is some more just in on the AP line...


PARIS (AP) -- Investigators have located and recovered the missing memory unit of the flight data recorder of a 2009 Air France flight - a remarkable deep-sea discovery they hope will explain why the aircraft went down in a remote area of the mid-Atlantic.

Goto:

News from The Associated Press

 

I 'm pretty curious now. So much has been said about this, we"ll finally get to know what happened

 

The team has now recovered the "cockpit voice recorder" as well. Now both systems are in the hands of the labs.


PARIS (AP) -- French investigators on Tuesday recovered the cockpit voice recorder from an Air France flight that plunged into the Atlantic Ocean almost two years ago, killing all 228 people on board.

The machine that records cockpit conversations was located Monday and raised from the ocean depths on Tuesday, according to the BEA, the French agency that probes air accidents.

The plane's flight data recorder was pulled out on Sunday, meaning both pieces critical to determining the cause of the June 1, 2009, crash have now been found. The memory unit was found by a submarine probing (12,800 feet) 3,900 meters below the ocean's surface.

Goto:

News from The Associated Press

Perhaps the mystery will be solved after all.

 

I saw that on the news too, the recorders both seem in good condtion and should reveal information soon. They are not in a lab yet. They are kept in high pressured sea water containers and will be transported to Paris on a fegate to assure maximum precautions and preserve whatever is left of the data.

 

Right on the "labs", I mis-spoke. What I was trying to convey is that the mystery may yet be resolved when the labs get to work on them, not that they were already there. I'm hopeful that the pitot tubes freezing over and the computer are more to blame than the pilots, although I do think that they were not trained to deal with that situation properly and may have contributed to the "fall into the sea".

 

pilot and technology are only two possibilities. Thunderstorms and even a "friendly" missile were evoked too. Many rumors will be put to easy when those boxes finally reveal their secrets.