nicolas75

A French professor of medicine and his wife had done everything they could to board the Air France Airbus which disappeared into the night, but the plane was full.

"We had an incredible chance. Afterwards, we were scared and have a thought for all those in the aircraft," said his wife Amina who has confessed that she was going to take the plane "with apprehension."

source: Le Nouvel Observateur

works2r

my question would be... if it was a crash, why hasn't an ELT been picked up by SARSAT 9 and 36 yet?

flamboyant 1

Tragic accident.

Richard Quest is one of the worst TV reporters on travel and aviation I have ever seen. Really dislike his 'attitude' and fully agree with the above posters.

us1549

An aircraft of this type and size should have a wather radar in it's nose cone, and the flight crew should have been aware of weather before they came across it. My question is, why did they fly into the storms, as opposed to around it?

nicolas75

The CEO of Air France declared that the area of the impact has been located "

source: Le Nouvel Observateur

Helena Handbaskets

If this were the result of a terrorist act, wouldn't we have had someone claiming responsibility by now?

snowed

Just saw this too. I wonder where it is and what they will find.

So odd that no distress signal was received by the satellites.

Blumie

Is it too much to ask that people stop and catch their breath before posting uninformed speculation and conjecture? Don't we get enough of that from the media? It appears to me that perhaps two or three participants in this discussion have any idea what they're talking about, and the rest of us are just talking out of our a__es.

AAscanius

This morning on CNN I saw an overlay of the flight path and the weather radar at the time the plane was passing through. There was a large storm cell directly in the path of the plane, and these cells often reach 50,000 feet in altitude, so it is not possible to fly over them. Flying directly into a thunderstorm can cause catastrophic airframe failure. This happened a few years ago to an Aerolineas Argentinas plane flying over Uruguay, when the pilot inexplicably flew directly into a large complex of thunderstorms.

My understanding is that the Captain has full discretion on setting a course through bad weather, and can deviate from a routing by declaring an in-flight emergency. Is it possible that this particular captain decided to fly through the cell rather than around it, which would have added on probably 45 minutes to the flight time? Or, could the crew have been distracted and not noticed that they were approaching some bad weather?

pcotten

May the souls of those lost rest in peace.

I was recently flying on Jet Blue from Orlando and over South Carolina, we came across severe weather. Out the window I could see really dark clouds as high as the plane's altitude with lightning in them. Don't know how far away from the plane they were, but they were close enough to notice clearly. Fortunately, we didn't fly directly through them.

kaka

when i used to work with these stuff (dispatcher), there are often situations where the thunderstorm clouds are soooo wide it doesnt make any sense not to fly through it. remember, all these clouds are 3D. a 45 mins detour is ok. but imagine it's a 2 hr detour?

if you can always fly around these CB, you'd hardly hit turbulance...

thepointsguy

Isn't that the point of FT? I like seeing different viewpoints.. even if they are a bit outlandish.

Blumie

My mistake. I thought FT was about sharing information about the airline industry, not baseless conjecture. Carry on.

disneybride

There is an interesting article at http://www.reuters.com/article/newsO...55059220090601 that says the weather radar in the nose of the plane is about the only part of the aircraft vulnerable to lightning strikes. So if that got hit, the crew may not have known how bad it was they were flying into.

It did cause me to re-assess my assumption that whenever a flight was in the air it was on radar. Is this true that there are "black holes" where a flight is not on radar anywhere?

My thoughts go out to those on the plane and those dealing with this on the ground.

The Saint

^ Sadly, it is a vain hope on FT. Unbounded by any doubt that merely flying regularly on planes does not actually make you an expert in flying, the armchair punditry in these circumstances takes on a life of its own. We'll have the conspiracy theorists along in a moment, then the blame gang and all before they've even found the plane.

To my mind, what is needed is hard facts and a thorough investigation and a moment's thought for the dead.