Air France jet missing over the Atlantic

[Phil Bunch]

I just notice this news article--

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124385144990571769.html

A couple of excerpts:

An Air France Airbus A330 jetliner flying from Rio de Janeiro to Paris with 228 people on board was missing over the Atlantic Monday after suffering an electrical short circuit when flying through strong storms, Air France Chief Executive Pierre-Henri Gourgeon said.
...

Mr. Gourgeon said the plane flew through an area of thunder and strong turbulence around 4:00 a.m. Paris time. At 4:14 a.m., Air France headquarters in Paris received automated maintenance messages signaling failure of several electrical components, he said.

Best wishes,

Phil Bunch

[Jeroen Hoppenbrouwers]

Yes, very worrying.

What I am surprised about is that apparently the SAR authorities have little clue where to start looking. Does an Air France A330 have ADS? That should give at least an indication where it was when the failures occurred.

[Phil Bunch]

The news article makes it sound like the plane was struck by lightning or some other storm-related event happened.

I thought it was essentially impossible for lightning strikes to totally disable a modern airliner.  My superficial impression is that planes are struck by lightning from time to time and that at worst some repairs may be needed.  Extreme turbulence in the middle of thunderstorms is another story I guess.  I am less sure of how bad the risk is at 30,000 feet or so, at cruise altitude.  I believe that thunderstorms can rise up to 40,000 feet in some cases.  I'm sure just from a comfort standpoint, an airliner would normally try to fly around or over thunderstorms when possible, but out over the Atlantic your airliner weather radar is probably not as powerful as one's ground-based, high-power Doppler radar sets.

[Shiv Mathur]

Why do Airbus aircraft seem so fragile and prone to (catastrophic) failures?

A quote I read somewhere; " if it's not Boeing, I'm not going. "

Sorry ... of course that's over-simplistic -- but I've had this feeling over the past several years.

[Hardy Heinlin]

Why do Airbus aircraft seem so fragile and prone to (catastrophic) failures?

What kind of statistics did you read?

|-|

[Jeroen Hoppenbrouwers]

Maybe they are used more? They surely sell more.

[Shiv Mathur]

Why do Airbus aircraft seem so fragile and prone to (catastrophic) failures?

What kind of statistics did you read?

|-|

Well, as I said it was more of a 'feeling' that I have got over the past several years.

But this link might be of interest.
http://jacno.com/za-an-inmo.htm

I admit I have no statistics ... sorry, maybe I just wrote while upset over this tragedy.

Shiv

[Shiv Mathur]

Also, the 'Disputed Account' section of this link might be of interest.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_296

[Will]

I thought it was essentially impossible for lightning strikes to totally disable a modern airliner. My superficial impression is that planes are struck by lightning from time to time and that at worst some repairs may be needed.

A few of the planes at my company got hit. I pulled into the one stormy night, and the captain in the neighboring aircraft called me over to look.  He had scorch marks on the nose of the plane, but no other visible damage up front.  In the rear, the tail cone, complete with the lights and wiring, was missing. There were char marks around where the tail cone had been attached, and some dangling wires.

Everything else was perfectly fine. All the aircraft's electronics (radios, radar, computers, all of it) continued to operate normally.  The crew did admit to being a bit startled when the blast hit them on the nose.

Will

[Peter Lang]

What confused me a little bit is the notice that they also had a loss of cabin pressure.   ->  http://www.avherald.com/h?article=41a81ef1&opt=0

Could a strike of lightning damage the pressurized cabin or the systems that there will be a loss of cabin pressure?

Peter

[Phil Bunch]

Below is a recent update by the Wall Street Journal, discussing lightning damage and airliners.  There is a quote agreeing with my impression that lightning has not brought down a large airliner in recent memory, in spite of reports of lightning damage.

http://blogs.wsj.com/middleseat/2009/06/01/air-france-flight-447-could-a-lightning-strike-have-damaged-the-plane/tab/print/

Especially after recently losing their independence when sold to a big news conglomerate, I have noticed degradation of the WSJ's quality and news standards (according to my own preferences and biases), but they are still useful for basic financial and business news, and they keep their web news site up to date reasonably well.

This news article is given below between the horizontal lines of dashes:

------------------------------------------

   June 1, 2009, 10:53 AM ET

Air France Flight 447: Could A Lightning Strike Have Damaged The Plane?

An investigation into what happened to Air France Flight 447 likely will be lengthy and complicated, beginning with the difficult search to find the aircraft in the Atlantic Ocean and retrieve its voice and data recorders.

The wide-body Airbus A330-200 carrying 228 people disappeared after some four hours in flight on its way from Rio de Janeiro to Paris. The plane sent an automatic message to Air France "signaling electrical circuit malfunction,'' the company said.

Speculation has swirled that the plane was flying into strong thunderstorms and was hit by lightning. Safety experts note, however, that planes are built to withstand lightning strikes, and crashes resulting from lightning are extremely rare, especially when planes are at cruising altitude and can fly above or around storms.

"I cannot recall in recent history any examples of aircraft being brought down by lightning," Bill Voss, president and CEO of Flight Safety Foundation, Alexandria, Va., told The Associated Press.

Planes have multiple backup electrical systems, including batteries and small turbines that deploy from the belly of the jet and generate power as they turn in the wind. Since apparently no distress call was received from pilots, officials have suggested something catastrophic happened to the jet. Electrical fires have brought down planes. In most crashes, a chain of events and mistakes typically leads up to the crash, with several key contributing factors.

We'll keep you updated - stay tuned.
-----------------------------------

[Phil Bunch]

Below is a web page re airline safety that is new for me.  Perhaps it is of interest to others.

http://twitter.com/AviationSafety

These "tweets" seem to provide a significant amount of detail that isn't so readily available elsewhere.  Needless to say, I haven't searched the whole internet for such things but this web site seems to be reasonably useful, on balance.

Does anyone know of good web pages on the technical details of the Air France monitoring system that picked up the multiple electrical failures and sudden loss of cabin pressurization?  Does this system transmit data to Air France at a reasonably high frequency?  Does it have some ability to survive an in-progress disaster and keep transmitting information as the disaster unfolds or is it limited to transient, real-time data only as long as the avionics is in good condition?

I hope that the ocean is not too deep near the nominal crash site so that recovery of the airliner pieces is reasonably practical.  I fear that they were well beyond the relatively shallow continental shelf and thus crashed into the deep ocean, making salvage much more difficult or perhaps impractical.

[Phil Bunch]

As usual, aviation-safety.net has a good summary of the available information about the missing Air France flight, including a google map of its estimated position when lost, etc.

http://aviation-safety.net/database/record.php?id=20090601-0

I did a small amount of searching about the nominal location of the crash, and some pages say it went down near the Google maps searchable "Fernando de Noronha" island.  Based on quickly reviewing a few internet ocean depth maps, this part of the ocean is generally quite deep, although there are islands in the area.

Below is an excerpt from this article, re the nominal position:

"Last radio contact with the flight was at 01:33 UTC. The crew was in contact with the Atlantic Area Control Centre (CINDACTA III) when the flight reported over the INTOL waypoint, estimating TASIL at 02:20 UTC. INTOL is an RNAV waypoint located in the Atlantic Ocean, 565 km from Natal, Brazil. The TASIL waypoint is located 1228 kilometers from Natal. TASIL is at the border of the Recife FIR and Dakar Oceanic FIR. "

[Phil Bunch]

A new, updated Wall Street Journal article on the missing Air France plane:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124389991877574443.html#printMode

An excerpt:
=======================

Modern jetliners aren't supposed to disappear from the sky without warning, as Air France Flight 447 from Rio de Janeiro to Paris did Monday.

The flight is presenting investigators with a major mystery: What spurred the plane's computerized brain to alert Air France's maintenance hub that the aircraft had significant electrical problems?

The automatic alert is puzzling for several reasons. For one, it suggests "that the plane didn't suffer a complete and sudden loss of electrical power," according to John Cox, a former U.S. airline pilot who now works as safety consultant. But barring an in-flight breakup, that would mean the crew should have been able to send out an emergency call. Air-traffic controllers never received one, though the Airbus A330 is designed with backup electrical capability to enable emergency transmissions.

==========================

[Qavion]

Air-traffic controllers never received one, though the Airbus A330 is designed with backup electrical capability to enable emergency transmissions.

Slightly misleading, I would say. It depends on the type of electrical failures. If the 744 lost all its main busses, it only has the Left VHF as a comms backup ... not much use when you're in the middle of the ocean.

If turbulence caused structural damage (and, in turn, electrical wiring damage), then perhaps the crew were too busy trying to control the aircraft to send out a mayday. Perhaps the turbulence even injured the crew before they were able to tighten their seatbelts.

Too many variables as yet. The DFDR and CVR should provide an answer if the associated wiring wasn't damaged.

Q>

[Jeroen Hoppenbrouwers]

Totally unscientific comments:

Airlines largely have their own equipment, both airborne and ground, to manage their technical operations. Although they probably buy the stuff from only a handful of vendors, there are significant differences between these backoffice systems not used for flying, but for operations management. It's part of their competitive edge.

As these boxes are usually bolt-on, they may (!! may) be relatively self-sufficient. I can imagine one of these boxes being designed to operate with planes nearly dead, i.e. on the ground during layover. If, and again this is speculation, IF Air France has such independent operations management boxes, it could be that it managed to get a final distress call out after everything else failed.


Jeroen

[Avi]

The DFDR and CVR should provide an answer if the associated wiring wasn't damaged.

Where are they?
More than 24 hours after the aircraft disappeared, no one has any idea where it is.
I start to think that if they don't find the crash site today, we will never know what exactly happened.

[Avi]

Here is an update from the last few minutes.
There are reports in Brazil that aircraft wreckages were found in the Atlantic. There is no official word yet that they are belong to the AF Airbus, but...

[Shiv Mathur]

There is no official word yet that they are belong to the AF Airbus, but...

 " military pilots spotted an airplane seat, a life jacket, metallic debris and signs of fuel in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean ..."

No official word that they belong to the airbus?

Well, I guess the airplane seat means it's probably not wreckage from the Titanic

[CarlBB]

Hello,

I have been following this story with interest and now the sad resignation that we must accept the worse case.

I do have some questions that have come up:-

In terms of the black box, what is the media inside that is used to record the data?
Assuming that this aircraft was lost where the few parts have to date been found, what is the surviability of the black box? I mean we are in area where the sea is potentially 7000m deep from what I have read? So does the black box stay afloat? Does it have a transmitter that can assist in locating it? If so what is the range of the transmitter?

As well as sensors from the aircrafts systems, does the black box have sensors to give independant readings e.g., G forces, altitude etc.?

A further thought - Is this the farthest away from land that an aircraft has been lost?

Regards

Carl