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air france jet drops off radar
Topic Started: Jun 1 2009, 04:37 AM (1,386 Views)
Copper
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Shortstop
George K
Jun 2 2009, 06:32 AM
Morbid question here: Assume the thing was at 20,000 feet or so. How long will it take to hit the ground from that altitude, if it was mostly intact?

There are a lot of variables in this.

There is a case of an Airbus 330 running of fuel on a flight from Ontario to Portugal it descended in a glide from 34,500 feet over 65 miles in about 19 minutes and landed safely.

I believe the "Best Glide Speed" for an Airbus 330 is around 215 knots. But their ground speed could have varied a lot depending on wind, weight and any other damage there may have been.

The Confederate soldier was peculiar in that he was ever ready to fight, but never ready to submit to the routine duty and discipline of the camp or the march. The soldiers were determined to be soldiers after their own notions, and do their duty, for the love of it, as they thought best. Carlton McCarthy
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Qaanaaq-Liaaq
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Senior Carp
I recalled Gauss’s Law from college physics after hearing that lightning might have hit the plane. Gauss’s Law concerns electrical conductivity. It proves that you’re safe from lightning electrocution if you’re in a metal shelled container like a car or a plane. I guess I forgot an important detail. It just means that you as an individual will be safe from the lightning but not the car or the plane.

Me, QAANAAQ, you NOT.
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QuirtEvans
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I Owe It All To John D'Oh
For R2: an imperfect description of how hard it is to find a plane crash in the ocean.
It would be unwise to underestimate what large groups of ill-informed people acting together can achieve. -- John D'Oh, January 14, 2010.
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RosemaryTwo
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HOLY CARP!!!
Thanks, Quirt.

That was a decent explanation.

I'm surprised, I guess, that radar doesn't extent over the oceans. I thought that would have been done for air traffic control, if nothing else.

I hope investigators can solve this mystery.
"Perhaps the thing to do is just to let stupid run its course." Aqua
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Frank_W
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Resident Misanthrope
If you look at a sectional, which is basically a map that shows what ATC governs what airspace, you'll see that it's primarily for regulating air traffic in a very specific region. After leaving the pattern and departing that particular tower's jurisdiction, everything is pretty much done via radio.
Anatomy Prof: "The human body has about 20 sq. meters of skin."
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1hp
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Fulla-Carp

Was just reading a comment that it is possible that the ROHS directive was responsible for the problems on The Airbus. I can't find anything to confirm that the Airbus 330 was one of the first aircraft to comply with the ROHS directive, but if it was, the comment makes sense. ROHS (Restriction of Hazardous Substances) requires the removal of lead from solder used in electronics circuit boards.

One of the side effects of this is that tin "whiskers" can grow on the boards, which if they become long enough, can short out parts of the board. This is a fairly well documented problem.

RoHS and tin whiskers

Since the presence of tin whiskers is rarely obvious to the naked eye, mysterious system behavior, faults, or failures often occur, such as the shut down of Connecticut Millstone Nuclear Power Station in Spring 2005, when its Unit 3 reactor accidentally tripped because of a tin whisker in a control circuit. The problem is even worse in defense systems such as smart munitions, which sit unused for years and decades. RoHS-compliant leadless solder would certainly facilitate tin whiskers, putting military systems and lives at risk all over the world.

According to Wiki:

Tin whiskers caused the failure of the Galaxy IV satellite in 1998


Here'sa link to a NASA webpage covering the problem:

NASA Goddard Tin Whiskers

Photo from Wiki showing the whiskers growing:

Posted Image

Airbus appears to be suggesting that the pitot tubes contributed to the problem, but now more evidence is surfacing of problems on other Airbus A330's. Comments are starting to appear about the possibility of tin whiskers contributing to the problems.
There are 10 kinds of people in this world, those that understand binary and................
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Copper
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Shortstop
http://www.cnn.com/2012/07/05/world/europe/france-air-crash-report/index.html?hpt=hp_t2

Quote:
 

Final Air France crash report says pilots failed to react swiftly

By the CNN Wire Staff

updated 1:40 PM EDT, Thu July 5, 2012

(CNN) -- A series of errors by pilots and a failure to react effectively to technical problems led to the crash of Air France Flight 447, France's Bureau of Investigation and Analysis said Thursday in its final report on the disaster.

The Brazil-to-France flight plunged into the Atlantic Ocean on June 1, 2009, killing all 228 people on board.

The report details how the pilots failed to respond effectively to problems with the plane's speed sensors or to correct its trajectory when things first started to go wrong.

When ice crystals blocked the plane's pitot tubes, which are part of a system used to determine air speed, the autopilot disconnected and the pilots did not know how to react to what was happening, the report said.

"The occurrence of the failure in the context of flight in cruise completely surprised the crew of flight AF 447," the report said.

The crew responded by over-handling the aircraft, which destabilized its flight path and caused further confusing readings, the report said.

"In the first minute after the autopilot disconnection, the failure of the attempt to understand the situation and the disruption of crew cooperation had a multiplying effect, inducing total loss of cognitive control of the situation."

The Airbus A330 went into a sustained stall, signaled by a warning message and strong buffeting of the aircraft, the report said.

"Despite these persistent symptoms, the crew never understood they were in a stall situation and therefore never undertook any recovery maneuvers."

The pilots responded to the situation by pointing the nose upward, rather than downward, to recover.

The report makes 25 new safety recommendations, on top of a number made in an initial report last year.

Some of the recommendations have already been implemented, but it could take years for others fully to come into effect, chief investigator Alain Bouillard told reporters as he introduced the report.

Opinion: Why do planes still crash?

The international aeronautic community will likely focus on the crew's loss of awareness of what was going on, Bouillard said.

The use of automatic systems on planes has improved safety overall, he explained, but "when it comes down to it, safety will always be based on the capacity of the pilots and the signals which they are given, which they have to understand and react to."

It was an "exceptional" inquiry because of the scale of the disaster, the number of countries involved and the difficulty of locating the plane's data recorders, he said. The intense media coverage of the crash added to the pressure, Bouillard said.

It's a crash that never should have happened, said CNN's aviation specialist Richard Quest. The industry will be studying the human factors of the crew on the plane for many years to come.

The Bureau of Investigation and Analysis said its report does not examine the issue of responsibility for the crash, which is the subject of a separate judicial inquiry.

History's deadliest plane crashes

The icing-up of the pitot tubes was "a phenomenon that was known but misunderstood by the aviation community at the time of the accident," the report pointed out.

Pilots should be trained on how to handle this event and a high-altitude stall with better technical instruction and flight simulator programs, the report said.

Airplane ergonomics should also be improved, it said, "to provide guidance to crews to help them recognize and manage unusual situations."

International communications systems should also be reviewed to ensure swifter response and recovery efforts after accidents at sea, the report said.

It took four searches over the course of nearly two years to locate the bulk of Flight 447's wreckage and the majority of the bodies in a mountain range deep under the ocean.

The aircraft's voice recorder and flight data recorder were recovered from the ocean floor in May 2011 after an extensive search using miniature submersible vehicles.

The Bureau of Investigation and Analysis said the data indicated that Flight 447 crashed because the aircraft's speed sensors gave invalid readings.

Who's really flying the plane?

Last year's report from the bureau said the airplane climbed to 38,000 feet when "the stall warning was triggered and the airplane stalled." It then descended, crashing into the Atlantic. The descent lasted three minutes and 30 seconds, and the engines remained operational, the report said.

Studies of the debris and bodies found soon after the crash led the French agency to conclude the plane hit the water belly first, essentially intact. Oxygen masks were not deployed, indicating that the cabin did not depressurize, the bureau said in a 2009 report.

Flight 447 was passing through an area prone to volatile and dangerous weather known as the Inter-tropical Convergence Zone when it went down. The zone is a belt of low pressure that wraps around the planet. Clouds and storms form along it because it is literally where the winds of the world's hemispheres meet.

Pilot: 'Damn it, we're going to crash'

A previous report from the French agency also raised questions about the training of the pilots on the flight.

The recorders revealed the pilots had failed to discuss repeated stall warnings and "had received no high altitude training" to deal with the situation, the bureau said.

They failed to regain control of the aircraft, and no announcement was made to the passengers, of 32 different nationalities, before it plummeted from the sky.

The Confederate soldier was peculiar in that he was ever ready to fight, but never ready to submit to the routine duty and discipline of the camp or the march. The soldiers were determined to be soldiers after their own notions, and do their duty, for the love of it, as they thought best. Carlton McCarthy
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Mark
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HOLY CARP!!!
How awful and totally preventable.
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Qaanaaq-Liaaq
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Senior Carp
Couldn’t transoceanic flights transmit flight data to a satellite and then to a ground station to be stored? This would provide a duplicate record of data in addition to the plane’s internal flight recorder.
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Jolly
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Geaux Tigers!
The very best explanation I've seen on why the plane crashed came from today's tv interview with Sullenberger.

He brought the reporter into an Airbus flight simulator and a Boeing flight simulator. He then showed how it would have been impossible for a crew in the Boeing not to know what the other pilot was doing as compared to the ease at which the Airbus cockpit lends itself to pitch confusion.
The main obstacle to a stable and just world order is the United States.- George Soros
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George K
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Finally
One of my orthopedic surgeon friends flies and his brother flies for FedEx. He went to a lecture/talk given by Story Musgrave (Space Shuttle pilot).

Musgrave said that the problem with the Airbus design is that, as Jolly said, there's no interaction between the controls of the right and left hand seats. Also, since it's really "fly by wire" there's no tactile feedback telling you that you've pulled up too hard. It'll just keep trying to follow your command.

Also, unlike Boeing aircraft, the "yoke" on the Airbus is a stick on the left side of the pilot, like in the armrest of your car. The copilot's is on the right. It's a one-hand thing, and goes against the gut-feeling training that a lot of pilots have. The "sticks" don't talk to each other.
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bachophile
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HOLY CARP!!!
fvcking europeans
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