French Plane lost over Atlantic

[kuronosan]

Only thing that would have made that observation more ironic is if Air France's slogan was "Get there in a flash".

[Kiro]

LOL

ANOTHER FUNNY.

[The Stig]

Freaky eh?

Cure "Lost" speculations and "portal to another dimension" speculations.

What I hate is at the moment is that the while Brazil people are enthusiastic and hopeful, the French are being such negative fucks.

On the news yesterday they showed some CGI of what might've happened, showing the plane rocking side to side, up and down before just falling flat from the air, was fucking nightmare fuel for me...

[GRT]

Cure "Lost" speculations and "portal to another dimension" speculations.

It's in 1976!

[Tricen]

And whatever you do, don't blink!

[Altanass]

How the hell are people afraid on an airplane?[/I]

Whats the bet that once the passengers realised the plane was really going down that most suffered heart attacks and died of shock before the plane even touched the ocean

To seraph: how the hell could you not be afraid lol

[Nibe]

A

[Novalye]

Reporting from Paris -- Brazilian military officials announced Saturday that they had found two bodies and some debris from the Paris-bound Air France flight that disappeared over the Atlantic Ocean with 228 passengers and crew aboard.

Two male bodies, a leather briefcase containing an Air France boarding pass, a numbered blue seat, and a nylon backpack were fished out of the ocean about 400 miles northeast of the Fernando de Noronha islands off Brazil's northern coast, Col. Jorge Amaral told reporters in the Brazilian mainland city of Recife.



* Air France crash
Photos: Air France crash
* Graphics gallery: Air France flight 447 crash
Photos: Graphics gallery: Air...

*
Despite Air France crash, there’s little cause to fear flying

Brazilian officials were careful to make their announcement only after removing the findings from the water. They caused confusion several days after the crash by reporting they had confirmed seeing signs of a crash, but then corrected themselves and said a piece of wood and an oil slick were not from the missing Airbus 330.

In Paris, French military spokesman Christophe Prazuck said he couldn't confirm that the bodies and debris were from Flight 447, which disappeared early Monday, until the Brazilian vessel carrying them reached the shore and a closer investigation was completed.

Nevertheless, he said it was "extremely likely" the objects and the bodies came from the crash because they were found near where the plane is believed to have hit the sea.

At a news conference earlier Saturday, officials of France's accident investigation bureau, or BEA, said that the plane encountered an "incoherence" in its measured air speeds, but that they could not conclude whether incorrect speed readings caused the crash.

Airbus had advised airlines to replace the device used to communicate flight speed, but Air France had not done so on Flight 447, according to BEA President Paul-Louis Arslanian.

Airbus and Air France are now working to replace the Airbus speed communicators, known as pitot tubes.

Arslanian added that "does not mean that without replacing the pitots that the A330 was dangerous."

Pitot tubes, protruding from the wing or fuselage of a plane, feed airspeed sensors and are heated to prevent icing, the Associated Press reported. A blocked or malfunctioning pitot tube could cause an airspeed sensor to malfunction and cause the computer controlling the plane to accelerate or decelerate in a potentially dangerous way.

Air France replaced the devices on other Airbus models because of problems with the instruments icing over, according to the Associated Press, which obtained the information from an Air France safety report.

The French daily Le Monde reported Saturday that it had obtained a copy of a letter from Air France sent June 5 to its Airbus pilots explaining how to trouble-shoot cases in which the pitot tubes malfunctioned, and assured pilots the company was "in the process" of replacing the devices.

Air France declined to comment on the letter.

Experts say that if pilots on the Rio-Paris flight could not determine the speed needed to fly through difficult weather conditions, or flew at an incorrect speed, a crash could have resulted.

Paris prosecutors opened an initial judicial inquiry Friday into possible "involuntary homicide," but have not identified who might be responsible.

BEA officials said it seemed unlikely that the airplane had been brought down by an act of terrorism, but that hadn't been ruled out.

Their investigation is focused on 24 malfunction messages that were automatically sent in the final minutes of the flight.

Despite earlier assumptions, "nothing indicates" that weather conditions were exceptionally dangerous during the time of the crash, Alain Ratier, the head of the French weather service, said Saturday.

Meanwhile, Arslanian said there was no guarantee the homing devices used to find the "black box" data and voice recorders were still attached to the recorders.

A French nuclear submarine and advanced acoustic locating technology on loan from the U.S. were added to the search this weekend.

Lauter is a special correspondent.

2 bodies found near Air France crash site - Los Angeles Times

Guess it's confirmed now?

[kuronosan]

No, those bodies were from a different crash. They're still looking for the Airbus itself for indisputable proof.

[Novalye]

No, those bodies were from a different crash. They're still looking for the Airbus itself for indisputable proof.

Source?

[Jotaru]

Junk was from something else, I think the bodies probably from the Air France flight. Else there's just random plane crashes leaving bodies around the ocean that we don't hear about?

[kuronosan]

Source?

Shoop da Whoosh.

[Dayson]

I came across an article that touched on some interesting facts. Mainly it discussed instances of other A330 type aircraft having autopilot failures resulting in uncontrollable dives.

A Past Flight May Offer Clues to Air France 447 - TIME

The A330 aircraft has three redundant flight inertial measuring systems designed to help the autopilot fly the plane and in the event one fails, the auto pilot is designed to detect the failure and ignore the data input. The redundancy is designed for safety reasons.

That being said, apparently there has been two documented cases where this did not occur. Qantas Flight 72 is one case as explained in the above link. The plane was said to be flying normally at cruise altitude on autopilot until the aircraft entered a sudden steep dive "that sent dozens of people smashing into the airplane's luggage bins and ceiling."

According to reports, the flight crew was able to disengage the autopilot and wrestle control of the plane back. The reason the plane entered the steep out of control dive was due to the failure of one of the three inertial measuring systems causing it to feed bad data to the autopilot software. It was discovered that the autopilot software detected the discrepancy between the three systems, but chose to follow the failed device and ignore the two that were still operational.

It was later found that this situation had occurred four more times, but had not resulted in a sudden gut-wrenching plunge. According to the article, all Airbus A330 and A340 aircraft models use this type of autopilot software.

Food for thought concerning the nature of this air disaster.

The following is just pure speculation on my part:

A possible cause of the crash could be the failure of an inertial device due to turbulence from the storm the aircraft was seen to fly near or into. This failure of the autopilot could have possibly resulted in the aircraft controls being applied by the autopilot pushing the plane into a flight envelope far outside it's designed limits. The explosion the Spanish pilot noted could be the plane structure failing under this extreme load factor causing the plane to break up in midair.

The automated reports of the auto pilot either failing or being turned off could have been the flight crew attempting to recover the aircraft.

Of course this could be completely unrelated to the Air France disaster.

[Novalye]

Shoop da Whoosh.

My bad, I don't typically joke about 200+ people dying in plane crashes.

[Jotaru]

I can't imagine suffering the forces sufficient to break an airliner into pieces midair while mid-flight... even a few G's like that directly up or down with no idea what's going on for a sustained period of time, followed by the airframe disintegrating and ripping in pieces, people and objects falling out of the cabin with the explosive loss of cabin pressure, immense cold and sudden lack of oxygen... freefall for a minute, then bam...


Fking scary way to die. Sad when you consider those 200+ people probably all experienced just that so briefly ago.

[kuronosan]

My bad, I don't typically joke about 200+ people dying in plane crashes.

I wasn't joking about people, I was joking about the asshole airline who told the families not to have any hope while in the meantime the Brazilians are trying to give them hope by going "oh well the debris we found wasn't from the french plane".

Look. The people are dead. The plane has crashed. Stop trying to fling doubt around and just be straight with them. Peoples hearts are at stake.

[Tristam]

I can't imagine suffering the forces sufficient to break an airliner into pieces midair while mid-flight... even a few G's like that directly up or down with no idea what's going on for a sustained period of time, followed by the airframe disintegrating and ripping in pieces, people and objects falling out of the cabin with the explosive loss of cabin pressure, immense cold and sudden lack of oxygen... freefall for a minute, then bam...


Fking scary way to die. Sad when you consider those 200+ people probably all experienced just that so briefly ago.

If the plane depressurized quickly, which I think one of the automated error messages said, or the plane broke up in mid air, everyone was probably (hopefully) unconscious in a matter of seconds.

[Tristam]

A plane going down, but giving off warning indicators suggests that external sensors are failing somehow, either through faulty wiring going into the internal system, or by external forces on the actual sensors outside the plane. Which is exactly what this looks like. And the second you're in a low visibility situation at 30,000ft. with failing sensors, I don't care how good of a pilot you are its going to be tough to stay up. I work O-level Avionics, and while the principles are roughly similar, an Airbus can't just rapidly dive below 30k to avoid it like a Hornet can. My best guess is either the sensors were fucked somehow through weather which caused human misjudgment and from there shit hit the fan. From the looks of it too, these people knew they were going down and the ones that didn't die from heart attack/shock suffered a lot along the way. If the pilot himself was at the controls he probably knew at the point of no return he was fucked in all honesty.

Oh I agree 100%, I would imagine given the weather that the pilots would be trying desperately to stay at cruising altitude anyway, and away from the hail/precip.

If the airspeed sensors somehow got fucked, then yes at 35k ft in severe turbulence there's not much any pilot can do. Too fast and turbulence breaks the plane up, too slow and you stall in low airpressure and go into an unrecoverable flat spin. And if the airspeed indicator is telling you one thing while you're actually doing the other, then you're essentially blindfolded and backwards. From the weather reports and in hindsight, this plane could have been in severe turbulence/weather and perhaps in a storm for the last 12 minutes of the flight, which could have indeed been the root cause of the electronic problems you mentioned, or just another link in the chain of events in the disaster.

We can only hope they didn't suffer on the way down. It sounds like the last 12 minutes or so though, were about as miserable as anyone can expect to be in the air.

[Elvis]

Key figures in global battle against illegal arms trade lost in Air France crash

Pablo Dreyfus, a 39-year-old Argentine who was travelling with his wife Ana Carolina Rodrigues aboard the doomed flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris, had worked tirelessly with the Brazilian authorities to stem the flow of arms and ammunition that for years has fuelled the bloody turf wars waged by drug gangs in Rio's sprawling favelas.

Also travelling with Dreyfus on the doomed flight was his friend and colleague Ronald Dreyer, a Swiss diplomat and co-ordinator of the Geneva Declaration on Armed Violence who had worked with UN missions in El Salvador, Mozambique, Azerbaijan, Kosovo and Angola. Both men were consultants at the Small Arms Survey, an independent think tank based at Geneva's Graduate Institute of International Studies. The Survey said on its website that Dryer had helped mobilise the support of more than 100 countries to the cause of disarmament and development.

CONSPIRACY!?

[Julian]

The traficantes (drug dealers, kinda/basically) and the violence in the favelas (slums) here in Rio is like, one of the worst things about this city. If they were gone, Rio would be such a better place