The Last Four Minutes of Air France Flight 447

[GoldenSpike]

This is enough to make you want to stick to Boeing equiqment, or trains

if possible:

The crash of Air France flight 447 from Rio to Paris last year is one of the most mysterious accidents in the history of aviation. After months of investigation, a clear picture has emerged of what went wrong. The reconstruction of the horrific final four minutes reveal continuing safety problems in civil aviation.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/...,679980,00.html

 

[birdy]

This is enough to make you want to stick to Boeing equiqment, or trainsif possible:

The crash of Air France flight 447 from Rio to Paris last year is one of the most mysterious accidents in the history of aviation. After months of investigation, a clear picture has emerged of what went wrong. The reconstruction of the horrific final four minutes reveal continuing safety problems in civil aviation.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/...,679980,00.html

Really an interesting in-depth article. Thanks for posting.

 

[jis]

Really an interesting in-depth article. Thanks for posting.

BTW, this accident was discussed on this board in this thread, back when it took place 1 June 2009.

Yes. This is the current hypothesis, but they are still not fully sure that this is what happened, and never will be, until they manage to get hold of the black boxes. They have re-started the search for those black-boxes. Without those this is probably the best we are going to get.

The interesting thing is similar problems have been observed in several flight by various modern aircrafts including the 777. It is just that they occurred in less trying circumstances and were recovered from. but all in all it was a pretty bizarre sequence of things that took place. It strongly suggest that captains should not be as blase about flying through dangerous thunderstorms as they sometimes are, specially in the ITCZ.

Many of these sort of incidents that have been reported are from the ITCZ or areas near it, although they are not unheard of elsewhere. Apparently the most reports are from the Indian Ocean which apparently has some of the most violent storms specially around Monsoon time. Apparently Atlantic Ocean is not the most common place for such incidents. When this accident occurred there was a 3000+ posting 7 thread discussion of it on airliners.net where even pilots who have experience Pitot failures participated. It was one of the most interesting and well informed discussions I have read in a long time.