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| -Signs, Portents, and the Weather- |
| Bodies Found From Tragic Air France Flight |
| 2009-06-06 |
| Investigators of worst aviation disaster since 2001 have found remains and said doomed jet was without auto pilot Bodies and debris have been found from the Air France plane which went missing over the Atlantic, according to the Brazilian air force. Remains were taken from the water at 11.14am (GMT) today and are now being examined, said air force spokesman Jorge Amaral. Question? My assumption is, the bodies can present evidence of a bomb. True or false? Earlier investigators said the passenger jet which crashed into the Atlantic last week transmitted 24 error messages before disappearing off the radar. The loss of the Airbus A330's autopilot was among the system failures reported, they claim. However they say it is not clear whether the system malfunctioned or was switched off manually by the pilots themselves. The Air France Flight 447 from Rio De Janeiro to Paris sent out a series of pre-crash signals during Sunday's flight, according to Paul-Louis Arslanian, the director of the French agency leading the crash investigation. Fourteen of those messages were sent within the space of one minute, from 3.10am BST to 3.11am BST. They included inconsistent speed readings and the failure of the autothrust. Speaking at a press conference today Arslanian said errors in velocity calculations were a recurring problem on the Airbus made jets. He said: "We have seen a certain number of these types of faults on the A330. There is a programme of replacement, of improvement." He added that the A330 were safe in the meantime. The plane was flying through an area of thunderstorms and turbulence when it disappeared from air traffic control's radars. However meteorologists claim the severity of the weather conditions were not exceptional. |
| Posted by:Sherry |
| #6 Plane seats, wing floating in Atlantic |
| Posted by: Oztralian 2009-06-06 20:17 |
| #5 Airbus A330 has history of airspeed problems |
| Posted by: Oztralian 2009-06-06 20:12 |
| #4 pretty easy to do, 3dc. Good catch |
| Posted by: Frank G 2009-06-06 16:47 |
| #3 An EU based commenter had this to say: Here's a thought I had that you might be interested in regarding that flight and what is likely to be the elusive black box flight recorder. Engineering in the aircraft industry tends to, necessarily, focus on producing highly robust solutions. Hence the standard black box mechanism has one unit that is designed to be as resilient as possible. Another solution that might not occur to people in that environment would be to replicate the data many many times to many data recorders with the hope that at least one of them will survive and be found. Modern airlines all have fairly powerful in-flight entertainment systems in the seat-backs. Seats are probably one of the parts of a plane most likely to become detached and to float. So why not replicate the black box data to every single seat-back in flight entertainment unit ? The amounts of data are pretty trivial compared to the multi-media that it has to cope with, perhaps 50MB/hour or something like that even including the voice recording. Most of the infrastructure is there already so it would largely be software changes. Going forward, it would then make sense to design the unit to be as likely to survive / float as feasible. Make it light (a good thing anyway). Use flash memory perhaps encapsulated in epoxy or something like that to make it resilient. Perhaps make the part of the seat containing the system such that under crash conditions it will break from the metal structure which might otherwise drag it down. Maybe a water-proof membrane around the foam inside to stop water ingress and keep it buoyant. Seems that the basic are pretty much there anyway. |
| Posted by: 3dc 2009-06-06 16:43 |
| #2 Well, that proves me wrong (Thank God) and we don't need to look for another 9-11 right away. |
| Posted by: Redneck Jim 2009-06-06 14:38 |
| #1 if they have shrapnel with chemical traces, perhaps, but they likely hit at terrific velocity and have been in the water some time..... |
| Posted by: Frank G 2009-06-06 13:40 |