ELAL

You can always change your IP address to a UK one.

ELAL

BBC reprting that a new search will take place for the flight recorders!

Lets hope that this 4th search will be successful!

Xandrios

Some more info has become available:

http://www.luchtvaartnieuws.nl/nl-NL...ance-vliegtuig

Both Airbus and AF have donated 9.2 million euros for further search operations. The search will start the 3rd week of March 2011 and three robots will be used to search an area of 10,000 square kilometers.

Mokshu

Yup, searches are equally financed between AF and Airbus. Those robots are called Autonomous Underwater Vehicles and that's some serious impressive technology.

GoingAway

I rarely fly AF and my airlines don't fly the new Airbus, but this crash continues to haunt me. I really hope they find the box so they can determine if it was only the pitot tubes or something more that caused this crash.

Zembla

Highly unlikely that it was caused by the pilot tubes only. Crashes are rare and crashes with only one single cause are even rarer. As is almost always the case there is probably a quiet complex series of multiple things that went wrong. If only one of the events in such a chain doesn't go wrong the outcome is different...That's one of the reasons why flying is so safe. If only pilot tube failure crashes an airplane that would actually be very bad news.

Finding out what happened is not less important though. If they can do something about one or perhaps even more than one of the things that went wrong it will make flying once again safer than very safe.

electriclarry

I know American does not fly Airbus 330/340 Aircraft, but many have used or hope to use partner awards on airlines that do.

PLEASE watch the current PBS NOVA on the reasons for the crash of Air France 447. While many of the theories (guesses?) will turn out to be 'red herrings' it does make you wonder?

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/space/c...light-447.html

rjw242

Operative word bolded. I'm not going to change my travel habits based on the speculations of a sensationalist, pseudoscientific TV program. Also, you're right that this has nothing to do with AA (unfortunately; it'd be quite nice if they decided to upgrade some of their aging 767s with A330s).

newbluesea

Watch Nova a lot do you? Or are your conclusions with regard to the content based on similar type "guesses" ?

emma dog

This isn't an American Airlines issue and it belongs either in the Air France forum or Newsstand.

Krazyglue

Nova is not pseudoscientific or sensationalist reporting. If you want that go watch springer.

JDiver

This has been relocated to the Flying Blue - Air France subforum, as it is about an AF incident and does not in any way relate to American Airlines nor oneworld. Merci beaucoup for your understanding.

JDiver, American AAdvantage Moderateur

MegatopLover

I watched the Nova program when it aired. It was certainly not senseationalist. The science portrayed was convincingly scientific. And the program made clear that it presented only theories based upon analysis of the best available data, most of it relayed by the aircraft itself.

For those who missed it, the "leading theory" as portrayed on Nova is that all three pitot tubes froze over when contacted by ultra-cold (sub-freezing-point) liquid water, and the heating elements in the pitot tubes were not strong enough to melt the ice; the loss of the pitot tubes caused a cascading loss of flight-control because the computer could not perform any airspeed-based calculations; the pilots could have recovered from a loss of air-speed data by putting the aircraft in a stall-safe mode, but evidently they did not; a stall ensued, and control could not be recovered.

I'm not endorsing the program's analysis, as I have no basis on which to evaluate it. I'm just reporting on the content for those reading this thread who missed the show.

Zembla

Well said. Nobody can validate this analysis. The analysis in the show are based on a set of known parameters. Looks very scientific. But it isn't. There are many unknown paramaters and the unknown parameters are not taken into account. Hence, the conclusions are speculative.

An obvious example: why didn't they go in stall safe mode? Nobody knows. This could have been caused by a complex chain of events for which we don't know the parameters. And this is completely ignored in the show.

I'd like to repeat what I said before. It's extremely unlikely that the pilot tubes were the only cause that lead to this tragedy.

SAT Lawyer

From CNN:
See also Washington Post, "French investigators say pieces of plane that crashed in 2009 located in Atlantic depths," April 3, 2011.

Hopefully they find the flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder.