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Georg Burdicek

Air France A330 F-GZCP Flight AF447 GIG-CDG Crashed Into the Atlantic Ocean All 228 POB Killed

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Here's an ironic fact about the island of Fernando de Noronha where AF447 crashed...

 

http://www.noronha.com.br/english/tourism.htm

 

Tours And Activities

 

There are many beaches to choose from on the island. Some are better adapted to diving, others to swimming, contemplation, surfing, etc. In general, the beaches found on the protected side of the main island are ideal for diving and swimming during the months of April through November, due to the extremely calm sea. During the rest of the year, the changing conditions of the sea favor the sport of surfing, especially during January and February. Below are some important suggestions for your future visit:

 

Air France

 

Located in the extreme northeast of the main island, ideal for contemplation and diving. It offers a spectacular view of the smaller islands. Here is found the Cultural Center of the Archipelago, which offers courses in beginning art for children. The name Air France comes from the use of this area as a base for transatlantic flights made by Air France during the 1930's.

 

There's a beach named Air France on the island...I kid you not!

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Agree. It looked like the plane was turning back before crashing into the ocean. Maybe a major failure (communication) forced them to turnaround before a second blow knocked them out of the sky. Still too early to speculate anything until they find the black boxes.

That's if they ever find it :pardon:

 

 

I don't think the crash will affect AF to the scale of Pan Am. When the Lockerbie disaster occured, Pan Am was already a weakened carrier facing the effects of deregulation in the US, and because the crash was caused by terrorism, many people just avoided flying with Pan Am. That's the death knell for Pan Am.

True. Pan AM is a whole different story. Having very little domestic routes to support their massive international operations is also one of the reasons why they went bankrupt.

 

 

Besides, there are many other airlines that are still flying, eventhough their safety record is a bit spotty. China Airlines is one, Garuda is another.

You forgot Korean Air. Both Korean Air and China Airlines are getting better though. Last KE accident was in the 90s while last CI accident with fatalities was in 2002.

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AF447's ACARS summary...ADIRU failure at 11:13....two QF A330s also suffered similar problems, 70 people were injured in the 1st QF incident when the A330 plunged mid-air.

A summary of the final messages from Flight 447

By BRADLEY BROOKS – 3 hours ago

French and Brazilian officials have described a "burst" of messages from Flight 447 just before it disappeared.

A more complete chronology was published Wednesday by Brazil's O Estado de S. Paulo newspaper, citing an unidentified Air France source, and confirmed to The Associated Press by an aviation industry source with knowledge of the investigation:

_ 11 p.m. local time — The pilot sends a manual signal saying the jet was flying through CBs — towering cumulo-nimulus thunderheads.

_ 11:10 p.m. — A cascade of automatic messages indicate trouble: The autopilot had disengaged, stabilizing controls were damaged, flight systems deteriorated.

_ 11:13 p.m. — Messages report more problems: The system that monitors speed, altitude and direction failed. The main flight computer and wing spoilers failed.

_ 11:14 p.m. — The final message indicates a loss of cabin pressure and complete system failure — catastrophic events in a plane that was likely already plunging toward the ocean.

 

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I guess Airbus must be hoping for 'act of god' or 'terrorist attack' to absolve it of major blame. If it's a design fault, then other A330s are at risk.

 

===

New Air France debris found, explosion unlikely

Wed Jun 3, 2009 11:07pm EDT

 

By Miguel Lo Bianco

 

FERNANDO DE NORONHA, Brazil (Reuters) - Search crews flying over the Atlantic found debris from a crashed Air France jet spread over more than 55 miles of ocean on Wednesday, reinforcing the possibility it broke up in the air.

 

Brazilian Defense Minister Nelson Jobim said the existence of large fuel stains in the water likely ruled out an explosion, undercutting speculation about a bomb attack.

 

"The existence of oil stains could exclude the possibility of a fire or explosion," he said at a news conference in Brasilia. "If we have oil stains, it means it wasn't burned."

 

Experts said extreme turbulence or decompression during stormy weather may have caused the Airbus A330, which took off from Rio de Janeiro bound for Paris on Sunday night, to splinter over the ocean with 228 people on board.

 

Two Brazilian navy ships arrived in the crash area, about 685 miles northeast of Brazil's coast, but had not yet retrieved any debris by nightfall. French officials said they may never discover why the plane went down as the flight data and voice recorders may be lost at the bottom of the ocean.

 

Air force pilots searching the area have reported no signs of survivors. Officials said recovering bodies may be extremely difficult.

 

"As well as bodies sinking, you also have problems along the coast of Pernambuco (state) that you know about," Jobim said in reference to sharks. He added bodies could take several days to float to the surface.

 

Newly spotted traces of the plane included a 12-mile (20-km) fuel stain and various objects spread across a 3-mile (5-km) area, including one metallic object 23 feet in diameter.

 

The Air France plane sent no mayday signals before crashing, only automatic messages showing electrical faults and a loss of pressure shortly after it entered stormy weather.

 

'DESTRUCTION WAS TOTAL'

"I continue to think violent turbulence caused structural damage to the plane," said Jose Carlos Pereira, former head of Brazil's airport authority Infraero.

 

"Its fall was localized but destruction was total," Pereira told Reuters.

 

Aviation trade publications focused on warnings in recent months issued by U.S. and European regulators about electronic systems on A330s and A340s that could throw planes into sharp dives. The directives covered ADIRUs -- air data inertial reference units -- that feed crucial information to the cockpit to help fly planes.

 

With officials struggling to explain how a modern aircraft could have crashed in stormy weather that is routine on the transatlantic route, there was speculation a bomb could have caused the worst crash in Air France's 75-year history.

 

The airline said on Wednesday it had received an anonymous telephone warning that a bomb was on a flight leaving Buenos Aires on May 27, four days before the crash. A spokesman said the plane was checked, no bomb was found and the aircraft left an hour and a half late. He added that such alerts were relatively common.

 

MINI-SUBMARINE ON ITS WAY

 

France is dispatching a mini-submarine that can explore to a depth of 19,680 feet and will try to locate the Airbus' flight data and voice recorders, which could shed light on the crash.

 

The recorders are designed to send homing signals for up to 30 days when they hit water, but there is no guarantee they even survived the impact with the sea, said Paul Louis Arslanian, head of France's air accident investigation agency.

 

Given a broken seabed and depths of up to about 2 miles, finding flight recorders will be very difficult.

 

"I am not totally optimistic. We cannot rule out that we will not find the flight recorders," Arslanian said.

 

Brazil will gather aircraft debris on Fernando de Noronha, a sparsely populated volcanic archipelago and nature reserve off its northeastern coast.

 

It has mobilized 11 air force planes, four navy vessels with divers and a tanker for the retrieval operation that Jobim said was being carried out in a 120-mile (193-km) radius.

 

An air force plane equipped with a radar and infrared sensor continued the search throughout the night.

 

Jorge Amaral, a Brazilian air force colonel, said the long strip of metal found on Wednesday was the biggest piece that search crews had seen so far.

 

"It could be part of the fuselage or the tail," he told reporters.

 

The French investigation will have its first report ready by the end of the month, and will be led by Alain Bouillard, who took charge of the investigation into the crash of an Air France Concorde in 2000.

 

France held an ecumenical religious ceremony for relatives and friends of those on the plane at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris on Wednesday, attended by President Nicolas Sarkozy.

 

In Rio de Janeiro, Air France released a list of Brazilian passengers on board, excluding a few names by request of family members. A memorial mass will be held there on Thursday.

 

(Additional reporting by Alonso Soto and Rodrigo Viga Gaier in Rio, Laure Bretton and Clement Guillou in Paris; Writing by Stuart Grudgings and Raymond Colitt; editing by Will Dunham)

 

http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSTRE5501PB20090604

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Here's an ironic fact about the island of Fernando de Noronha where AF447 crashed...

 

 

 

There's a beach named Air France on the island...I kid you not!

 

It crashed in the sea, if at all...

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how can the system on board the plane fail one by one like that?turbulence itself caused all that?

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Fly-by-wire commentary.

 

===

 

WHAT HAPPENS TO FLY-BY-WIRE WHEN SOMEONE PULLS THE PLUG?

by Charlie Martin

 

Air France Flight 447. It’s the worst of nightmares in the airline industry: a full flight, no sign of trouble, and then the aircraft disappears from radar over the ocean. It happened in 1996 with TWA Flight 800, and it happened again last night.

 

Most commercial air accidents have pretty obvious immediate causes: something fell off, or something hit the plane. A year-long investigation will eventually show that there was a sequence of mistakes and failures, none enough to cause a crash in itself, but fatal in combination. This sort of mid-air, single-plane mystery is much harder, and will be made more difficult still because it will be very difficult or impossible to recover much of the plane. The Atlantic is very deep there, more than 20,000 feet.

 

This one is certainly mysterious: automatic warnings were sent by the plane that there were problems, but there was no hint of a message from the pilots, no distress calls, and minutes later the aircraft disappeared completely.

 

It’s probably too early for the speculation to start, but that won’t stop anyone. In this case, particularly, I can’t help but speculate, because of a small personal connection.

 

Back in the late 80’s I was consulting at NASA during graduate school, working on reliability modeling for aircraft. When we think of NASA, we always think about the Space Shuttle, Hubble Telescope, and astronauts. We forget that NASA also does research and development on aircraft that stay in the atmosphere. In this case, we were interested in pure “fly by wire” aircraft.

 

In small airplanes, when you turn the wheel, it moves wires or pushrods. Most of the time in bigger aircraft, turning the wheel pushes the control surfaces through hydraulics, and while there may be some power assist (like power steering) it’s still a direct connection between pilot and airplane.

 

In a fly-by-wire aircraft, that’s all gone - the pilot pushes the control, and it becomes an input to a computer that adjusts the control surfaces to match. Some fly by wire plans have auxiliary systems to help the pilot if the computers do fail, but in a pure fly by wire plane, that’s all gone.

 

Obviously, in a fly by wire plane, it’s considered very undesirable for the control computer to fail. It crashes, literally. We were using mathematical models to explore how reliable a fly by wire system could be made. Could it be as reliable as the rest of the airframe itself?

 

The results at the time were that it certainly could be made as reliable as a fighter plane - fighter pilots break those pretty regularly, even if no one is shooting at them. In general, the chances are about 50-50 that there will be a fighter aircraft failure for every 100,000 hours of flight time. But commercial aircraft are a thousand to ten thousand times more reliable: you should be able to go a billion flying hours or more before the actual aircraft will fail.

 

So the question was, could flight computer systems be made as reliable as a commercial aircraft? And the carefully considered answer, after several years of work and immense amounts of modeling, was: we don’t know.

 

The truth is that computers aren’t like wings. They don’t fail when you bend them too hard, they fail when the complicated instructions in the computer hit some condition no one ever thought about. Of course, you can try to solve that by having multiple computers, say three, and taking a majority vote. Then you’re depending on the computers’ programs being diverse enough to not fail the same way on the same inputs, an assumption called n-version programming. That has its own problems, though: experiments done by John Knight and Nancy Leveson about that time showed that independent groups of programmers working from the same requirements tend to make a lot of the same mistakes. In other words, the three computers might very well agree on the wrong answer.

 

What does that have to do with the Airbus 330, you ask? Simply, the Airbus 330 is one of the few commercial aircraft that is completely fly by wire. The Airbus 320, or Hudson River fame, has mechanical backups, but the Airbus 330 and 340 don’t. And that’s the root of my speculation. If something happened to cause all the computers to fail at once, or cause all electrical power to fail, the pilot and passengers are pretty much out of luck.

 

What could do that? The obvious answer is lightning. Aircraft are actually damaged by lightning very rarely, but lightning can be a capricious beast: protect yourself against all twelve ways that lightning could harm something, and lightning will find a thirteenth.

 

Soon enough we’ll know more - or maybe we won’t. But back in the 80s I promised myself that I wouldn’t fly in the fly-by-wire Airbus, and I’ve pretty well kept that promise. The loss of Air France 447 may be why.

 

http://pajamasmedia.com/edgelings/2009/06/...pulls-the-plug/

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It seems that Air France retains the scheduled GIG-CDG flight with flight number AF447 with the same aircraft type after the tragic incident.

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It seems that Air France retains the scheduled GIG-CDG flight with flight number AF447 with the same aircraft type after the tragic incident.

Heh.... I guess they are not that superstitious. But then again, what else can they do? If they stop the A330 on that route, the same should be done to other routes using the same aircraft.

I haven't read all the post. But this is isolated case, right? Doesnt affect the whole A330 fleet?

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From Times Online

June 4, 2009

 

Air France Flight 447 'may have stalled at 35,000ft'

 

Airbus is to send new advice to operators of its A330 jets

Charles Bremner, Paris

 

The Air France jet that crashed into the Atlantic killing 228 may have stalled after pilots slowed down too much as they encountered turbulence, new information suggests.

 

Airbus is to send advice on flying in storms to operators of its A330 jets, Le Monde reported today. It would remind crews of the need to maintain adequate thrust from the engines and the correct attitude, or angle of flight, when entering heavy turbulence.

 

Pilots slow down aircraft when entering stormy zones of the type encountered by Air France Flight 447 early on Monday as it was flying from Rio to Paris.

 

The fact that the manufacturer of the aircraft is issuing new advice indicates that investigators have evidence that the aircraft slowed down too much, causing a high-altitude aerodynamic stall. This would explain why the aircraft apparently broke up at altitude over the Atlantic.

 

Airbus declined to comment on the report. A company official said: "Each time there is an accident, it is imperative for the manufacturer to inform all operators of the type of aircraft concerned of any specific procedures to put in place or any checks to carry out."

 

Jean Serrat, a retired airline pilot, told Agence-France Presse: "If the BEA [accident investigation bureau] is making a recommendation so early, it is because they know very well what happened. If they know what happened, they have a duty to make a recommendation, for safety reasons ... The first thing you do when you fly into turbulence is to reduce speed to counter its effects. If you reduce speed too much you stall."

 

Although the flight recorders lie about 12,000ft below the ocean surface, the BEA has data on the last four minutes of Flight 447, transmitted automatically by satellite to Air France's base at Paris Charles de Gaulle airport.

 

A stall, in which the wings lose lift and the aircraft becomes uncontrollable, would be consistent with the sequence of events that have leaked to the media from the Air France data. According to this, the first anomaly was the disconnection of the automatic pilot and computerised flight controls. This means that the pilots were hand-flying the aircraft.

 

It is not known whether Captain Marc Dubois, 58, was at the controls or just his two co-pilots, who were in their 30s.

 

A stall at 35,000ft – the altitude at which Flight 447 was cruising – is hard to recover from in still air. In the heart of a furious tropical storm at night, it could be near impossible. High-altitude stalls claimed several aircraft in the early days of jet aircraft.

Speculation over the fate of Flight 447 continued to rage as ships began trawling the crash area, spread over a 200-mile stretch. Debris, including airliner seats, has been identified from the air, about 800 miles off the Brazil coast. No bodies have been spotted

 

Nelson Jobim, Brazil's Defence Minister, said that a 12-mile-long slick of fuel had been found under the planned route of the Airbus. This meant it was improbable that there had been a fire or explosion, because the jet fuel would have ignited, he said.French experts dismissed this theory, noting that an explosion could fracture the fuselage and cause the break-up of an aircraft without igniting the fuel, which is mainly carried in the wings.

 

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/worl...icle6430398.ece

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if there is no spin during the stalling fall, it is probably 0G, freefalling.

Edited by kaybin

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The B777 has fly by wire

 

My mistake there. I should said AIRBUS's fly by wire system. Airbus system is quite different from Boeing. B777 has fly by wire system in different way which mean the signal you put on rudder or yoke is converted into electrical impulse which sent the signal to the motor at ailerons or rudder.Not with conventional cabelling system. Airbus system is more like AI platform. When it think it going to crash, it will counterback by itself and pilot can't input any control what so ever. This is the problem when the gyroscope is damaged and the plane might think it stalling while its not and sent the plane into diving.

 

p/s: I just wanted to ask here why stalling at 35k feets is almost impossible to recover?

Edited by Shahiez

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if there is no spin during the stalling fall, it is probably 0G, freefalling.

 

Sure? I thought free falling also generate G force as the passengers will be push back on to their seats.

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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.

 

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.

 

from the BBC

 

 

 

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...

p/s: I just wanted to ask here why stalling at 35k feets is almost impossible to recover?

 

Lower air density means less lift.

 

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RECIFE, Brazil – Searchers have found two bodies in the Atlantic Ocean near where an Air France jet is believed to have crashed, a Brazilian military official said Saturday.

 

Air force spokesman Col. Jorge Amaral said searchers also recovered a leather briefcase with an Air France ticket for the flight inside of it.

 

"It was confirmed with Air France that the ticket number corresponds to a passenger on the flight," he said.

 

Flight 447 disappeared Sunday with 228 people on board and officials believe there were no survivors.

 

The two male bodies were recovered Saturday morning about 70 kilometers (45 miles) south of where Air Flight 447 emitted its last signals — roughly 400 miles (640 kilometers) northeast of the Fernando de Noronha islands off Brazil's northern coast.

 

"At 9:10 a.m., a ship spotted the first body," Amaral said. "The body was recovered and it was confirmed to be male."

 

The second body was spotted and recovered around 11:30 a.m. (1430 GMT).

 

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/brazil_plane

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Sure? I thought free falling also generate G force as the passengers will be push back on to their seats.

 

In theory, a free fall would cause a state of 0G, or something like without gravity. However, if Flight 447 had fell from the sky, it wouldn't have been a free fall, due to the wind resistance factor, as free falling means falling only due to the gravitational force. Therefore, yes, the passengers would have likely experienced some G force.

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My mistake there. I should said AIRBUS's fly by wire system. Airbus system is quite different from Boeing. B777 has fly by wire system in different way which mean the signal you put on rudder or yoke is converted into electrical impulse which sent the signal to the motor at ailerons or rudder.Not with conventional cabelling system. Airbus system is more like AI platform. When it think it going to crash, it will counterback by itself and pilot can't input any control what so ever. This is the problem when the gyroscope is damaged and the plane might think it stalling while its not and sent the plane into diving.

 

p/s: I just wanted to ask here why stalling at 35k feets is almost impossible to recover?

 

I'm pretty damn sure you can recover from a stall at FL350 !

 

Unless he lost all his computers , and powers , and electronics . And his Emergency Generator didn't work , and his RAT didn't deploy . And he lost both engines

 

Too many criteria to fulfill don't you think ?

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