ragde77

I crossed the Atlantic yesterday (MEX-MAD) and had severe turbulence too.

My prayers are with those on board and their families.

tjisnumbaone

Amazing in how in 8 and a half hours since I found out about this incident, much more details have came out.

This sounds like a mix between:
Swissair flight 11 (IIRC)
Delta crash in DFW
Movie of the FedEx cargo crash

divemistressofthedark

Just another data point: The average depth of the Atlantic is just over two miles. Considering the water pressure on the bottom at that point is about 5000 pounds per square inch, you're looking at a monumentally difficult search and recovery organization - which might explain the dearth of information.

Yep, it's all pure conjecture at this point, but I think it's human nature to speculate about what's happened and to hope for some possibility of survivors.

I know I personally am keeping all available digits crossed. My own and Mr. Dive's hearts go out to the families of all concerned.

GadgetFreak

At least according to the BBC website, yes, there are radar wholes and the AF plane was in fact in one. According to that article it left Brazilian radar coverage as it went into the Atlantic and never checked in with ATC at a scheduled time 40 minutes later. It also never was reacquired by radar in Africa.

works2r

if they are on one of the tracks and out of land-based radar range, most likely not on radar until they reach a waypoint within a ground-based radar location? - usually updates are received through SELCAL or otherwise (if i am not mistaken?)

us2

It is inconceivable to me that a flight crew would elect to fly into a thunderstorm, nor is it conceivable that "distraction" would divert them from looking at the plane's radar display, let alone miss the lightning from storms in their path. They would have had a briefing on weather before departure and would quite possibly have been speaking on air-to-air frequencies with other aircraft regarding the weather. What is conceivable is that an electrical problem rendered the weather radar inoperative or inaccurate, which caused the aircraft to fly into a storm. But, without facts, this is simply speculation. I would remind everyone that we have few facts with which to work and no context into which we can place these facts. The presence of storms and the apparent presence of electrical problems are not necessarily causal factors here. And, the electrical issues could simply be a symptom of a larger issue.

What I can say is that the discovery of any wreckage will be a daunting task. Any starting point will be, at best, an educated guess. Assuming one can narrow the site down to a 100 nm radius, the search area itself would be huge -- about 31,400 square nm -- or 45,216 sq mi or 107,500 sq km. This is just a little bit less than the size of the state of Ohio. I don't know the depth of the Atlantic in that area, but it is likely one is looking at thousands of feet.

works2r

my question is still.. if it crashed (unless the ELT was also damaged on collision) .. why no ELT signal was picked up by SARSAT 9 / 36 (the two sat's in that region)

vsop

Does going to Embry Riddle Aeronautical University and studying Aerospace Studies as one of my Double Majors make me qualified to guess?

Well the simple fact is that EVERYTHING so far has been a guess, the Media, The Goverment, even the so called experts (And if you watch many of those are ERAU Grads or Professors). The only real facts have been the Release of the notification by the automated system, the loss of transponder and last radio com.

Until they can recove some of the plane/black boxes we really will have no idea what happened. It is possible that we will not know what happened. TWA flight 800 is a great example of how difficult it will be. That flight was close and in shallow water and it still took a huge amount of time to put things together. Even to this day some still like to claim that it was shot down.

All we know is that they did have a system(s) fail, we at this point have no idea what caused the failure and if it was the cause of the crash or if it was just a side effect that had no effect. (Example would be if the plane had a huge failure of the airframe loss of power probably did nothing to keep them from crashing)

fti

You are free to not read this thread if only hard facts are what you are after. You won't get many of those here - since there aren't many to be hard anywhere!

kerflumexed

Airlines have their own standards and techniques about bad wx avoidance. In the US, NWA used to have the reputation of being the most conservative about avoiding bad weather. The FAA prohibits flying into known severe turbulence.

A colleague of mine once pitched the idea of having the aircraft do a high speed burst transmission of the flight data recorder and the CVR in the event of a severe anomaly that was threatening to the continuation of the flight. This would be from aircraft to satellite using a high speed link.

A prayer for those that are lost and the ones left behind.

pb9997

ELT are not as resilient as the black box; No signal from ELT means they could have been damaged.

A very sad day and my prayers are with the families of those on board.

SchmutzigMSP

I'm surprised by now that there isn't a backup satellite link that sends data every X seconds/minutes in addition to the regular continuous recording "black box". It's strange that every other system on an aircraft is double/triple-redundant except for the Black Box...

works2r

i agree with that also

although if the automated system still had some power to report "catastrophic" electrical failure.. wouldn't they have also indicated position, etc?

SEAUAKID

Is the Air France fleet stretched enough to cause cancellations since they are down one A332? I don't recall if there were cancellations after they lost the A340 in YYZ.

My thoughts and prayers are for the lost souls. May they rest in peace.

travelbug007

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