AIRCRAFT INCIDENTS

[DanKellFla]

I've read a little about 587. I doubt it was a tail just snapping off - which is the first time that ever happened to a modern jet. Another pilot who took off around the same time said if tails just dropped off like that he'd quit flying. An off-duty police officer who was jogging and just so happened to be staring up at the plane saw a fireball emerge out the side of the fuselage before it nose-dived. It was probably the first shoe-bomber which is why you never saw any analysis of the passengers done on TV. I saw a NASA scientist's analysis of the drop and drift rate of the wake vortex and it wasn't strong enough or drifted far enough to rip 587's tail off. The pilot was most likely "overreacting" to an unexpected force exiting out his fuselage. I doubt a cop would make something like that up (as well as a firefighter who saw the same thing). A toll booth video caught a smoke trail off of 587. Google: USREAD587

A fireball from the side of the plane could be an "un-start." That is when the engine has something interfere with its airflow and the flow of the gasses goes backwards. Then, a fireball comes out the front or the engine, which is on the side of the airplane. If this was the case, the cop just reported what he saw. Personally, I have no problem with the tail snapping off. Composite analysis is still decades behind metal analysis. With all the testing that takes place, it would be nice if things like this never happened. But, we live in an imperfect world.

Any Air France official reporting anything right now is unprofessional. This may never be solved.

[Sanibel]

Well an 'unstart' would announce loudly in the cockpit. The cockpit audio was available and I don't think they recorded that. Besides such an event would be very clearly in origin from the engine. The officer was specific that he was staring at the plane as it took off and saw it emerge out the side of the fuselage. The pilot was trying to go to "Escape" which is a switch that turns off the take-off autopilot in order to give emergency control to the pilot. Audio showed an audible frame rattle sound prior to the alleged overreaction move by the pilot. In other words he was reacting to an event that clearly occurred, according to the cockpit recorder, before he made the rudder moves. The wake vortex wasn't strong enough or in the right location to cause this gross overreaction to something encountered by commercial aircraft daily. Which is why you don't see any in-depth computer graphic recreation of the speed and strength of the vortex in relation to the prevailing NW wind that morning. NTSB was declaring a mechanical cause while the wreckage was literally smoking in the background. Totally unprofessional.

[tropicana]

Thu Jun 4 2009

The captain of a Spanish airliner claims to have seen "an intense flash of white light" in the area where Air France Flight 447 was lost, the El Mundo newspaper said today.
The co-pilot and a passenger on the Air Comet flight from Lima to Lisbon also saw the light, it said, adding that a written report from the captain has been sent on to Air France, Airbus and the Spanish civil aviation authority.
"Suddenly, we saw in the distance a strong and intense flash of white light, which followed a descending and vertical trajectory and which broke up into six segments," the unidentified captain wrote.
The Air Comet flight's position at the time was at seven degrees north latitude and 49 degrees west longitude, whereas the Air France flight was estimated to be on the equator and 30 degrees west longitude, El Mundo said.
"Given the coincidence of time and place, I bring to your attention these elements so that they may be, possibly, useful in casting a light on the facts," the captain wrote.

The Air France jet went down on Monday during a flight from Rio to Paris with 228 people on board.
Air Comet is a Madrid-based airliner that mainly flies long-haul routes between Spain and Latin America

[Dionne]

Thu Jun 4 2009

The captain of a Spanish airliner claims to have seen "an intense flash of white light" in the area where Air France Flight 447 was lost, the El Mundo newspaper said today.
The co-pilot and a passenger on the Air Comet flight from Lima to Lisbon also saw the light, it said, adding that a written report from the captain has been sent on to Air France, Airbus and the Spanish civil aviation authority.
"Suddenly, we saw in the distance a strong and intense flash of white light, which followed a descending and vertical trajectory and which broke up into six segments," the unidentified captain wrote.
The Air Comet flight's position at the time was at seven degrees north latitude and 49 degrees west longitude, whereas the Air France flight was estimated to be on the equator and 30 degrees west longitude, El Mundo said.
"Given the coincidence of time and place, I bring to your attention these elements so that they may be, possibly, useful in casting a light on the facts," the captain wrote.

The Air France jet went down on Monday during a flight from Rio to Paris with 228 people on board.
Air Comet is a Madrid-based airliner that mainly flies long-haul routes between Spain and Latin America

Seems like a long distance....19 degrees longitude. And citing six segments descending. Makes me wonder if the flight had turned back towards South America.

[Stephanie]

I read a comment from another pilot that said that pilots are trained to use the onboard radar to fly around storms as they see "holes" in the radar develop. However, in the ITCZ, storms could churn up so fast that they may have found themselves surrounded by storms once the attempt was made. Read more here:

http://www.philly.com/inquirer/world_us/46890702.html

Posted on Thu, Jun. 4, 2009


Plane became lost in fierce storm zone
The pilot encountered a huge and violent band of ferocious weather near the equator.
By Brian Skoloff

Associated Press

Air France Flight 447 vanished in a zone of ferocious weather over the Atlantic Ocean known as the birthplace of some of the world's strongest storms - just as the plane was encountering a 400-mile-long maze of lightning, hail, driving rain, and 100-m.p.h. updrafts.
So why didn't the pilot simply turn around, avoid the storms, or divert to another airstrip, standard procedure for avoiding severe weather anywhere in the world? After all, no pilot willingly flies directly into a large thunderstorm.

The plane's crew may have tried to navigate through the storms using onboard radar, threading through holes in the weather, but then found itself trapped, unable to get around or over the clouds that towered up to 50,000 feet, experts said.

Joe Mazzone, a retired Delta Air Lines pilot, said that captains often look to their radar at night to weave through thunderstorms, which appear as red blotches, but that in such a volatile region, storms can converge suddenly around you.

"You're penetrating where you think you've got a hole," he said, "and you get in there, and you basically now see that it's red all around you, so you're committed now." At that point, he said, even if the plane were to turn around, it would have to go back through the same weather, presenting a dicey situation both ahead and behind. And no pilot, Mazzone said, is going to try to simply keep on schedule in dangerous weather at the potential expense of passengers' lives.

A Brazilian Air Force spokesman has said the plane's debris field in the ocean may suggest the pilot did indeed try to return, because parts of the plane were found just outside the flight's path, near where the last signal was emitted before it disappeared. Searchers found debris in a region known as the Intertropical Convergence Zone, a nearly continuous band of colliding weather systems near the equator.

It's where winds from the Northern and Southern Hemispheres clash, spawning violent thunderstorms that can tower 60,000 feet, far higher than any commercial airliner could fly over.

Weather reports from the time indicate massive thunderstorms were developing over a 400-mile-long route directly along the flight's path Sunday night. Basically, this zone, which experts refer to as the ITCZ, is a stormy weather band that wraps some 25,000 miles around the world, generally hugging the equator.

While the region can be quiet and calm, it is also "the birthplace of our strongest storms on Earth," said Henry Margusity, a senior meteorologist for AccuWeather.com. The convergence of weather from opposite hemispheres fuels the production of thousands of small storms that can merge to form massive ones, sometimes in continuous bands, like what apparently happened Sunday.

Brazilian officials said the plane's last electronic message came at 10:14 p.m. EDT, indicating loss of air pressure and electrical failure. AccuWeather showed towering thunderheads were sending updrafts of up to 100 m.p.h. into the jet's flight path at that time.

Mazzone said that if the Air France pilot found himself trapped in these storms, it could have been catastrophic, with updrafts sucking the plane up and down, while being battered by huge hail.

Still, a plane crash caused solely by a storm in this volatile weather zone is rare, said Larry Burch, deputy director of the Aviation Weather Center. Thousands of flights every year travel across this stormy equatorial region worldwide without incident. "It's something that's done every day," Burch said. "What happened Sunday night, though, I just can't say."

[HURAKAN]

Debris 'not from Air France jet'

Debris recovered from the Atlantic by Brazilian search teams does not come from a lost Air France jet, a Brazilian air force official has said.

Brig Ramon Borges Cardoso contradicted earlier reports that debris had been found, saying "no material from the plane has been recovered".

A wooden cargo pallet was taken from the sea, but the Airbus A330 had no wooden pallets on board.

Relatives have been told that there is no hope of survivors being found.

Air France chief executive Pierre-Henri Gourgeon and chairman Jean-Cyril Spinetta briefed the passengers' relatives in a hotel near Paris Charles de Gaulle airport where they have been waiting for news.

Mr Gourgeon said the jet, which was carrying 228 people from Rio de Janeiro to Paris, broke apart either in the air or when it hit the sea.

"What is clear is that there was no landing," said a support group representative who was at the meeting, Guillaume Denoix de Saint-Marc. "There's no chance the escape slides came out."

In Rio de Janeiro, hundreds of people gathered at a memorial service attended by the French and Brazilian foreign ministers.

"Those who are missing are here in our hearts and in our memories," said the French minister, Bernard Kouchner.

A memorial service was held in Paris on Wednesday.

Oil slick

Brazilian navy vessels have been combing the area, about 1,100km (690 miles) north-east of Brazil's coast.

Three more Brazilian boats and a French ship equipped with small submarines are expected to arrive in the area in the next few days.

Brig Cardoso said that fuel found in the sea probably did come from the plane, because it was not of a type used in ships.

However he said a large oil slick photographed in the area was more likely to have come from a ship.

He said the search effort would continue, with the main focus on finding bodies, but bad weather is forecast for the region on Friday.

'Clock ticking'

French military spokesman Christophe Prazuck said the priority was looking for wreckage from the plane, before turning the search to flight data recorders.

"The clock is ticking on finding debris before they spread out and before they sink or disappear," he said.

French officials have said the recorders, which could be deep under water, may never be found.
FLIGHT AF 447 TIMELINE
# Plane left Rio de Janeiro at 1900 local time (2200 GMT) on 31 May
# Contact lost 0130 GMT
# Had been due to land at 1110 local time (0910 GMT) in Paris

Officials have warned that they are far from working out the cause of the crash.

Investigators are reported to be relying on a stream of automated messages sent out just before the crash, which suggested the plane's systems shut down as it flew through high thunderstorms.

Investigators have suggested that speed sensors failed or iced over, causing erroneous data to be fed to onboard computers. This might have caused the plane to fly too fast or too slowly through the storm, leading it either to break apart or stall and fall out of the sky.

A Spanish pilot flying in the area at the time of the crash was quoted by his airline, Air Comet, as saying he had seen an "intense flash of white light, which followed a descending and vertical trajectory and which broke up in six seconds".

The paper said Airbus, the maker of the plane, would issue A330 jets with new advice on flying in storms.

Airbus declined to comment on the report, though an unnamed official told AFP news agency that it was normal to update airlines following an accident.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/w ... 083474.stm

[Brent]

From http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/americas/ ... pstoryview

On Wednesday, searchers recovered two debris fields and had identified the wreckage, including an airplane seat and an orange float as coming from Flight 447. Officials now say that none of the debris recovered is from the missing plane.

So where did it come from? It would seem to me if a second plane was involved we'd know by now since it's been four days.

Something is not right here. I never bought this weather theory but this is just baffling.

[wx247]

I bet Charles Widmore is involved! That is one thing I am sure of!!!

[gtalum]

In regards to AA587: eyewitness reports are incredibly unreliable in aircraft incidents. People see what they want to see. What you leave out of your analysis is the fact that while all Airbus A300's were temporarily grounded, nearly all of them turned out to have tiny imperfections due to repeated stress in the connections between the composite tail and the aluminum fuselage. The A300 was the first commercial aircraft in which composites were heavily used in structural components. Thus the effects of long-term stress were not known at the time of construction as well as they are now. Further, stress imperfections in composites are very difficult to find. They have to be found with a very close x-ray inspection. By the time they are visible to the naked eye, they will have already failed catastrophically. Contrast that to metals, where stress cracks are inspected for visually, and will slowly deteriorate over time rather than catastrophically fail, giving plenty of time to find them before they cause a real problem.

In regards to AF447: it's far too early to speculate in any real way as to what happened to that aircraft. Due to the location of the crash, we may never get a definitive answer to what happened. Terrorism seems incredibly unlikely, as terrorists are generally quite eager to claim responsibility for an incident.

[Dionne]

Most catastrophic events involve more than one failure.

I'm going way out on a limb here and suggest this failure was at least caused by two simultaneous situations. Weather and aircraft viability during very intense ITCZ storms.

I saw the radar....they flew into a large red blob....the pilots could not climb over or detour.

Real bummer.

[senorpepr]

Here's a page written by meteorologist Tim Vasquez...

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

[Harry Cane]

Holy Mary, mother of God. That airplane must have encountered hell up there....
Peace to those poor souls and respect to the families.

[Harry Cane]

Terrorism seems incredibly unlikely, as terrorists are generally quite eager to claim responsibility for an incident.

Not if it is drug related. If a Drug cartel wants to send a clear message.....

[cycloneye]

Planes Autopilot was not on

PARIS – Signals sent by Air France Flight 447 before it disappeared show its autopilot was not on, the head of the French agency leading the investigation into the crash of 447 said Saturday.

Agency head 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.

Plane manufacturer Airbus says the investigation found the flight received inconsistent readings from different instruments as it struggled in a massive thunderstorm.

Alain Bouillard, head of the investigation into the crash, told reporters that, "we also saw messages that show the automatic pilot wasn't working."

Arslanian said investigators are analyzing 24 messages sent automatically by the plane during the last minutes of the flight.

He said investigators are searching a zone of several hundred square miles (square kilometers) for the debris.

It is vital to locate a beacon called a "pinger" that should be attached to the cockpit voice and data recorders, now presumed to be deep in the Atlantic, he said.

"We have no guarantee that the pinger is attached to the recorders," Arslanian said.

Holding up a pinger in the palm of his hand, he said: "This is what we are looking for in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean."

Investigators are trying to determine the location of the debris in the ocean based on the height and speed of the plane at the time the last message was received. Currents could also have scattered debris far along the ocean floor, he said.

"You see the complexity of the problem," he said.

Laurent Kerleguer, an engineer specialized in the ocean floor working with the investigation team, said the zone seen as the most likely site of the debris was 15,112 feet (4,606 meters) at its deepest point and 2,835 feet (864 meters) at its shallowest.

Water salinity and temperature can affect the distance that the beacon's signal can travel, Kerleguer said.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090606/ap_ ... azil_plane

[CajunMama]

They're having a memorial service here today for Anne & Mike Harris.

How can an entire plane just disappear? I just can't believe they haven't found any parts of it. Not all of it would have sunk.

[srainhoutx]

Here's a page written by meteorologist Tim Vasquez...

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

Tim's article is spot on. What a tragedy.

[southerngale]

I bet Charles Widmore is involved! That is one thing I am sure of!!!

I have to say... plane breaking up over the ocean, vanishing... the thoughts were unavoidable.


How I wish they were on the island as opposed to the certain death they faced. My heart broke thinking of the fear they endured and for the families left to mourn. May God comfort them.

[Brent]

Bodies found:

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,525297,00.html

[gtalum]

Not if it is drug related. If a Drug cartel wants to send a clear message.....

If they don't claim responsibility, there's no clear message. Further, why would they attack a French aircraft as opposed to an American or Brazilian aircraft?

I suspect Dionne is right. A series of calamities occurred simultaneously to bring the plane down. Most crashes are a result of exactly that.

[wx247]

I bet Charles Widmore is involved! That is one thing I am sure of!!!

I have to say... plane breaking up over the ocean, vanishing... the thoughts were unavoidable.


How I wish they were on the island as opposed to the certain death they faced. My heart broke thinking of the fear they endured and for the families left to mourn. May God comfort them.

I agree. I hope that no one took my post as being callous. Exactly who is leading the investigation? Could this be a case of too many chiefs delaying what appears now of being the inevitable?