Mysterious disappearance of AF 447

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jis

jis

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Anyone been following the unfortunate events that overtook AF 447 over Atlantic Ocean in the remote area several hundred miles North of Fernando de Noronha island in equatorial area, near the border of Atlantico and Dakar Oceanic control areas near a checkpoint named TASIL?

You can get a very good cross-reference summary of what is known so far in Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AF_447.

You can also follow an ongoing discussion on it at airliners.net.

It took 6 days to find and positively identify the first pieces of wreckage from the plane. When the incident happened the plane just mysteriously disappeared and failed to arrive in Paris. It will possibly be a long while before the FDR and CVR are recovered from the bottom of the ocean which is quite deep in that area. Just before disappearing the plane automatically sent 24 maintenance messages over a period of 4 minutes via ACARS, and that is about all that is concrete that is known about any unusual occurrences on the plane just before its disappearance. The plane did report normal operation at FL350 at the previous checkpoint at the boundary of Recife Region and Atlantico Oceanic region as it entered Oceanic and radar coverage ceased. It failed to report from TASIL which was its next checkpoint. It was reporting from checkpoints because it was under Oceanic control (Atlantico region controlled by Brazil) where there is no radar coverage. TASIL is where it would have transitioned from Atlantico to Dakar region controlled by Senegal.

May the souls of those that were on the plane rest in peace and that their loved ones find solace.
 
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Yes, I've been following the story of this mysterious tragedy, and thanks, Jishnu, for posting those resources. Interesting caveats on the discussion at airliners.net.

Though a mishap of the first magnitude this story seems to be sort of under the radar, as it were, at least in the United States. Several reasons for this, I believe: 1) Not a U.S. airline; 2) Few Americans aboard; 3) The main one, in my view - No video of flaming wreckage to repeat endlessly each time the story is told. Not a "good" crash for electronic media, so kind of on their back burner. Shots of search activity and recovered debris just don't have the same visceral impact as clearly visible calamity. Almost as if no pictures, no story.
 
WhoozOn1st said:
3) The main one, in my view - No video of flaming wreckage to repeat endlessly each time the story is told. Not a "good" crash for electronic media, so kind of on their back burner. Shots of search activity and recovered debris just don't have the same visceral impact as clearly visible calamity. Almost as if no pictures, no story.
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Probably right there.....
 
I think the bigger issue with the lack of US press coverage is the absence of a "local angle". The press feels that few Americans lost means little American interest. Sadly, they might be right.

This incident shows the potential value of ADS-B. Having a position of the aircraft when whatever happened actually happened would make finding the data and voice recorders a whole lot easier. Without those recorders, it is possible that we will never really know what happened. By coincidence, the new A330-200's being delivered to US Airways are ADS-B equipped. The first of those aircraft was ferried across the Atlantic last week for final fit-out at Mobile, AL.
 
Neil_M said:
WhoozOn1st said:
3) The main one, in my view - No video of flaming wreckage to repeat endlessly each time the story is told. Not a "good" crash for electronic media, so kind of on their back burner. Shots of search activity and recovered debris just don't have the same visceral impact as clearly visible calamity. Almost as if no pictures, no story.
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Probably right there.....
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I too think you're right. :rolleyes:

This crash does not have the visual impact of other crashes. (And TV is visual!)

Most of the footage I've seen are shots like

  1. An AWAC on takeoff
  2. A guy looking out the window at the ocean
  3. A sub on the surface of the ocean
  4. A very few pieces of metal being picked up
  5. etc ...

It (to the TV stations) just does not provide the same impact as

  1. A plane that ran off the runway
  2. A plane that broke in 2 or 3 pieces
  3. A plane that is stuck into the side of a building and in flames
  4. etc ...
 
WhoozOn1st said:
Yes, I've been following the story of this mysterious tragedy, and thanks, Jishnu, for posting those resources. Interesting caveats on the discussion at airliners.net.
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You are welcome.

I have actually been very very impressed with the quality of discourse at airliners.net. Yes it has its contingent of the clueless. But the moderators have done a great job of keeping the discussions on line and away from descending into an Airbus vs. Boeing or US vs. Europe fist-fight, which often tends to happen there.

PRR60 said:
This incident shows the potential value of ADS-B. Having a position of the aircraft when whatever happened actually happened would make finding the data and voice recorders a whole lot easier.
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They have been having this very discussion at length at airliners.net. They do have the rough position from where the last of the ACARS messages were sent.

Of course the real challenge is that if one of the failures was a system-wide power failure (and we do not know for sure that was the case), then it would be quite unclear what the correlation is between the last reported position using whatever technology was used, and the final position where the plane came down. I remember that initially the search area included everything from TASIL all the way to the African coast because no one had a clue what might have happened after the last ACARS messages. They surmise that after the 24th message main AC power bus, which powers ACARS went dead for whatever reason thus interrupting any further ACARS activity.

Incidentally, the entire summary of the 24 ACARS messages is available on one of the airliner.net threads around number 7 or 8 or such. It is quite chilling really, the last one being the one that is being interpreted as one reflecting a sudden depressurization of the cabin.
 
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They found the vertical stabilizer in a single intact piece with the rudder attached to it!

foto_3.jpg
 
jis said:
They found the vertical stabilizer in a single intact piece with the rudder attached to it!
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Is that recent?

Isn't the black box in the tail fin on Airbuses? Would that mean they've found the black box?!
 
jackal said:
jis said:
They found the vertical stabilizer in a single intact piece with the rudder attached to it!
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Is that recent?

Isn't the black box in the tail fin on Airbuses? Would that mean they've found the black box?!
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This is within the last couple of hours. What they have found is the vertical stabilizer. The Black Boxes are in the tail of the plane on which the vertical stabilizer is normally attached. So depending on when in the sequence of breakup the vertical stabilizer separated from its mounting point, the black boxes could be very nearby or very very far away. Hard to tell given the information currently available.
 
The photo of the vertical stabilizer does not agree with the wikipedia photo

800px-Airfrance_fgzch_a330200_1.jpg


The wiki photo shows a stabilizer about twice as tall.

And the stripes on the recovery pic look about 45 degrees. The wiki photo stripes angle is much steeper.
 
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This has been discussed over a hundred messages from people in the airline industry both pilots and maintenance people on airliners.net and their conclusion is that it is almost the entire vertical stabilizer intact in a single piece that broke off at the base with some additional damage to the base of the rudder.

After one takes into account the angle from which the floating VS is being viewed and also the fact that the rudder is slightly deflected and not fully in the same plane as the stabilizer, the match is exact.

Anyhow, a better place to argue the point if you must, is at airliners.net where thread number 14 is now in progress on the subject of AF 447 at the URL http://www.airliners.net/aviation-forums/g...d.main/4439893/
 
jis said:
This has been discussed over a hundred messages from people in the airline industry both pilots and maintenance people on airliners.net and their conclusion is that it is almost the entire vertical stabilizer intact in a single piece that broke off at the base with some additional damage to the base of the rudder.
After one takes into account the angle from which the floating VS is being viewed and also the fact that the rudder is slightly deflected and not fully in the same plane as the stabilizer, the match is exact.

Anyhow, a better place to argue the point if you must, is at airliners.net where thread number 14 is now in progress on the subject of AF 447 at the URL http://www.airliners.net/aviation-forums/g...d.main/4439893/
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I'm not going to argue the point. Must have been shot with extreme zoom to foreshorten that much.
 
jis said:
I have actually been very very impressed with the quality of discourse at airliners.net. Yes it has its contingent of the clueless.
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As a proud member of the Clueless Contingent I might resent your implication, Sir, if I knew what it was.

Although perhaps overtaken by more recent developments, AF447 Did Not Have Pitot Tube Upgrade, from Aviation Week.

Long as I'm at it, and as noted in another thread in this non-rail forum, the NTSB's public hearing on US Airways flight 1549 - the Hudson River ditching - will be webcast beginning Tuesday, 6-9-09: Hudson Ditching Hearing To Be Webcast and NTSB Advisory.
 
WhoozOn1st said:
jis said:
I have actually been very very impressed with the quality of discourse at airliners.net. Yes it has its contingent of the clueless.
Click to expand...
As a proud member of the Clueless Contingent I might resent your implication, Sir, if I knew what it was.
Click to expand...
By clueless I particularly mean those who "know not and know not that they know not" e.g. someone that loudly proclaims that only Airbus uses FBW in its planes and Boeing does not, never mind that a Boeing 777 is as FBW as any Airbus 330/340 is; and then proceeds to launch ad-hominem attacks on anyone that disagrees with them.

I have no problem with someone who "knows not, but knows that they know not". They by their own admission are students and that is a good thing.
 
Here is a map provided by the Brazilian Rescue Ops

phptPSiQP.jpeg


To help interpret this:

Destroços is wreckage, debris.

Grande peça is the Vertical Stabilizer.

The last know position is "Ultimo Contato" or last contact point.

TASIL is the next navigation point where the flight was supposed to report transition from Atlantico Oceanic to Dakar Oceanic.
 
The fact that they took so many days to figure this out suggests that the French do not use APIS (or something like it) like most flights originating and departing from US airports are required to, or even if they do, these names were so secret that even their security checkpoints did not know about them, which would be kind of fierd I should think.

At Edinburgh Airport on the way back from Scotland I actually got to see an APIS screen inadvertently while they were checking me on a laptop at the security questioning rigmarole before one checks in for an international flight. The screen looks like a dashboard with about 8 itmes with a red/yellow/green indicator next to each, and a passport reader attached to it. They scan the passport through it and in a moment the indicators light up an appropriate color. In my case they all lit up green. The guy who was handling me basically waved me on to checkin after that, since he was already done asking me the usual questions about who packed your bag etc.
 
GoldenSpike said:
Adding to the mystery: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,525642,00.htmlhttp://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,525642,00.html

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,525642,00.html<H1 class=head _extended="true" itxtvisited="1">Two Air France Passenger Names Probed for Terror Links</H1>http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,525642,00.html
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From the above news story;

While it is certain that there were computer malfunctions, terrorism has not been ruled out.
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Were they running Vista?
 
The black (orange) boxes have not been found yet. The current conjecture according to press conferences and news releases from the French invetigating authority apparently is that the plane did not break upin mid-air. It crashed into the Ocean at very great vertical speed and broke up upon impact.
 
The Flight Data Recorder has been found and retrieved. The Cockpit Voice Recorder has not been found yet. But the FDR is in relatively good shape and data recovered from it will be absolutely invaluable to get a better understanding of what happened, and hence to make changes so as to reduce the likelihood of recurrence.
 
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