bwhite

It's crossed my mind before, but there are hundreds of such flights all over the world daily with very few issues.

pptp

Well, I really doubt that having an up-to-date position report via satellite would have done anything to save the plane, however it would have helped immensely with the search. For the record, over water equipped planes have emergency location transmitters (ELT) so if they managed to ditch and deploy rafts, the ELT's should be signaling. The old ones used radio frequency while the new ones use satellite.

nicolas75

This tragic event reminds me a very sad French song.

It says:

No, I will never forget the Bay of Rio
The colour of the sky, the name of Corcovado
La Rua Maduereira where you lived
I remember yet I never went there

No, I will never forget that day in July
When we met and we had to separate
For such a short time we walked in the rain
I talked about love and you talked about your country

No, I remember the sweetness of your body
In the taxi that drove us to the airport
You have returned me a smile before getting
in a Caravelle airplane which never arrived

No, I will never forget the day
I read your name written among other unknown names
On the first page of a Brazilian newspaper
I tried to read and I did not understand anything

La rua Madureira

GadgetFreak

How sure are we that they dont communicate their position?

NICEDUDE66

This AW&ST article has some additional details on the aircraft itself.

http://www.aviationweek.com/aw/gener...d&channel=comm

Air France A330 Lost, Electric Fault Reported
Robert Wall/paris [email protected]

An Air France A330-200 flying from Rio de Janeiro to Paris overnight suffered an electric circuit fault while flying in a storm just before air traffic control lost all contact with the aircraft.

Air France says AF447 encountered stormy conditions and strong turbulence around 4 a.m. Paris time, or around four hours into the 11-hour flight. An automatic message about an electric fault was received around 4:14 a.m. Paris time.

Air traffic control from Brazil, Africa, and France failed in efforts to contact the aircraft, which was flying far off the coast of Brazil at the time.

The aircraft was carrying 216 passengers: 126 men, 82 women, seven children and a baby. Additionally, three pilots and nine cabin attendants were onboard.

The pilot in command, who has not been named, had 11,000 flight hours and 1,700 on Airbus A330/A340s under his belt. The copilots had logged 3,000 and 6,600 flight hours each, with 800 and 2,600, respectively, on the Airbus type model.

The aircraft, registered F-GZCP, was powered by General Electric CF6-80E1 engines. The A330 had logged 18,870 flight hours and entered service April 18, 2005, Air France says. The last hangar visit came April 16.

The aircraft had taken off at 7:03 p.m. local time, or 12:03 a.m. Paris time (6:03 p.m. EDT). Air France says it has notified the French accident investigation office, the BEA. Airbus, meanwhile, says it is ready to assist.

The crash in only the latest in a number of accidents Air France has suffered this decade, including the high profile July 2000 crash of a Concorde after takeoff from Charles de Gaulle killing 100 passengers and nine crew. In August 2005, the airline also suffered the loss of an A340-300, which overran the runway in poor weather conditions. All onboard survived.

LilZeppelin

This sounds as an incorrect statement. NTSB chairman just spoke on CNN alleging that they can be retrieved from deeper than that, that they emit a ping for 30 days.

I came across the requirement to withstand the water pressure found at an ocean depth of 20,000 ft (6,100 m), and a deep-sea submersion test is conducted for 24 hours.

bwhite

I've been patiently waiting to hear what the other pilots on this route would say about their experience last night. That is very interesting.

jwhite4

Unfortunately I think safety systems always drop to the bottom of any wishlist (for homeowners, if you just got $8000, who wouldn't rather build a new deck, then retrofit the house with a sprinkler system?). Part of is mental - it's not a lot of fun working on thinks that primarily are only used in the case of emergencies.

Another I'm sure is the logistics. I don't Air France can add satellite transmission of it's position on just it's overwater fleet. It might be something that needs to be incorporated into their entire fleet. If might actually fall back to something that has to be engineered and approved by Boeing/Airbus. One can imagine the perhaps thousand of hours invested just in testing IFE or wireless internet, making sure there's no interaction between it and aircraft control functions.

And as sad as it sounds, there's also the bottom line issue - would it really make a difference? If one assumes there were no survivors, then is there there any significant financial impact if they find the wreckage 24 hours after the crash, vs 2hrs? If AirFrance was paying say $100k/hr for the coordinated search effort, then one could argue there is a quantitative reason to improve response time. Since the participating agencies are probably not planning on sending AF a bill for time and materials, it may not make a big difference.

Of course there's the human factor. It's bad enough that some accidents take forever to determine the cause. It's probably worse when it takes seemingly forever to even locate the crash site and any debris. In general we like closure, and feel incomplete without it.

Jeff

Beckles

My understanding is that even where "radar" coverage exists, commercial (i.e., non-military) radars have a very limited ability to actually detect an aircraft on their own by "painting" it with a radar beam, in fact what they do is send out a signal and the aircraft's transponder responds and it is the transponder's response that is detected, not the aircraft itself. In other words, if there was an electrical malfunction and the transponder ceased to work, the aircraft would likely not be tracked by commercial radar unless it was close to the radar.

This is basically the concept behind ADS-B that is being rolled out as a next-generation air traffic surveillance system.

DownUnderFlyer

According to reports here and on PPRuNe very certain. Only technical data is transmitted, no GPS coordinates.

CMK10

Is it too soon to start making Airport '77 references?

amarain

What a horrible tragedy - my heart goes out to all the loved ones of these passengers and crew.

I find it very strange that the news reports are concentrating on the electrical system problems rather than the loss of pressure. The loss of pressure suggests to me that there was some loss of fuselage integrity and something catastrophic occurred, like an explosion.

flg8rmatt

I think the focus is on the electrical system warning because that was the first problem. I don't know how the redundancy works, but if the electrical system has an issue, is it possible that any subsequent warnings/messages received may be false readings as a result of that electrical system error?

If the electrical system problem was the result of a fire, a fire which burned long/hot enough to weaken the airframe which in turn may cause a breach of fuselage integrity.

Another alternative is that the aircraft entered some sort on uncontrolled descent as a result of the electrical issues, which then led to a breakup of the aircraft.

Lots of possibilities at this point....

GadgetFreak

Thanks. I hadnt looked at the other source and the ones here that I saw (although it is a long thread and I certainly could have missed some) didnt seem very definitive.

jwhite4

I'd say. For starters, '77 was a bigger plane (747) with barely any passengers. At least in theory, the amount of oxygen per passenger might have been sufficient to support them for several hours. With 220+ passengers on a smaller A33x, the ratio is probably magnitudes worse.

Although USAirways showed that you could land a jet on the water, the passenger's survival was greatly aided by the fact that (rescue) boats arrived within minutes. Obviously you won't be having that in the Atlantic Ocean.

I'll defer to others to comment if an unopened plane could float on the water, and/or survive for any length of time underwater, if it started to sink.

Jeff