CARIIS
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One interesting fact extracted from the autopsies of the crash victims is that there were no signs of burns on any bodies. Just fractures, bruising and blunt trauma. What does this mean? The plane probably didn't explode and likely hit the water in one piece. While unlikely, it's possible some could have survived the crash, and if they did, could have lasted as long as 12 hours in the 80 degree waters of Tasil Point.
The jet fell at a rate of 10,000 feet a minute, or roughly 15 stories a second.
extreme inputs to their flight controls and the engines spooling up to full power and later the thrust levers being pulled back to idle. At one point, according to the report, both pilots sitting in front of the controls tried to put in simultaneous commands. The plane only accepts one of them.
Interestingly, with the aircraft nose up 40 degrees I'm curious how the Captain even got back into the cockpit. Couldn't have been easy.
http://jalopnik.com/5799544/8-captivating-facts-about-the-air-france-flight-447-mystery
Pivot tubes:
The pitot probes on Flight 447 were even more vulnerable than most in conditions like those at Tasil Point. They were produced by a French company, Thales, and the model was known as AA. In the years leading up to the crash of Flight 447, the Thales AA was problematic in places where the meteorological conditions do funny things with water. At high altitude and low temperatures, water sometimes doesnt freeze. Instead, it hovers, but as soon as something solid like a pitot tube flies through it, the water flash-freezes to form ice. Until heaters can melt the ice, the pitot probes are out.
This could happen to any kind of pitot probe, but by the summer of 2009, the problem of icing on the Thales AA was known to be especially common. Why the probes were still in use is a contentious question, but here is what we know for sure: Between 2003 and 2008, there were at least 17 cases in which the Thales AA had problems on the Airbus A330 and its sister plane, the A340.
In response, Air Frances official policy was to replace the AA pitots on its A330 planes only when a failure occurred. In August 2008, executives at Air France asked Airbus for proof that the BA pitots worked better in ice, and faced with the question, Airbus conceded that it did not have proof. So it removed the claim from the service bulletin. Another five months passed.
During that time, another airline, Air Caraïbes, experienced two close calls with the Thales AA on its Airbus A330s. The companys chief executive immediately ordered the part scrapped from the fleet and alerted European regulators, who then began asking questions. In their conversations with Airbus, regulators learned of the 17 cases of icing, and they also discovered, looking at those cases, that the failures seemed to be happening more often (9 of the 17 occured in 2008). None of the failures seemed to signal an immediate danger, so the Thales AA was not removed from service. Regulators simply asked Airbus to watch the problem and report back in a year.
By then, 19 months had passed since the service bulletin suggesting the same thing, but now Air France made the change. At the end of April, the airline ordered replacement BA probes for its A330s, and on May 26, the first batch of probes arrived. Five days later, when Flight 447 took off in Rio, the probes were still in an Air France warehouse, and none of them had been installed. All three pitots on Flight 447 were the Thales AA.
Apparently many French think the investigation was hidden to protect AF and AIrbus
In private, some B.E.A. investigators agree that they have found things that disturb them. After the planes final communication, for example, it took nearly 11 hours for a search team to be sent to Tasil Point. For the first hour, air traffic controllers generated a virtual flight on their computers, as is common practice, passing the plane along its intended route. For the next two hours, controllers checked periodically to see if anyone had seen the plane, and when a controller in Brazil asked a controller in Senegal if the plane had reached Cape Verde, the controller in Senegal said that Cape Verde hadnt talked to them but not to worry; so the controller in Brazil didnt.
Air France alerted a satellite search-and-rescue, 4 hours and 20 minutes had passed, and then it was another two hours before anyone notified the B.E.A. A search team lifted off in Dakar 10 hours after the last radio contact and for the next 45 minutes flew toward Cape Verde, where they assumed the plane had gone down.
When I asked the director of the B.E.A., Jean-Paul Troadec, if this was a suitable response time, he practically jumped from his seat and cried: No! Its not! The alert should have been much more quick! Yet the reports from Troadecs office draw no such conclusion. When I asked another B.E.A. investigator, Olivier Ferrante, whether it is difficult to write the reports without pointing out mistakes, he acknowledged that it is a matter of craft.
the American approach is very different. Jim Hall, a former N.T.S.B. chairman, told me that American investigators in the same position would have no trouble acknowledging if a search team took too long or if a plane was flying with faulty parts. That would not be a problem at the N.T.S.B.,
the French government, which nationalized Air France in 1945, currently owns nearly 16 percent of Air France-KLM, a stake worth about $830 million, and controls 3 of the 15 seats on the companys board. The government also owns about 15 percent of the parent company for Airbus, which is worth another $3.8 billion.
a government to investigate a company it owns is the very definition of conflicted interest. It also turns out that the underwater search this spring was entirely financed by Air France and Airbus and as one Air France executive told me, directly by cash.
When I asked Goelz if the N.T.S.B. would allow the target of an investigation to control the purse strings in the same way, he laughed. No, no, no, he said. We would charge parties for underwater retrieval, but we would control the money.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/08/magazine/mag-08Plane-t.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
The jet fell at a rate of 10,000 feet a minute, or roughly 15 stories a second.
extreme inputs to their flight controls and the engines spooling up to full power and later the thrust levers being pulled back to idle. At one point, according to the report, both pilots sitting in front of the controls tried to put in simultaneous commands. The plane only accepts one of them.
Interestingly, with the aircraft nose up 40 degrees I'm curious how the Captain even got back into the cockpit. Couldn't have been easy.
http://jalopnik.com/5799544/8-captivating-facts-about-the-air-france-flight-447-mystery
Pivot tubes:
The pitot probes on Flight 447 were even more vulnerable than most in conditions like those at Tasil Point. They were produced by a French company, Thales, and the model was known as AA. In the years leading up to the crash of Flight 447, the Thales AA was problematic in places where the meteorological conditions do funny things with water. At high altitude and low temperatures, water sometimes doesnt freeze. Instead, it hovers, but as soon as something solid like a pitot tube flies through it, the water flash-freezes to form ice. Until heaters can melt the ice, the pitot probes are out.
This could happen to any kind of pitot probe, but by the summer of 2009, the problem of icing on the Thales AA was known to be especially common. Why the probes were still in use is a contentious question, but here is what we know for sure: Between 2003 and 2008, there were at least 17 cases in which the Thales AA had problems on the Airbus A330 and its sister plane, the A340.
In response, Air Frances official policy was to replace the AA pitots on its A330 planes only when a failure occurred. In August 2008, executives at Air France asked Airbus for proof that the BA pitots worked better in ice, and faced with the question, Airbus conceded that it did not have proof. So it removed the claim from the service bulletin. Another five months passed.
During that time, another airline, Air Caraïbes, experienced two close calls with the Thales AA on its Airbus A330s. The companys chief executive immediately ordered the part scrapped from the fleet and alerted European regulators, who then began asking questions. In their conversations with Airbus, regulators learned of the 17 cases of icing, and they also discovered, looking at those cases, that the failures seemed to be happening more often (9 of the 17 occured in 2008). None of the failures seemed to signal an immediate danger, so the Thales AA was not removed from service. Regulators simply asked Airbus to watch the problem and report back in a year.
By then, 19 months had passed since the service bulletin suggesting the same thing, but now Air France made the change. At the end of April, the airline ordered replacement BA probes for its A330s, and on May 26, the first batch of probes arrived. Five days later, when Flight 447 took off in Rio, the probes were still in an Air France warehouse, and none of them had been installed. All three pitots on Flight 447 were the Thales AA.
Apparently many French think the investigation was hidden to protect AF and AIrbus
In private, some B.E.A. investigators agree that they have found things that disturb them. After the planes final communication, for example, it took nearly 11 hours for a search team to be sent to Tasil Point. For the first hour, air traffic controllers generated a virtual flight on their computers, as is common practice, passing the plane along its intended route. For the next two hours, controllers checked periodically to see if anyone had seen the plane, and when a controller in Brazil asked a controller in Senegal if the plane had reached Cape Verde, the controller in Senegal said that Cape Verde hadnt talked to them but not to worry; so the controller in Brazil didnt.
Air France alerted a satellite search-and-rescue, 4 hours and 20 minutes had passed, and then it was another two hours before anyone notified the B.E.A. A search team lifted off in Dakar 10 hours after the last radio contact and for the next 45 minutes flew toward Cape Verde, where they assumed the plane had gone down.
When I asked the director of the B.E.A., Jean-Paul Troadec, if this was a suitable response time, he practically jumped from his seat and cried: No! Its not! The alert should have been much more quick! Yet the reports from Troadecs office draw no such conclusion. When I asked another B.E.A. investigator, Olivier Ferrante, whether it is difficult to write the reports without pointing out mistakes, he acknowledged that it is a matter of craft.
the American approach is very different. Jim Hall, a former N.T.S.B. chairman, told me that American investigators in the same position would have no trouble acknowledging if a search team took too long or if a plane was flying with faulty parts. That would not be a problem at the N.T.S.B.,
the French government, which nationalized Air France in 1945, currently owns nearly 16 percent of Air France-KLM, a stake worth about $830 million, and controls 3 of the 15 seats on the companys board. The government also owns about 15 percent of the parent company for Airbus, which is worth another $3.8 billion.
a government to investigate a company it owns is the very definition of conflicted interest. It also turns out that the underwater search this spring was entirely financed by Air France and Airbus and as one Air France executive told me, directly by cash.
When I asked Goelz if the N.T.S.B. would allow the target of an investigation to control the purse strings in the same way, he laughed. No, no, no, he said. We would charge parties for underwater retrieval, but we would control the money.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/08/magazine/mag-08Plane-t.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
