Air france flight from Brazil to Paris

[Njaco]

Whatcha takin' 'bout, Willis? I think ConspiracyCon was last week.

[RabidAlien]

Heh. The doors never close at ConspiracyCon.

[Matt308]

...hmmm. There is much truth to Occam's Razor. Usually the truth is much simpler than the theories.

[Burmese Bandit]

Anybody gewt the feeling that truth is stranger than fiction? I mean, if this was a TV series, I would probalby be saying "Hold on, that's too much the screeplay writer put in, you can't have all these things happening at once in real life!"

[vikingBerserker]

I betcha it was those Swiss!!

Of course V2 did post that article about the Poles causing WW2 so maybe it was them too.

But there is Sally Struthers..........

[Matt308]

Blame it on Lucky. I assure you he's not wired triply redundant.

[RabidAlien]

This guy stripped the plane before takeoff:

[seesul]

Got it by e-mail from a US friend of mine today:

Subject: excerpts from various news about 447
Date: Sat, 06 Jun 2009 17:21:15 +0000
What Thwy know so far..

.....the jet issued 24 system failure messages before it crashed. Fourteen of those messages were sent within the space of one minute, from 3.10am BST to 3.11am BST, a briefing in Paris was told today.

At 11pm (2am GMT) pilot Marc Dubois sent a manual signal saying he was flying through an area of 'CBs' - black, electrically charged cumulonimbus clouds that carry violent winds and lightning.

At 11.10pm, automatic messages relayed by the jetliner indicated the autopilot had disengaged.

This suggested Dubois and his two co-pilots were trying to thread their way through the storm manually.

At this point a key computer system had switched to alternative power and controls needed to keep the plane stable had been damaged.

An alarm also sounded, indicating that the 'fly-by-wire' system on the Airbus that controls the flaps on the wings had shifted to 'alternate law'.

Alternate law is an emergency back-up system that kicks in after an electronic failure. It enables the plane to keep functioning with less energy - but reduces stability, which would have been desperately needed as
the pilots battled to bring the jet safely out of the turbulence.

At 11.12pm, two key computers monitoring air speed, altitude and direction failed. These would have increased the pilot's loss of control over the plane.

The loss of instruments showing air speed in particular would have been detrimental. The pilot was trying to fly a fine line between slowing the plane enough to navigate through the turbulence, and not slowing so much
that the plane stalled mid-air, which would have been catastrophic.

The messages show there was an inconsistency between the different measured airspeeds shortly after the plane entered the storm zone.

At 11.13pm, control of the main flight computer, back up system and wing spoilers also failed.

The last automatic message, at 11.14pm, indicated complete electrical failure and a massive loss of cabin pressure - catastrophic events, indicating that the plane was breaking apart and plunging toward the ocean.

Last night Airbus warned airline crews to follow standard procedures if they suspect speed indicators are faulty.

The Airbus telex was sent to customers of its A330s late yesterday. An industry official said such warnings are only sent if accident investigators have established facts that they consider important enough to pass on immediately to airlines.

The recommendation was authorised by the French air accident investigation agency (BEA) looking into the disaster. It has said the speed levels registered by the slew of messages from the plane showed 'incoherence'.

Airbus said its message to clients did not imply that the doomed pilots did anything wrong or that a design fault was in any way responsible for the crash.

'This Aircraft Information Telex is an information document that in no way implicates any blame,' a spokesman said today.

[vikingBerserker]

Excellent summary. thanks Seesul

[Burmese Bandit]

It seems that Murphy has struck again.

"All these things surely can't fail at one and the same time".

Well, it seems that they did...

[seesul]

Miles O’Brien is a pilot, airplane owner and freelance journalist who lives in Manhattan. His blog is located at Miles O'Brien - Uplinks - True/Slant. The opinions expressed are his own.

Air France Flight 447 went down in a giant, dangerous, violent storm that might not have been survivable under any circumstances. But as the Airbus A-330 penetrated that huge system of thunderstorms, sensors, systems and computers on the plane started failing in a rapid cascade that would make any pilot’s head spin – even if he was not in the middle of extreme turbulence flying blind in the night.

The failures likely sealed the fate of the 228 souls sealed inside that thin metal tube as it hurtled through the dark, stormy night - but were they contributing causes with their own roots – or simply the unavoidable outcomes of a decision to fly such a perilous course?

Remember, more often than not, an airliner goes down at the end of a long chain of unrelated, seemingly innocuous decisions, malfunctions, mistakes and external factors. Remove any single link (or even change their sequence) and you have an on-time arrival at Charles de Gaulle.

So how do those system failures fit in the chain of calamity?

Consider for a moment two cockpits. This one is the granddaddy of jet airliners – the Boeing 707 – which first flew paying passengers in 1958. This is the Airbus A-330 – which started flying the line 35 years later. Now quick: which is the more complex airplane?

Looks can be deceiving. Relatively speaking, the 707 is a much simpler airplane – which is different from saying it is simpler to fly. Mastering and monitoring all those steam gauges required an alert three-person crew. In the 707, the burden of the complexity – and the opportunity for error – is on the human side of the instrument panel.

Because humans make mistakes and machines do not, airplane designers have steadily shifted that workload to the other side of the gauges over the years. The A-330 instrument panel is proof they have done a bang up job. It looks simple to fly, doesn’t it? It is.

The joke is that in the not too distant future, flight crews will consist of one human pilot and an ill-tempered junkyard dog. The pilot is there to watch the computers fly the airplane – and the dog is there to bite him if he tries to touch the controls.

Airbus has embraced the philosophy (if not the joke) with zeal. The company builds highly automated “Fly By Wire” (FBW) airplanes. NASA developed the first FBW aircraft in 1972 – an F-8C Crusader. On FBW planes, the movable surfaces on the wings, the horizontal and vertical stabilizer are not connected to the controls on the flight deck with cables, pulleys pushrods and hydraulic actuators as they were on the 707.

Instead, electrical wires transmit the pilot’s commands to hydraulic actuators that move the aero surfaces.

Between the pilot and those surfaces is a bank of computers that are actually flying the plane. The computers are programmed with some strict rules (in fact, Airbus calls them “laws”) designed to assess the human commands from the flight deck – and veto them if they would put the plane in harm’s way. Point the nose too high or too low – or bank too steeply and the computer will correct your bad airmanship. Who’s in charge here?

Pilots like to call their autopilots “George,” old phonetic shorthand for “gyro”, which makes the autopilot work. On an FBW airplane, “HAL” might be more apt.

Dave Bowman: Open the pod bay doors, HAL.
HAL: I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that.
Dave Bowman: What’s the problem?
HAL: This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it.
-From 2001: A Space Odyssey

But what happens when the silicon co-pilot gives up the ghost? It gets very ugly - very quickly.

Just before Air France 447 went down, it transmitted a four-minute spurt of text data reporting five failures and 19 warnings via its Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System (ACARS).

The data is cryptic and we will only know the full scenario if searchers find the black boxes, but we know the autopilot disengaged, the flight control computer failed, warning flags appeared over the primary flight data screens used by the captain and first officer and the rudder moved beyond its limits.

All of it is consistent with a flight control system that was getting some bad information about how fast the airplane was moving through the air. The device that performs this task is called a pitot tube. Pointed in the direction of flight, it measures the relative pressure of air as it flows in. For pilots this is a crucial device, like an EKG for a heart surgeon, I suppose. If you don’t know your airspeed, you can easily stall or overspeed the plane. That’s why the A-330 has three pitot tubes.

They tend to be ice collectors on an airplane flying through precipitation. If they glaze over, or get clogged with crystals, they won’t work – so that is why they are heated. Even so, A-330 pitot tubes were icing up and failing in flight so Airbus issued a “service bulletin” recommending airlines replace them with a newer model that has a more powerful heater. It was not considered urgent, and so the pitot tubes on the doomed plane had not been removed and replaced.

But I would not focus on this too much. The epic thunderstorm system that Air France 447 flew into would have been a huge hail and ice-generating machine that could have overwhelmed even the new and improved pitot tubes if they had been installed.

Regardless, the failure cascade chronicled in the ACARS text message hauntingly matches a 2008 event when an Air Caraibe A-330 flying the same route encountered some serious pitot tube icing. That plane was not in such severe circumstances so the crew was able to get things back under control – and lived to tell the tale.

Now here is a key point to remember: as systems fail in an Airbus, the laws that the computers live by change from “normal”, to “alternate”, to “abnormal alternate” to “direct”. At each stage the computers surrender more authority to the humans – until finally silicon surrenders and the carbon pilots are on their own – with no help at all from HAL – at just the point they need him most.

They were in the dark, getting hammered by turbulence, flying blind, by hand, a plane that was designed and built to be controlled by machines – with human supervision.

Suddenly that deceptively simple cockpit was a riddle so complex it was unsolvable.

The Great Debate Debate Archive The paradox of “simplicity” | The Great Debate |

[Matt308]

Airbus has issued three AITs. The first was notification of the accident. The second reminds operators of FOM/QRH procedures for airspeed discrepancies. The third notes that the airspeed discrepancies resulted in system reconfigurations PER DESIGN, does NOT indicate loss of electrical power, does NOT indicate loss of PFDs, and notes some Thales pitot probe issues related to icing.

Seesul, your #128 post is really not consistent with the messages nor with system degradation behaviour.

[seesul]

Originally Posted by Matt308

Seesul, your #128 post is really not consistent with the messages nor with system degradation behaviour.

That´s possible...you know my English
A friend of mine, a WW2 vet (not that one in my siggy) sent it to me. He got this e-mail from a retired Delta Airlines pilot. It would be unfair to show their names here but if you wanna have a full copy of our conversation, just send me a PM.

[Matt308]

No that's okay, Seesul. I'm not challenging his position, just that it seems contradictory to the above information. Whether his conclusions are correct, I don't know. It's easy to speculate. I too want to make conclusions, but there really isn't enough information to conclude anything other than system status until we find the recorders. I did not mention, and perhaps it has been reported, France did send a submarine to the area with a remotely operated vehicle. Let's keep our fingers crossed.

[seesul]

Yes, I know about this submarine. It is able to search 18 square miles a day as I heard. Hope it will find the black boxes and keep my fingers too. Black box sends a signal 30 days. So there´s no much time left...