Air France jet crashed over Atlantic

[beereo]

Someone forgot to press the button in the bunker on the island

sa TV series ito na Lost ah.

[asmdriskell]

Lets pray for them nalang...

[valvura]

With the present technology, makita pa kaya ang black box ng Air France jet?

Retrieving Air France black box will be epic task
By Tim Hepher and Jason Neely – Tue Jun 2, 3:57 pm ET

PARIS/LONDON (Reuters) – The first sighting off Brazil's coast of possible wreckage from a missing Air France jet signals the start of what could be one of the most challenging operations ever mounted to retrieve the tell-tale "black box."

The box, which is in fact two separate devices containing cockpit voice recordings and instrument data, offers the best chance of finding out why the Airbus jetliner vanished in an Atlantic storm en route to Paris with 228 people on board.

The devices are designed to send homing signals when they hit water, but merely locating them presents one of the most daunting recovery tasks since the exploration of the Titanic and barring good fortune, could take months, experts said.

If they are in waters as deep as some people fear, 4,000 meters (13,100 ft) or more, unmanned submersibles would be tested to their limits. Yet past disasters have led to advances in equipment which do give hope for finding out what happened.

"There is a good chance that the recorder would survive but the main problem would be finding it," said Derek Clarke, joint managing director of Aberdeen-based Divex, which designs and builds military and commercial diving equipment.

"If you think how long it took to find the Titanic and that the debris would be smaller, you are looking for a needle in haystack. You are very quickly looking at a large area to survey and could spend months running sonars down to a deep depth."

Black boxes have an underwater beacon called a pinger which is activated when the recorder is immersed in water. The beacon can transmit from depths down to 14,000 feet, according to the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board.

RECORD DEPTHS

Clarke spends time preparing for the unthinkable as part of an industry network on stand-by to help rescue submarines.

But the depths in this stretch of ocean far exceed the 600 meter maximum at which any navy could attempt a useful submarine rescue, a senior diving expert at Britain's Royal Navy said.

Brazil said on Tuesday its military planes had spotted wreckage 400 miles off its northern coast.

Speaking beforehand, based on reports of the plane's probable location, Neil Wells, senior lecturer in oceanography and meteorology at Britain's National Oceanography Center, said the black box could be more than 4,000 metres below the surface.

"There is no doubt about it; you will be pushing the limits of the technology. It is not a straightforward operation."

The oil industry has significant unmanned deep-sea capability but only operates down to 3,000 metres, Clarke said.

Such depths are well below the reach of manned craft.

A handful of deep-sea prowlers such as the U.S. Navy's Alvin, which surveyed the wreck of the Titanic at 4,000 metres below the Atlantic in 1986, could be equipped for such depths.

A U.S. Navy report based on similar disasters, released under the Freedom of Information Act late last year, found it was possible to recover aircraft wreckage including the black boxes from depths of up to 6,000 metres.

It cited advances since the 1980s in technology such as sonar for combing rugged sea floors, new software and acoustic beacons or "pingers" which indicate a position under water.

Both recorders were recovered from the crash of Air India Flight 182, which was blown up off the Irish coast in 1985.

They were recovered from some 2,000 metres in a search which lasted more than two weeks.

Two years later, South African Airways Flight 295 crashed into the Indian Ocean near Mauritius, triggering the deepest hunt for an airliner yet undertaken, with investigators recovering the cockpit voice recorder after a three-month search from a record depth of more than 4,200 metres.

Whatever the challenges, industry experts say the stakes are too high to give up on the search. "Not knowing would be totally unacceptable to Airbus and to aviation in general," said David Learmount, safety and operations editor of British-based aerospace magazine Flight International.
(Additional reporting by Jonathan Saul, Helen Massy-Beresford, editing by Janet McBride)

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/us_france_plane_blackbox

[ghosthunter]

Depends if they find it before the battery in the "pinger" of the black boxes runs out. Its a large area and they still have no idea of the exact impact area so surveying a large area would lower the probability of finding the flight recorders.

[uls]

the plane flew into a storm with 100mph winds

Air France Flight’s Doom Linked to 100 Mph Gusts, Lightning
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?p...d=a8TXqMxPinPI

June 3 (Bloomberg) -- An Air France Airbus that crashed into the Atlantic Ocean may have flown into plane-shaking updrafts and lightning that helped knock the airliner from the sky, aviation experts said.

Wind measurements show the plane met tropical thunderstorms with updrafts of 100 mph (161 kilometers per hour), according to AccuWeather.com, a commercial forecaster in State College, Pennsylvania. Gusts that strong and lightning may have led to structural or electrical failures of the aircraft, the weather service said yesterday in a statement.

[XTO]

storm alone can't easily demolished a modern airliner. terrorist act, mechanical, hydraulic or pneumatic failure can ba a factor and a possibility. when air france concorde with ruptured wing tank and crashed during take off, what's their findings? a punctured then blown tire????

[valvura]

Mysterious? If aircrafts are designed using winds to fly (Bernoulli's theorem) and now, the same wind destroying it, how can they convince ordinary people that it's still safe to take air transport considering also the erratic and extreme weather systems the earth is now experiencing?

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20090603/...rance_plane_47

Brazil navy races to pull Air France wreck from sea...
....
Authorities were at a loss to explain how a storm could have caused the plane, operated by three experienced pilots, to crash without sending a mayday call.

Officials from France have arrived in Brazil to lead the investigation with help from Brazilian teams.

Brazil's air force last had contact with Flight AF 447 at 0133 GMT on Monday (9:33 p.m. EDT on Sunday) when it was 350 miles from its coast. The last automated signals, which reported an electrical failure, were received about 40 minutes later.

One theory is that a lightning strike or brutal weather set off a series of failures. But lightning routinely hits planes and could not alone explain the downing, aviation specialists said.

Two Lufthansa jets believed to have been in the same area half an hour before the Air France mishap could provide clues for investigators, the World Meteorological Organization said.

[ghosthunter]

storm alone can't easily demolished a modern airliner. terrorist act, mechanical, hydraulic or pneumatic failure can ba a factor and a possibility. when air france concorde with ruptured wing tank and crashed during take off, what's their findings? a punctured then blown tire????

As for concorde, it was a piece of metal debris that caused a tire to blow. The blown tire sent high speed pieces of rubber through the underside of the wing housing the fuel tank. The ruptured fuel tank leaked fuel into the engine causing the fire. The fire caused the wing flaps to eventually melt/fail. Once that failed, the pilot lost control and the plance crashed.

The storm could have caused a chain of events to happen to down the modern airliner.

[s_quilicot]

As for concorde, it was a piece of metal debris that caused a tire to blow. The blown tire sent high speed pieces of rubber through the underside of the wing housing the fuel tank. The ruptured fuel tank leaked fuel into the engine causing the fire. The fire caused the wing flaps to eventually melt/fail. Once that failed, the pilot lost control and the plance crashed.

The storm could have caused a chain of events to happen to down the modern airliner.

Let's just watch the investigation and re-enactment in Nation geographic's Air Crash investigation.

[XTO]

As for concorde, it was a piece of metal debris that caused a tire to blow. The blown tire sent high speed pieces of rubber through the underside of the wing housing the fuel tank. The ruptured fuel tank leaked fuel into the engine causing the fire. The fire caused the wing flaps to eventually melt/fail. Once that failed, the pilot lost control and the plance crashed.

The storm could have caused a chain of events to happen to down the modern airliner.

the final conclusion about that crash was zeroed in a metal strip lying on the runway, which came from the thrust reverser cowl door of the number 3 engine of a Continental Airlines DC-10 that had taken off from the runway several minutes before.

but

the flight 4590 was 6 tonnes over and had an unbalance weight distribution etc. and most important of all was the "Failed engine 'repaired' minutes before take-off'

Air France revealed that the captain of the Concorde returning from New York to Paris earlier in the day had reported the number two engine reverse thrusters were not operational.

The thrusters are used to slow the plane on landing. A spare part was not immediately available, although "given the technical tolerance authorised by the manufacturer, the aircraft could take off again without being repaired," said Air France.

It added: "The information was presented to the captain of AF 4590. He made the decision to have the spare part changed. The part was immediately obtained from another spare Concorde and it took 30 minutes to make the necessary repairs."

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/wo...ff-707652.html

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