Sounds like the got turned into a giant ball of St. Elmo’s fire by the T-storms, and then the plasma currents started leaking through every ground fault they could find.
Global warming!
Oh boy. Now the speculations will go into higher gear.
Ping.
It was Senagalese airspace at that point?
In any case, this is a horrible scenario. Prayers for all those poor people.
And no voice traffic? Something sounds fishy about that.
I don’t think they’ve recovered the “black boxes”, and I haven’t heard that there were any distress calls, so how are they determining this? Pure speculation?
Wow.
No matter what happened I pray for the passengers, crew and families of the flight.
I fly — A LOT — and can picture what happened and what they were thinking in their last moments. My wife and I both know the importance of that “last” statement: “I love you.” It may be our last statement.
But so may be your drive to work — so let the people you love know how much you love them. Frequently.
Huh. Failures in air data inputs can give erroneous airspeed indications and kick off the autopilot. I’m not familiar with this aircraft though...
This could have been wind shear: i.e. the plane was flying into a strong headwind and then suddenly found itself in a tailwind. This is what caused the Delta crash at D/FW back in the 80's.
However, the Delta plane was on final approach to the airport near the ground. This plane was presumably at high altitude and cruise speed, although they may have slowed to "maneuvering speed" because they expected heavy turbulence.
The "flying too slow" may have been an erroneous measurement, or it may have have been when the plane first went out of control.
Anyone remember the wing tests that Airbus failed. I wonder if that had anything to do with this.
There’s a bias in these stories that the reporter wants to blame the victim if they can, that an Airbus can’t just fall apart in the sky without some pilot error. It helps people feel it couldn’t happen to them, that these were just dumb people. People fear random uncontrollable death much more than stupid death.
Flight data messages provided by an Air France source show the precise chronology of events of flight AF 447 before it plummeted into the sea 400 miles off Brazil on Monday.I hope the peabrains who criticized me when I ruled out terrorism, and suggested that the plane had blundered into severe turbulence associated with a thunderstorm which, along with possible systems failures, spelled doom for the plane, will read this.These indicate that the pilot reported hitting tropical turbulence at 3am (BST), shortly before reaching Senegalese airspace. It said the plane had passed through tall, dense cumulonimbus thunderclouds.
At this time, the automatic pilot was disconnected – either by the pilot or by the plane's inbuilt security system, which flips to manual after detecting a serious error.
At the same moment, another message indicates that the "fly-by-wire" electronic flight system which controls the wing and tail flaps shifted to "alternative law" – an emergency backup system engaged after multiple electricity failures. This system enables the plane to continue functioning on minimum energy but reduces flight stability. An alarm would have sounded to alert the cabin crew to this.
Two minutes later, another message indicates that two essential computers providing vital information on altitude, speed and flight direction ceased functioning correctly.
Two new messages at 3.13am report electricity breakdowns in the principal and auxiliary flight computers.
ML/NJ
I’m starting to settle in on very severe turbulence, perhaps with additional lightning strikes, being at the root of this. There’s some interesting datapoints in this story. Stuff was breaking, systems were failing and it was just getting worse and worse... losing power to more and more things... suddenly there’s just a cascading failure of the structure. We’re not talking about one bad thump of bad air... but a series of really, really hard bangs. Stuff can break when that happens. It sounds to me like it broke up in the air, or something important came off, like the tail or a wing, and/or the cabin broke open.
Just an opinion, but that’s what it sounds like to me.
I still don’t fly the Airbus.
So the tail fell off?
People will concoct any form of story to obscure an explosion.If there was a catastrophic airframe failure,
how long would it take for the debris to reach
the surface of the the water from that altitude ?Four minutes ?
“If it ain’t a Boeing, I ain’t going”
Good rule to live by. I do get on Airbusts occasionally when necessary, but I prefer Boeing and MD.
Stay off of planes made by socialists.
We can all relate unpleasant experiences when flying. In the mid 70’s I was flying a Huey over some montains in Montana and had to add power to gain altitude I pulled the collective up along left pedal application when a compressor stall occured with loss of power. Thank God a snow field was in view for an auto-rotation landing. I am very religious but instead of praying, I remember thinking that I hope it doesn’t hurt. My prayers for those lost and their families.