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Could a Meteor Have Brought Down Air France 447?
niktemadur writes "In light of an Air Comet pilot's report to Air France, Airbus, and the Spanish civil aviation authority that, during a Monday flight from Lima to Lisbon, 'Suddenly, we saw in the distance a strong and intense flash of white light, which followed a descending and vertical trajectory and which broke up in six seconds,' the Cosmic Variance blog team on the Discover Magazine website muses on the question 'What is the probability that, for all flights in history, one or more could have been downed by a meteor?' Taking into account total flight hours and the rate of meteoric activity with the requisite mass to impact on Earth (approximately 3,000 a day), some quick math suggests there may be one in twenty odds of a plane being brought down in the period from 1989 to 2009. Intriguingly, in the aftermath of TWA flight 800's crash in 1996, the New York Times published a letter by Columbia professors Charles Hailey (physics) and David Helfand (astronomy), in which they stated the odds of a meteor-airplane collision for aviation history up to that point: one in ten."
Yes.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
... In this case, is it fair to the loved ones on the flight in question to speculate about the cause?
This is my opinion. To make sure you don't steal it, it's covered by the DMCA.
Is it likely?
Was Sephiroth seen anywhere near the wreck?
Just as likely.
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
How much does God hate you to put you in a meteor strike, a plane crash, and a lost-at-sea drowning all in the same day?
"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
Yeah, right, Air Comet has no intrest whatsoever to accuse a meteor...
If meteors can be so dangerous to airoplanes, why we don't see them hitting cars or buildings more often?
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
A company called Air Comet is saying they saw a meteor do it?
Does anyone else smell some blame-shifting?
No.
Let P1 = the probability of a human pilot, mechanic, or inspector screwing up.
Let P2 = the probability of a meteor intersecting an airplane midflight
P1 is much, much, much, much, much, much greater than P2.
Information theory is life. The rest is just the KL divergence.
This is mere speculation and is not all that different than when the Columbia accident happening folks in the press asking repeatedly if terrorists could have caused the orbiter to break up during re-entry.
Sure, the odds look good on paper, but at the same time, how many aircraft have been damaged by or downed by meteors over land, and conclusive proof shown that being struck by something of extraterrestrial origin was the culprit?
In short, there is a huge difference between "could have" and "that's what happened." In between you will find all sorts of people with axes to grind and/or crackpots. The truth is probably fare more mundane though no less tragic for those involved.
So any guess is equally likely/unlikely until there is more information. I think even a lot of the 'debris' they've found is probably not from the jet.
They disengaged the main flight control system because they thought it was flying too fast in the turbulence, or was causing too much passenger discomfort.
They slowed down to a very narrow margin above stall speed.
They hit a 100 mph updraft, causing the AOA to go beyond the stall angle.
They went into a high-speed dive.
Because they were on manual backup control they could not exert enough force on the controls to recover before Vne or the flutter speed of something was attained.
Something (wing, tail surface, aileron, spoiler... whatever) tore off.
The resulting asymmetric forces caused a violent departure from normal flight.
At a speed probably above Vne, that resulted in the aircraft structure being instantly destroyed.
This accounts for the fact that there was a an elapsed time of approximately a minute between the first failure messages and the last.
If it had been a bomb, or simple explosive decompression from another source, that time would have been at most a few seconds, and more likely zero.
The crew was struggling, all three physically, to pull the aircraft out of a high-speed dive and nobody had a chance to radio what the hell was happening.
That's my call.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
It's an Airbus. You have to add "engineer" and "programmer" to your P1 list.
The Air Comet aircraft was over 2,000km away from where Air France 447 was supposed to be, and the pilots report has been discounted by everyone in the industry.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Don't forget that the plane crash was during a thunderstorm in a dark night. Yes, it's possible that it got hit by a meteor, but it isn't probable.
Those of us who think they know everything annoy those of us who do.
Gravity Brought Down Air France 447.
We still don't fully understand it yet, but gravity is probably THE number one reason for aircraft crashes.
I speculate that Windows downloaded some critical patches and then rebooted.
I hope they find the blackbox, with the event logs so we can be sure.
I'll leave the blue screen joke for someone else.
3000 meteors with sufficient mass to hit the earth. But they are forgetting that planes fly at 10km or so high. Many more meteors would be able to reach that far into the atmosphere.
70% of the earth is water. I would guess 98% of the land is not covered by buildings or roads. So, a lot of things can hit the ground without us noticing.
Without reading the article it almost sounds like the 'ol insurance company trying to play this off as an act of GOD.
Much less liability if it was hit by a meteor than if it was a malfunction, poor maintenance, pilot error, any human caused reason.
Shop smart, Shop S-Mart.
P1 is much, much, much, much, much, much greater than P2.
Yeah, but the headline didn't ask if it was likely. It asked if it was possible ;)
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
I believe there was a storm in the area, a rather nasty one.
Absolute statements are never true
Current search methods seems so old and slow,
Why we cant have a bunch of satellite photos ( from google, or yahoo, or microsoft... or anyone else ) and request the internet community to analyze them.I bet lots of people will want to help reviewing pictures. It should be faster and cheaper to find something
The plane was flying in an intense storm, and a flash of light was observed striking it. Occam's Razor says go for the obvious explanation: lightning.
Have you read my blog lately?
The BBC has a better explanation in their article about Airbus reissuing guidelines on what to do when speed detectors give differing results, how this may happen and why it could have caused the crash. From the article: "Meteorologists say that the Air France Flight 447 had entered an unusual storm with 100mph (160km/h) updrafts that sucked water up from the ocean. As the moisture reached the plane's high altitude it quickly froze in -40C temperatures (thus freezing the airspeed detectors). The updrafts would also have created dangerous turbulence, they say. More info here.
... It was a giant shark (no lasers attached).
Somebody better call Lorenzo Lamas.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Actually this is how the plane was brought down:
Shark Attack
I don't know what the assumptions were, but it seems to be an over estimate by orders of magnitude. Space, 3D space is really really huge, unimaginably huge. In WW-II they had to protect the lumbering bombers from the swift fighters. So they tried arming a few bombers with very high number of machine guns. Short Sudeland flying boat was actually called a "Flying Porcupine" because of the number of gun barrels sticking out of it. With guns firing at 1000 to 3000 rounds a minute, with tracer bullets, with trained gunners aiming the guns, they still could not reliably hit the fighters. Both Luftwaffe and RAF and USAF independently had to learn the same lesson with very high cost. Yes, meteors could hit an airplane. But if their calculations shows odds of 1 in 20 for the last 20 year period, I am very sure they have over estimated the odds.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
They just came up with the meteor story because they don't want us to know that North Korea has perfected their death ray.
Or that Jumbo Jet the US military equipped with a missile-killing laser system.
Military test gone bad?
Or just an unfortunate and sad accident that happens every so often. There's a good chance it was very large hail stones that can crack aircraft windows, that would explain the decompression if a couple hit the same window and smashed it out, plus extreme turbulence and lightning - none of which on their own would even worry a pilot.
If P2 > 0 then the answer is "yes".
It's an Airbus, if you add "engineer" and "programmer" to the list than P1 approaches 100%
I mean, why do we still have to have the black box in the aircraft? Is it possible to radio the parameters continuously and record it on land? Thus even when the plane is lost, the data is safe. What kind of bandwidth is needed to transmit that level of data?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Unlike a missile, a meteor has a predictable path of flight. Given the speed at which a meteor enters the earth's atmosphere, the typical meteor is white hot and should be easily detected by the infrared detector in these laser systems. An AMLS, with some slight modification for tracking a meteor, could easily blast it out of the sky.
An alien mothership used a photon blast in simulate-a-natural-explosion-mode.
Fail. RTF question.
Attention deficit disorder is a complicated issue, spanning several major... HEY LET'S GO RIDE BIKES!
AF447 is the cover up story for North Corea's long range balistic missile successful launch.
Soon France will pull its diplomats out of North Corea for some random made up story.
Equipment on the Air France airplane transmitted a signal about an equipment failure. So, we know when the plane could have been struck.
If the Spanish pilots can nail the meteor sighting to something like a radio transmission (all of which are recorded) or a course change, we know approximately when the meteor happened.
Meteors generate a radio signal. Such signals are often recorded. http://www.k5kj.net/meteor.htm That would give us an exact time for the meteor.
If the meteor happened exactly when the plane sent the message about equipment failure, I would say we have a pretty good case.
There are a lot of people saying that the overall probability of a plane being hit is irrelevant, and that the probability of this one being hit is what's important. I disagree.
What we are dealing with here is a plane that actually crashed under unexplained circumstances. To realise the odds of this plane being hit by a meteor, we shouldn't look at the odds of ANY single plane being hit, but rather, the odds that one which went down in unexplained circumstances had been hit by a meteor.
Consider this: Over the summer holidays, some people from my college course don't return. It is most likely in each case that the student dropped out. However, there is the chance that the student died over the summer. We shouldn't look at the odds of this particular student dying, but the odds of ANYONE in the class dying, because we know that those who are present didn't die, by virtue of them being there. So in this case, for each student that didn't return, the chance that she died is:
( 1 - ([odds of no student dying over summer]^[# of students]) )/[number of students that didn't return]
My formula may be a bit off, but you get the idea.
--
The dinosaurs were fine until they invented the plane. It was all down-hill from there.
Table-ized A.I.
Meteor hits house (2003): http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news139.html
Meteor hits car (1992): http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=888&dat=19921012&id=evMNAAAAIBAJ&sjid=6HoDAAAAIBAJ&pg=6664,1878615
As aircraft fly at >30000 feet, the number of meteorites will be greater than the number that hit the ground. Atmospheric density is many times greater at sea level than at 30k+ feet, so more will penetrate the atmosphere to that height. It would only take a small rock, travelling at the speeds meteors do, to severely compromise a wing or even the cabin.
is bogus.
The movement of the plane is NOT taken into account.
Yours In Communism,
Kilgore Trout.
P.S. I have taken care to not link to any URL of substance given the slow load times of www.slashdot.org
While I don't buy it, either, your reasoning is too simplified.
Let P1 be 0.1
Let P2 be 0.0001
Even though P1 is much greater than P2, P2 will still happen with a probability of 0.0001 - it is independent of P1.
So while for every individual event, the probability that P1 happened will always be 1000 times larger than P2, in a large enough sample size you are still very likely to have P2 events.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Something tells me you came to this conclusion without doing any math at all.
The probability of a lightning strike is quite high. It happens all the time. This article is about meteors, not about lightning or your personal prejudices. The odds of it having been a terrorist bomb are practically nil at this point, given that no one has been able to convincingly claim credit.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
The modal verb "could," indicates possibility; thus the GP is (trivially) correct.
Or are you denying that it's possible that a meteor strike could take down a commercial airliner?
Some pilots on PPRuNe suggested that it is very unlikely to find any hail of significant size at FL350 (35,000 feet), and that if you find any at all, it was blown up there from a lower altitude (i.e. relatively low speed). Besides, there's no reason to believe a hail ding is going to bring down something the size of an A330.... That said, anything is possible, I suppose, particularly given the amount of composite material involved.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
No.
Let P1 = the probability of a human pilot, mechanic, or inspector screwing up.
Let P2 = the probability of a meteor intersecting an airplane midflight
P1 is much, much, much, much, much, much greater than P2.
So you're telling me there's a chance.
Yeah. It's possible I have four arms and four legs and go by the name Hubert Farnsworth.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Those probabilities are incorrect. What we want is P(a plane was hit by a meteor GIVEN that it crashed), not P(some plane in history was brought down by a meteor). These are very different probabilities, and the former is surely much smaller than 1/20.
The following probabilities are all much greater:
P(it was hit by lighting | it crashed)
P(there was a bomb | it crashed)
P(human error | it crashed)
and the list goes on...
Covered under 'inspector' - all of Airbuses FBW systems, just like Boeings, are certified to fly by the FAA and EASA. By the way, all Boeings since the 777 was launched are Fly By Wire as well.
Nothing I've read or know from flying in the Air Force and working at the USAF Flight Test Center at Edwards AFB indicates this was a collision....with a meteor or anything else.
I personally believe the aircraft encountered weather conditions that Airbus never tested against or thought possible. 100+ mph updrafts, as some have reported, would definitely cause control issues.
By that, if the plane was on autopilot or simply "in trim" and suddenly went nose up, it would have required immediate and CORRECT actions to handle. Having recently read the transcripts of the commuter crash, where the pilots were inattentive, then compounded a stall problem by pitching up, I think the real cause was a combination of events, including pilot error.
If a lightning strike caused electrical and control problems while the pilot(s) were trying to recover from a sudden attitude change, they were screwed. Going into a flat spin at 35000+ feet at 400 knots would have ripped the airframe to pieces. Given the reported debris field, and no apparent evidence of explosion, I'd bet that's what likely happened; unexpected event combined with control/system problems resulted in an unrecoverable spin and the aircraft came apart well before impact.
I am my own gestalt.
From a quick RTFA; it appears the calculations assume even distribution of flights and meteors. I don't know if meteor activity is uniformly distributed over the Earth's surface, but flights aren't in time of day or location. A more accurate calculation would compare meteor activity at the times and flight paths of commercial aviation, at altitudes where damage could potentially occur, to come up with a more accurate assessment of the probability of a meteor downing an aircraft.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
Someone from the 1700's? who likely died within 10 miles of where they were born?
trust me- the car would NOT be mundane to them.
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Phil Plait has just put up a blog post explaining that it's probably a lot less likely than than these other guys have made it seem. http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2009/06/05/flying-the-meteoric-skies/
Yeah, it's also possible that Martians did it as revenge for defiling their planet with rover tracks. Or the reverse-vampire Illuminati responsible for faking the Apollo landings and blowing up the World Trade Center did it because they were bored.
Coding with assembly is like playing with Legos. Coding an application in assembly is like building a car with Legos.
I think it's scientifically more plausible that a malicious flying gremlin is responsible for the disappearance of the plane. If it's a good enough explanation for WWII airmen, it's good enough for me.
True, but the concept of air travel shrinks the planet way more than cars, especially if both are revealed at the same time.
Ummmmm... P1 can be 99.9999999%, that still doesn't exclude P2 from happening.
some quick math suggests there may be one in twenty odds of a plane being brought down in the period from 1989 to 2009
You better check your math. According to your odds, at least 1 plane would have been hit by a meteor everyday. If you can count on kdawson for something, it's posting articles that are wildly inaccurate.
If it's one in twenty -
You sure wouldn't want to invest in a space station.
Maybe not even a new tile roof.
Anyway, everybody already knows what doomed TWA flight 800.
Could a meteor, going some-odd thousand miles per hour, collide with an airplane while airborne? Sure, in the way that a bullet could collide with another much faster bullet when fired from two different guns in two different directions. You could aim them and fire in such a way as to "make" them hit, but the odds are way less than 1 in 20 that this would ever happen. Maybe the odds are 1 in 20 that a meteor would cross through a path taken by a plane, but to hit the plane? Yeah right.
Furthermore, given the littany of reasons most planes crash are highly attributable to user error, I think the chances that this plane crashed because of a direct hit from a meteor are essentially zero.
stuff |
Maybe a passenger went mental, ran to the door, somehow opened it and jumped out, creating the decompression. He, and several other unbelted people nearby, all got sucked out straight into one of the engines, blowing it up and causing the aircraft to spiral into an uncontrollable dive very soon after.
C'mon, let's get some ideas!
Here comes something meteor! *groan*
A meteor ? Noway. We in Slashdot all know that it's a coup from our new Alien overlords since Mankind has difficulties welcoming any alien, for one.
Feeling of helplessness greatly influences perceptions of safety of an airplane.
In case of a car, you can actively increase your safety, by...driving safely. Granted, sometimes you are at a mercy of some moron, but even then - you can often recognise such situation soon enough, or at least point at the other guy. Furthermore, in relation to "you can always blame the other guy", most morons on the road think they are great drivers. And this is all about perception, of safety in this case.
But the planes are different. You're just a cargo. When things unfold you have no idea who/what is responsible and can activelly increase you chances (proper position and evacuation) only in part of the cases.
And people hate beeing reminded how small and fragile pieces in the grand scheme of things they are.
One that hath name thou can not otter
As exciting as meteor or motherships would be, I still think that simplest reason hold true in this case. An ex-Air Force weatherman, gives quite a low down on the weathersystem directly on AF447's path at the time the last messages came. http://www.weathergraphics.com/tim/af447/
My theory is that Chuck Norris brought down the plane
maybe in bangkok , in a closet , with a rope ? :D
...I obey the laws of physics....
The difference here is the eye witness account of "a bright white light" descending rapidly, which is not easily attributed to the materials on board the plane itself. Crackpots are those who will imagine that this is what a plane crash looks like.
There isn't enough kinetic energy to "burn up" and jet fuel burns orange and smokey, not bright white. And a high explosive (thinking of the bomb threat) would be a flash at most, and then the condensation cloud of the decompressing plane. But perhaps it was some visual illusion from watching an electrical storm... that can generate a bright white light without the help of aliens or UFOs...
It's not statistics that are at fault, it's your understanding of them. When someone says that the probability that you're going to die in a car crash is X, this is a correct statement. Of course it doesn't take into account other things like your speed, and it doesn't claim to. If you wanted to analyze that, then you would want to calculate P(dying in a car crash | you stay under the speed limit, wear your seat belt, pay attention to the road), which is of course a lower probability.
There's nothing wrong with statistics if you understand what's being calculated.
But how many crashes remain unexplained after a few days of investigation? Quite a few and probably most of those that happen over sea. It's not that the sum probability is irrelevant, it's just not the correct estimate for the probability for this accident in particular.
Obviously treating this airplane as a random one is wrong too, since this one crashed and most don't...
Sounds like the US and France better call up Charles Whitmore or Benjamin Linus and start asking about "the island"... can anyone say "Oceanic Flight 815" Take 2.
Wrong
As long as P2 > 0 the the answer must be Yes.
Looks to me like Desmond forgot to press the button again.
. . . where are the reports of sub-catastrophic damage? Certainly, not every hit would be fatal and there should be a body of accident reports for commercial aviation.
Someone didn't push the button
Actually I've had plenty of car journeys where to some extent one is relieved to be at the destination. Here in Ireland I would suggest that a journey of 200 km would involve at the very least, four encounters with crazed lunatic drivers trying to kill everyone around them. Friday evening out of Dublin involves many many more as three lanes worth of traffic tries to fit in two lanes, with random people trying to do faster than the 120 km/h limit. Not to mention the handful of times I've made an unwise choice in choosing to be a passenger in a car with certain drivers.
Even in Germany where I find driver behaviour mostly excellent, this is made up for if you merely encounter one insane driver while on the no-speed limit section of Autobahn (not nice speeds to have someone acting the maggot with lanes/tailgating) or one driver on the 120 km/h limit section who intends to pretend it's no speed limit (not fun if you are 120 km/h in outside lane with this driver coming up behind, and you can't pull in due to slow trucks close together in the inside lane).
By contrast I've mostly found air travel quite reasonable (although some stressful airport encounters - but no feeling of narrowly avoiding death).
-- *~()____) This message will self-destruct in 5 seconds...
The obvious question is were there any Muslims on board. That would make the chance of a bomb much more likely than a meteor strike. I am not saying that it is very likely that an individual Muslim is a bomber, just that the probability of a lightning strike is minuscule.
You might be looking at a flaimbait mod there... If al qaeda or a similar group where to try the bomb+plane thing again, I'm sure they are bright enough not to use an obvious attacker for the job so "counting muslims" is not a statisticly valid risk assessment procedure. And anyway, they woud have claimed responsibility by now - there is no point commiting an act of terror to just let people think it was a natural disaster afterwards.
You are, in my untrained opinion, wrong about the lightning strike given the weather conditions reported for the time in that location. OK, so a strike powerful enough (or otherwise somehow affecting equipment sensitive enough) to down an airbus might be very unlikely but as they where flying through a hefty storm system I'd guess more likely than one of the passengers happening to be a very naughty boy.
I'd say a meteor strike is far far less likely too, but without some analysis you can't completely rule it out. "Very very unlikely" is not the same as "impossible".
So I think the smoke monster got 'em.
No. Bush did it!
..and "manufacturer". I have flown often for business, and experienced in-flight issues 3 times, all on Airbus aircraft: on two occasions while flying out of Houston, TX, the engines barely provided enough power to get the planes off of the runway, and the planes ended up flying over the Gulf of Mexico to dump fuel for a return landing; once flying into Houston, one of the landing gear indicator lights showed that one of the gears failed to extend and lock -- which required a fly-by of a tower at a considerable roll angle so that the controllers could visually verify that the gear was indeed extended.
So, I now avoid flights that involve Airbus aircraft, which limits my travel options somewhat. That may be an irrational decision, but it's mine to make.
Best post in the story. I haven't seen the raw data, but from some knowledge of the scenario I suspect that "flutter", probably induced by turbulance and extremely low pressure (& hence density) caused the horizontal stabilizer to resonate and fail, probably followed by vertical stabilizer and possibly main aerofoil. Whether sundry control surfaces left the scene at the same time would not change the outcome, but would show as "difficulty in controling the aircraft". It is likely that instant loss of cabin pressure was caused by breach of pressure hull integrity on a large scale. At least we can believe that the end would be very quick for all aboard. The real question is not what happened but why the aircraft entered a storm of such severity.
nec sorte nec fato
but I would put more money on another shoe bomber before placing it on a meteor.
As for reporting times and such ruling out a bomb, from 35,000 feet to Ocean Floor isn't instant. Also, all a bomb has to do is damage it sufficiently not to fly... not blow it to bits. The one that came down over Britain, Lockerbie, broke up in flight from a small bomb spreading debris over a very large area (over 800 square miles)
So here is to hoping there is no bomb and simply pilot error. If its the former then someone would have stepped forward already, as for the later, well Air France or Airbus (forget who) already issued new directives to maintain higher speeds in storms.
The real threats are finding out that the composites used are not up the task.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Need we grasp at straws this early?
The far more likely scenarios, while being vigorously downplayed by the press and governments involved, are on board bombs or aircraft structural failure.
1) There was a bomb threat
2) This same type of aircraft had its tail torn off by simple wake turbulence on American Airlines flight 587
The fact that Airbus and Air France are groping around for ANY more politically acceptable explanation should be your first clue that they are in full out Spin Doctor mode.
Why look to the infantessimaly small probability items when the 800 pound gorilla is still in the room: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam's_razor
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Since we're all just speculating.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
George Bush just told me it was the terrorists and they did it with a nuclear weapon of mass destruction. Just as likely.
That HAS happened and more than once. Here is one that happened in '92.
http://www.nyrockman.com/pages/peekskill-knapp.htm
Here is a somewhat exhaustive list of meteor impacts into man made objects:
http://imca.repetti.net/metinfo/metstruck.html
Of course as you say, the odds of a particular car, house, or what have you getting hit are astronomical but this is like winning the lottery. You aren't likely to hit the jackpot but SOMEBODY is going to.
It's actually more weird than you think. Everyone who drives slower than you is a wimp. Everyone who drives faster is an irresponsible moron. Most drivers (including me) really think that way.
Extreme Programming - Redundant Array of Inexpensive Developers
Now we know.
I scream. You scream. I assume that means we're both acquainted with the problem. We proceed.
I also read a quote somewhere else of somebody saying "Airplanes might be safer than cars, but I'd rather arrive at my destination with a false sense of security than feel like I've narrowly escaped death."
Whoever said that was a moron. Was that person by any chance involved in designing our airport "security" system? I'd rather be safe than think I'm safe when I'm not.
I personally believe statistics aren't all they're cracked up to be. When I'm in control of a situation VS when I'm not. I think I can personally change my chances of survival in a car by not speeding... Maybe only a few percentage points, but still-
So the math is wrong or useless because it makes you uncomfortable quantifying the risk? Yes, you can elect behaviors that reduce your risk and statistics can (often) tell you whether your attempt to reduce your risk is significant. But that's not the same as eliminating all risk. You are never completely in control of your survival in a car because you can't control other people's decisions nor the environment around you. At best you can simply behave in a manner which minimizes your risk but it is never zero. Control is an illusion and complete control is wishful thinking.
statistics are cold hard ideas, but don't account for personal decisions.
Yes they do. Statistics account for aggregated decisions. Every accident includes a series of decisions by everyone involved. Accident statistics tell us the results of those decisions. With sufficient data we might learn that certain decisions should be avoided in the future but statistics very much account for personal decisions. And the decisions are not just in operating the vehicle but also decision made in the manufacture of the vehicle (Firestone tires on an Explorer anyone?) or the contents (Budweiser?).
Statistically, 1 in X number of men will have a heart attack- but eating healthy and excersizing changes your odds. You're not just a sitting duck, y'know?
Correct but that doesn't alter the utility of the statistics. Furthermore depending on your genetics and other factors you may get the heart attack anyway. Reduced odds does not mean perfect safety. If your parents had high blood pressure despite eating a healthy diet, chances are good you will too no matter what you eat.
If it was struck by a meteor how would the aircraft be able to send maintenance messages minutes apart ? This is the part that makes the scenario unlikely to me.
Looks like only one plane full of folks got to heaven and all the rest here are Left Behind......
(now that's some funny shit)
>And people hate beeing reminded how small and fragile pieces in the grand scheme of things they are.
This is the heart of the problem. People hate feeling unsafe, more than they hate *being* unsafe, which is why they prefer to drive than be flown.
(I wonder if people feel this way about chauffeurs or bus drivers: I've never heard people say this, but they must.)
The thing is: a pilot has thousands of hours of specific training, and more importantly, the pilot's almost certainly going to be the first to die if something goes wrong. The pilot has all the same concerns as a car driver, plus specialized training very few drivers have -- which is why commercial aircraft are safer than cars. Pilots feel just the same way car drivers do, and have better skills in addition.
But that's not what people want. They want to feel like they're in control of their lives. Hence SUV's and a litigation-prone, zero-acceptable-risk society.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
It does show meteor strikes going on.
Doubting the existence of evolution is like doubting the existence of China: It just shows that you're uninformed.
What i'd like to see from these brainiacs is a complete probability distribution of what happened to the plane. If there is a 1/10^x chance of a meteor hit, 1/10^y chance of human fuckup, 1/10^z chance of terrorist attack, I'd really like to see i tall put together using Bayes' so that they can say "We calculated that there was a 45% chance of it being a meteorite hit".
That center fuel tank dog and pony show government explanation is THE biggest crock since I don't know when. Freeking dozens of eyewitnesses, including a nat guard helo pilot who reported it right then after he landed, and it was on all the news at the time, clearly saw a missile streak/trail going from the surface to the air then BOOM. It's a coverup, most likely a navy training exercise missile that went real bad according to most of the researchers. They screwed up so they didn't want the huge bad PR and be liable for buhzillions in lawsuits, etc. They even got caught outright lying at first about whether or not they were running some training in that area at the time and again, too many eyewitnesses finally made them admit that well, maybe they were running a "little" exercise in the immediate area.
Really, this is the government at work. The prudent person will always be skeptical of them telling the truth if it is even close to being embarrassing to them.
No, it's got to be the terrerists! They's got a bomb. Kill'em all!!
There's NO WAY it's anything else!!!
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
The fact that Airbus and Air France are groping around for ANY more politically acceptable explanation should be your first clue that they are in full out Spin Doctor mode.
Um, the suggestion that this might potentially have been a meteor came from a couple of college professors in New York, abd a blogger at Discover magazine.
I'm not sure I recall the correct latin name for attributing something the wrong person, but I'm sure you have it at the tip of your tongue.
While not really possible, ifthat did happen, there would ahve been a lot more radio chatter from the crew.
As opposed to a loss of pressure warning and then nothing
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
it also happened to be traveling through a tremendous serious of thunderstorms, and happened to be a plane from a company which has had some recent problems with its fly-by-wire systems reacting incorrectly to data from sensors on their planes, and it happened to report a series of electronic messages over a span of time indicating a deteriorating flight situation. By george, I think you've got it!
No.
Let P1 = the probability of a human pilot, mechanic, or inspector screwing up. Let P2 = the probability of a meteor intersecting an airplane midflight
P1 is much, much, much, much, much, much greater than P2.
maybe God is very bored, and has very good aim.
how many pairs of boxer shorts should you own?
But that doesn't invalidate P2.
Consider the lack of information coming from the crew, something very very sudden and violent probably happened. Pretty much any internal event to the craft would have been signaled automatically and broadcast from the crew.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Stewardess: [Captain], the possibility of successfully navigating an asteroid field is approximately 3,720 to 1.
Captain: Never tell me the odds!
That said, my money's still on the boring updrafts & colossal turbulence theory.
Low speed relative to what? The ground? Certainly not the airplane, since the airplane is moving at 500 mph.
Just look at the Columbia shuttle crash. It struck a piece of foam at a couple of hundred miles an hour which left a huge hole in the wing. It's actually fairly similar too since both the Columbia and this Airbus had shells largely consisting of composite materials.
If that jet slammed into some hail any larger than pea size it could certainly sustain a lot of damage very quickly. Large hail stones can also reach very high altitude--that's actually how they grow to be so large by cycling from low to high altitudes over and over again, growing the whole time. It's just rare for the situations needed to form large hail stones to occur.
Personally I think that a space-based laser test or kinetic energy weapon is more likely than a meteor. Malice strikes me as more common than meteors.
Consider... If you were going to test your weapon:
- it would be good to test on a plane in a storm, that way lightening can be blamed
- it would be good to run the test in a place where there's not much communication coverage/radar
- it would be great to test over the sea where there's less likely to be evidence
- you wouldn't want to test on the aircraft of a hostile nation because that might precipitate a war you don't want
- you'd like to avoid Muslim nations because inflamed opinion can lead unpredictable places
- you'd plant stories in the media about the likelihood of meteors hitting planes.
Or it could be a bomb.
Or it could be vicious weather conditions, possibly a small precursor to more widespread conditions caused by global warming.
Or it could just be lightning taking out the electrics. A plane with no engines is hard to fly at the best of times.
And, yet, I'm am positive that Quantas 72 was properly inspected prior to flight. Even though it was only a demonstration, I am equally sure that Air France 296Q was also fully inspected.
Inspection only covers the known "knowns" and known "unknowns"; there's still plenty of places for unknown "unknowns" to hide in a flight control system. In some cases, it takes an incident or disaster investigation for unknowns to become knowns.
It is possible that the plane was hit by a meteor. There are many, many pieces of debris falling into Earth's atmosphere every day.
But it begs the question: If meteors are capable of catastrophic damage to an aircraft, why do we not see frequent occurrences of meteor damage that is not catastrophic? Planes are regularly damaged by birds and thunderstorms, and both phenomena have and do take down aircraft (the Hudson river crash being a recent example of a bird strike). We should be seeing minor damage done by meteors before we're seeing aircraft lost to meteors.
Thunderstorms, computer glitches and bird strikes are much more likely to be the culprits here, not to mention human error.
There's even the suggestion of a bomb having brought down the aircraft. Again, this is more likely than a meteor.
But I think it's unlikely that we'll ever find out for sure, if they can't get the black boxes back.
Meteors... Heh, there's way more important things to worry about when flying.
Julie Moult is an idiot.
I know you are not suggesting that a pilot should make their own flight path decisions... but since you making a case about making your own decisions to effect a statistic, how would a pilot flying a passenger plane make his won decisions?
In this case, statistics might actually be closer to the real thing due to the fast that virtually all flights are 'static'
If they are "burning up in the atmosphere", how many of them have completely disintegrated before entering the bottom 6 miles of the atmosphere? Airliners routinely travel at 30,000 feet, meaning you stand a higher chance of meteor contact than you do at sea level.
Would an explosion resulted in 10 maintenance notices being sent out that the electrical systems were failing?
What probably really happened is that they were flying over a previously undiscovered island just as it was jumping backward in time, which is why no trace of the airliner can be found...
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
How do you suppose a 700 B.C. cave dweller would take a Jet airliner landing and passengers disembarking?
Do you think he or she would dare step aboard?
Why didn't they just claim it was hit by a U.F.O. It is just about as probably, since they didn't identify it.
I use that basic attitude while golfing. I frequently end up with a tree in between me and the green.
If I think about it and try to play it safe, I will normally shank it into the tree anyway. If I just hit it, tree be dammed, maybe I'll hit the tree but maybe I'll make it through.
"Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."
through astrology!
I just KNEW something was up when I noticed a meteor setting in Capricorn...
Personally, I think it was time traveling, alien, mushrooms. Until they find, even a small amount, of evidence my theory is almost as strong as this one. In other words, until there is some evidence, one way or the other, any conjecture over the cause is nothing more than mental self manipulation (if you know what I mean).
Rules of Conduct:
#1 - The DM is always right.
#2 - If the DM is wrong, see rule #1
Aircraft doors have to open inwards first before they swing out. The outward pressure on the cabin door of a plane pressurized to 8,000 feet while flying at 35,000 feet is about 7.44 PSI. The A330's cabin door measures approximately 141" x 101". Multiply it out and you get approximately 106,000 pounds of force. I don't know anyone who is that strong. I don't know of very many machines that are that strong. This is equivalent to lifting 1.5 of the empty external tanks on the space shuttle. That's 1/3rd the thrust of a single shuttle main engine. That's close to the total thrust for both A330 engines put together.
In other words, it's not going to happen. The only way a cabin door could open mid-flight would be if its hinges and/or a substantial part of the door/frame were physically destroyed, which would require a massive structural failure. Basically, short of someone detonating a pretty big bomb, it borders on absurd to consider the possibility of someone opening the cabin door while the plane is at altitude.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
I still say it was an electromagnetic pocket gone out of control because a Scotsman forgot to push the button.
I thought that you can't use this kind of probablity questions when you already know the outcome of the last 100 years of air travel. This kind of calculations as I udnerstand it is only valid for predicting future events.
So while in the next hundred years it is 1/20 (or whatever the result of the calculation is depending on how detailed you go) of a meteor and aircraft collision, you can't then say well we have already been flying for a hundred years so we a pretty due a collision.
So given it hasn't happened yet it remains increadibly unlikley that there will be a meteor vs aircraft collision.
Or did I miss something - I am sure you will tell me if I have.
I'm pretty sure no human, mental or not, is able to open the door. Too lazy to list the evidence right now though.
No, http://www.spaceweather.com/glossary/nasameteorradar.html
It would have been near midnight there. It would be more likely in the morning hours.
At least it wasn't my model rocket. I always wondered where it went.
I use irony whenever I can, but my shirts are still wrinkled...
Burst of bright light? No plane wreckage found? I think the most likely conclusion is that you are watching an episode of Lost.
Hi,
this explanation is clearly a case for Occam's Rasor. There are currently more simple and more probable explanations than a meteor strike. So unless other evidence comes up, this theory should rest in peace until then.
CU, Martin
However, a person of the 18th century wouldn't have any context in which to evaluate the relative planet-shrinking abilities of cars vs. planes. Ballpark it at 500 miles per day for a car vs. 10,000 miles per day for a plane. To a Parisian commoner of that era, that's a matter of being able to travel to Turin vs. Tokyo, both of which are just names of far away places to him, if he's even heard of them.
For comparative purposes, imagine that somebody from the future were to show a modern Earthican two forms of space travel - one that could take you to Polaris (430 light years) in a day, and one that could take you to the Orion Nebula (1,500 ly). Sure, if you know the distances it's obvious that one's faster than the other, but what does that mean to you? Both are so far from anything you know, and so far beyond any distance that you ever imagined travelling, that the difference is meaningless to you.
Well what if it was an exploding meteor? Huh? I just blew your mind!
Seriously though, a small bomb may have just destroyed the electrical system. Airbus' are fly-by-wire but I'm sure they are loaded with redundancies. Still, a combination of bad luck, stress on the plane, etc could've led to a perfect storm (pun sort of intended).
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
For those following the story you might have already read they believe the debris they picked up is not from the Air France flight. Is it possible there was a mid-air collision with an unregistered plane/jet?
"Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."
Let P3 be a terrorists named say Mohammad or Achmed living in France,
Wouldn't that be more likely than a meteorite ?
Unless you've been brainwashed by Liberal kooks, that's far more likely suspect
It cant be a meteor,as only a meteorite enters the atmosphere and survives
So it must be a terrorist
I am not a physicist but i respectfully I think that the possibility for the plane to be taken down by superman is much higher than the meteor hypotesis.
Here you can see the last automatically transmitted ACARS messages of AF447:
http://img32.imageshack.us/img32/7547/acarsaf447d.png
Personally, I think this incident was caused by a combination of factors.
ALL speculations tread on thin air before the CVR and FDR are recovered, but based on current data I would QUESS:
-it is a dark, stormy night with no horizon or any landmarks visible
-160km/h updraft brings moist air to a much higher flight level than usual
-this causes sudden icing of the pitot tubes
-this causes the flight computer to think that the plane is in danger of stalling, and it lowers the nose automatically
-the crew switches auto-pilot and flight envelope protection partially off, or a (positive) lightning strike disables them
-the crew has no good idea about the true speed and orientation of the plane
-inside the cumulonimbus' horrible gusts the crew over-stresses the composite flight controls while fighting turbulence
-the place exceeds it's maximum speed and/or structural load (G-) limits
-two-three minutes later the agony of the 228 souls on board finally ends as the slowly disintegrating plane hits the sea near the speed of sound, instantly ripping them to stamp-sized bits
Here's more detailed speculation about possible causes and a crude analysis, taken from Usenet:
1. Terrorism or other malicious use of explosives
A bomb explodes in the cargo hold, crippling the aircraft's control systems or starting a structural break-up that eventually leads to loss of control.
Supportive evidence: According to Wikipedia, a bomb threat had been made on an earlier flight. Lack of communications from the flight crew indicates either a sudden event or something which lead to significant problems that the crew had to focus on. This would be consistent with the effects of a bomb. The automatic messages about computer system failures sent by the aircraft could be interpreted either as indications that the aircraft's movements have exceeded the limits that the systems can handle, or as indications about direct damage to the systems. A flash of light has been seen by other aircraft in the area.
Evidence against: While terrorist organizations exist both in France and Brazil, there has been no recent activity. No organization has claimed responsibility for the act. There is no specific evidence about a bomb. Nothing is known about any individuals or organizations who would have non-terrorism related reasons for malicious acts. It seems too big of a coincidence that a bomb would go off at the same time as the aircraft flies through very rough weather. Finally, what we know about the sequence of ACARS messages indicates that loss of cabin pressure was the last message in the sequence. This appears to rule out an explosion, unless it was contained in the hull and only damaged internal structures and components. This seems unlikely. The flash of light was apparently seen from too far to be caused by AF 447 related problems.
Open questions: Where are the cargo holds that are used to carry the passengers' luggage? Are they physically close to the computer and navigation systems that ACARS messages reported as failing? And obviously, physical evidence would be useful.
Verdict: Can most likely be ruled out
2. Explosion or other rapid, harmful reaction from the cargo
The sequence of events is as in the terrorism theory.
Supportive evidence: The sequence of events fits this theory, as it does the terrorism theory. The cargo might have shifted at the time of turbulence, initiating the reaction.
Evidence against: See the evidence regarding the malicious use of explosives. In addition, there is no information that the cargo could have contained something harmful.
Open questions: More information is needed about what was in the cargo, and who cargo was taken from.
Verdict: Can most likely be ruled out
3. Fire
Fire starts in cargo hold, in sys
Capitalization is the difference between "Helping your uncle jack off a horse" and "Helping your uncle Jack off a horse"
If I told someone in the 1700's or 1800's that many people across the country often travel 50+ miles a day to and from work and home, I imagine they would be very awestruck.
Maybe... but perhaps that'd be because they're simply bewildered as to why everyone doesn't just move closer to where they work 8P
The difference is that we currently couldn't travel to either of those places even if we had the time, whereas the 18th century person could conceivably make the journeys to Turin or Tokyo. Good point though, hadn't thought of that.
4 8 15 16 23 42
NO.
Equally possible is that a Russian sub brought it down.
Or that a lego piece was used in the rear lavatory, clogged it, and the pipe burst, shorting out the controls, causing a tail spin.
The aircraft is currently in the 11th dimension, along with an appendage of Dwayne Hoobler.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
from responding to the word "God". Pavlov got bit by that dog, dont'cha know?
The odds of me writing this exact reply, at this exact moment, are astronomically low.
Yet I did it.
factor 966971: 966971
I disagree. A fast horse on good terrain could make 100 miles per day. A car is just like a somewhat faster horse. A plane, not requiring roads and able to travel anywhere on the planet in a day is a several order of magnitude increase.
Man, you really need that seminar!
Said astronomer seems to have forgotten that planes fly in the atmosphere, not on the surface. Probably the odds of getting hit by a meteor at 10km altitude is two or three times greater than at the surface.
Once launched, the missile is detected by the Guardian system, which then directs a non-visible, eye-safe laser to the seeker of the incoming missile, disrupting its guidance signals, and protecting the aircraft.
So, no, that wouldn't be any help against normal meteors. Unless you're posting guided meteors. In which case, we have bigger troubles on the horizon than just a plane crash...
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
With false humility: "I don't think I'm better than anyone else, but..." Where the but clause is an attempt to justify some otherwise objectionable behavior.
Which, if taken to its logical conclusion means the speaker is no better than you, and quite possibly much worse.
It's an attempt to convince the hearer that the person speaking is not arrogant; a humble person would readily admit that he is better than others, about the same as many, and worse than a few. Usually, though, I find someone who makes it a point to claim false humility is either intentionally blind to their own imperfections, or trying to hide or justify them. The natural consequence of such an attitude usually results in said person having many more character flaws person than his peers.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
...that it was downed by a missile?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Every one knows a North Korean missile test brought down that flight! ;-)
And I didn't even read the article.
Call me paranoid, but before we consider a fucking meteor, let's see the passenger list. Okay? Great.
Proof is in the video, ~36s mark
http://screencrave.com/2009-05-16/star-treks-chris-hemsworth-cast-as-thor/
Storms like those encountered by the flight have very strong up and down drafts.
The warning issued by air bus about flight speed indicates the plane was flying close to stall.
A very strong down draft + slow flight == crash.
As the recovery for a crash is a dive. But in a strong downdraft your fall speed can't get you the lift needed to overcome the stall.
Downdrafts are serious business
http://www.arm.gov/publications/proceedings/conf09/extended_abs/xu_km.pdf
Personally, I think a meteor collision is unlikely because the failures occur over 10 minutes. I would expect a meteor collision to occur when the other ACARS errors were not sent. I think the ACARS messages seem to suggest somthing other than a meteor.
One possibility is that a lightening strike could have physically or electronically damaged some sort of sensor, and that this could have caused a failure cascade to the computer systems. This would explain the disengangement of the autopilot and at that point, the pilot's job becomes very difficult due to near-maximum speed, turbulance, and high altitude. In short the performance margin becomes very narrow. Additionally, once alternate law is enguaged the problems become more severe.
If this is the case, it would seem to me possible that the plane was flying in conditions that even experienced pilots could not fly manually though with any safety, and that flying along the edge of the performance margin could have lead to more instability which could have lead to physical damage to the control systems. Eventually the plane loses control and breaks up due to aerodynamic stress.
Anyway, that is my working theory. It suggests that the fatal lightening strike would have occurred prior to the FIRST of the troubling ACARS messages and at least 10 minutes before the crash.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Magic. Island.
the most likely scenario is erroneous airspeed readings due to rapid icing caused the pilots to think they were going slower than actual and they were not able to slow to the maneuvering speed required for a severe turbulence encounter, which over-stressed the airframe. Even then, that alone shouldn't have been immediately catastrophic so there were probably other factors. Meteors? Horseshit!
The only problem with the argument that it was lightning is that those aircraft are able to withstand a direct lightning strike and still fly.
Airbus A330-200 dimensions:
.138) whereas there have been over 1900 non-meteorite-caused major commercial accidents since 1959.
Overall length: 58.8 m
Fuselage diameter: 5.64 m
Wing area: 361.6 sq. m
Total silhouette area (target area for meteorite): 58.8 x 5.64 + 361.6 = 693.232 sq. m
FlightAware says there are about 5000 airborne commercial aircraft flying into or out of U.S. airports right now. For arguments sake, let's assume 5 times that amount for total currently-airborne global commercial flights (25,000 planes in the air).
Let's also assume (for arguments sake) that all those airplanes have the "target" area of an Airbus A330-200 (total target area of all airborne planes then equals 18,080,000 sq. meters, or 18 sq. km).
Let's also assume (however absurd) there has been this many planes, of this size, in the air since 1959.
Taking the high-end estimate (approx. 84,000/yr, or 4.2M since 1959) for the number of meteorites greater than 10 grams that strike the Earth's surface each year (assuming, of course, that all of these would bring down an aircraft with any contact) and given the surface area of the Earth at 510,072,000 km, the chance that a meteorite would hit any (as in, just a single) plane within the last 50 years would be about 13.8% (or
The upshot of all this, even working with absurd (in the meteorites' favor) numbers, the odds of the Air France Flight 447 accident being caused by a meteorite are astronomical .
Now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure everything I just said is completely wrong.
Air France Flight 447:
A detailed meteorological analysis
http://www.weathergraphics.com/tim/af447/
Done by Tim Vasquez, a man who knows his weather. This was no meteor.
a Sperm Whale.
I can imagine it thinking:
Ahhh! Woooh! What's happening? Who am I? Why am I here? What's my purpose in life? What do I mean by who am I? Okay okay, calm down calm down get a grip now. Ooh, this is an interesting sensation. What is it? Its a sort of tingling in my... well I suppose I better start finding names for things. Lets call it a... tail! Yeah! Tail! And hey, what's this roaring sound, whooshing past what I'm suddenly gonna call my head? Wind! Is that a good name? It'll do. Yeah, this is really exciting. I'm dizzy with anticipation! Or is it the wind? There's an awful lot of that now isn't it? And what's this thing coming toward me very fast? So big and flat and round, it needs a big wide sounding name like 'Ow', 'Ownge', 'Round', 'Ground'! That's it! Ground! Ha! I wonder if it'll be friends with me? Hello Ground!
If by somewhat you mean, "about five times faster". We have to take our modern highways into account when we talk about the speed of the auto, but on a normal trip a car essentially doesn't get fatigued and only needs to stop when it needs gas or its driver is fatigued. 500 miles in a day is child's play, and by switching drivers you could go on for days with minimal stops. Sorry for pointing out the obvious.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
is really annoying.
In England, castles are carefully placed around 20 miles apart so that the peasants who needed help could have received help on foot in half a day from any troups, or in a couple of hours on horseback.
It also allowed fast access to a fresh horse for messengers.
is not the relevant number. The probability calculation needs to consider how many are large enough to take down a large aircraft.
Did a physists and an astronomer REALLY miscalculate these odds by using a 1 dimensional formula? ~90,000 flights worldwide on a dialy basis.. ~3,000 meteorites which impact our atmosphere as estimated in article ~7,300 days in 20 years. meteorites/day * day : flights/day * day meteorites : flights 3:90, 1:30... But assuming there's not that many flights per day and the odds are 1:20... that still is not accounting for longitutde, latitude and altitude of the aircraft and or the meteorite. Therefore, the 1:20 odds meerely represent the likelyhood that a meteorite and an airplane are travelling thru our skies at the same time. To be at the same lat, long and alt. is MUCH MUCH more unlikely... There's a greater chance it was electrical malfunction due to the storm cells. Heck, it's even greater chance the plane would have impacted and been broken apart by a decent size block of ice/hail in the clouds.. that's more probable than something speeding super sonic thru space to enter our atmosphere and nail the plane. That'd be like sniping of a wing of a gnat from 100 yrs away with a bb gun.
You don't need to imagine the 18th Century *or* travel light years to see how this absence of perspective works: just talk to a 7-year-old. My son knows Seattle is in Washington and that Washington is on the West Coast, but he still asks if we can go watch the Red Sox play the Mariners there as though he thinks it's as easy as our 45-minute train ride to Fenway.
depending on where your at, the odds of being killed by a meteor would change greatly. IE if you cruising in a plane a mach 0.9 at 20,000 feet, then your a much bigger target. I would guess any spot of the plane gets hit by a baseball sized molten hot meteor your all toast regardless if you got hit, on a much larger sized meteor even a near miss could create enough concussion in the air to suck out a critical part of the plane (or cause a non critical part to hit a critical one.)
Also the faster you move, the (very slightly) more likely you are to hit the meteor. IE it will break up into naturally small pieces and the meteor will create a tail, all sucked into the vacuum of the leading pieces. Also with humans being taller than wide, and meteors coming more or less straight down, the faster you move, the larger surface area you would have exposed to something coming down fast, and the larger surface area of the meteor shower you could hit.
As one of the commenters in TFA said...
Anecdotes are not data, but I've never seen an airplane crash, and yet I've seen two fireball meteors (those are the ones that are big enough to make it well into the atmosphere and leave smoke trails), one daytime, one nighttime, both in the LA basin. And I've never seen a bomb explode (that I didn't make as a kid, I mean). Bombs are pretty rare. Meteors are quite common. How common? You can buy them on eBay for some dollars per ounce. The vast majority burn up in the atmosphere, but the larger ones do hit the earth pretty frequently. Most of the meteorites (the ones that hit the earth) are too small to do any damage upon impact. However, I would speculate that there's serious aerodynamic breaking that happens below 30,000 ft, so that even small ones might pack a punch at cruising altitude.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
In case of a car, you can actively increase your safety, by...driving safely. Granted, sometimes you are at a mercy of some moron, but even then - you can often recognise such situation soon enough, or at least point at the other guy.
Are you suggesting that a professional driver/pilot entrusted with the lives of hundreds of passengers is unable to recognize or avoid dangerous situations? Have you looked at the fraction of plane crashes attributed to "pilot error"?
Or perhaps you're just part of the 65% of the population who think they're better than average drivers.
A plane, not requiring roads and able to travel anywhere on the planet in a day is a several order of magnitude increase.
:-)
It's not even a single order of magnitude for most places. I can drive from Orlando to Los Angeles in about 35-40 hours. The same trip via aircraft is about 5 hours, and the difference becomes less as the distance between the two points decreases.
Obviously this doesn't apply to transoceanic travel.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
In Sweden we have a semi-public infrasound network that could detect civilian supersonic flights across the atlantic. It is used for nuclear weapons controll. Since several of the sources is public (but not those under control of the UN), media should be able to pinpoint any peculiar large explosions at that relevant time. I'm not entirely sure of the range, but the system can detect and pin-point Russian SSBM launches. The relevant link is http://www.umea.irf.se/. During the first North Korean nuclear crisis Swedish intelligence quickly knew what was going on. The instrument used for finding trace isotopes in the air was also Swedish. I have some memory of a really useful but delayed data source from this network. With it you could "hear" the workshifts in mines, accelerations from Concorde aircrafts etc. But I don't remember the link. Does anyone remember it?
Good point.
But one thing that many people tend to forget is that the silver bullet theories, that always pop up after air accidents, tend to be wrong. The flock of geese in New York is one of the rare exceptions where you could argue that one single factor brought a plane down. In most other accidents there is a series of environment factors, errors, failures, lack of human training, miscommunication, and simple mistakes, or neglect by the crew.
It is likely that what went wrong with AF447 is a string of events, where that particular string of events is perhaps about as unlikely as a meteor strike. Although I would argue that many strings of events are a lot more likely than a meteor strike. Even if we accept that the meteor strike is as likely as any string of events, the string-of-event theories that fit the evidence outnumber the meteor theory by billions and billions.
Based on earlier accident investigations, I would guess that the investigators will find some form of pilot error where multiple weather factors played a part in making the flying difficult for the pilot.
The difference between the old Parisian commoner and the modern Earthican is that in the Parisian's world, some people have been to Tokyo, and they know it takes several years of sailing to get there and back. I think a better example for the modern person might be the Moon and Mars (or Orbit and the Moon). Both are places a modern Earthman (or at least Earth machine) has been, but an individual Earthman would be very, very, unlikely to ever go to. If there were an hour-trip to Mars, we'd consider that amazing. If there were a way to travel FTL, we'd consider that unbelievable magic, just like the old Parisian would think of a trip to the Moon or Mars.
> I think I can personally change my chances of survival in a car by not speeding..
;) ).
When you're in an airplane piloted by someone else, your genes matter less to your survival in event of a crash, compared to if you're in a car.
If you're in a plane and it blows up, whether you're sickly or fit or a super genius, you die (unless you're Wolverine
If you're driving a car and you screw up and die, then your genes "fail" and the human gene pool gets "better".
Individuals doing riskier things every day than flying, might actually help improve the gene pool. And perhaps we've evolved that way.
UPS uses this system on all their planes, not only for air safety but also for tracking.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADS-B
Pilots and air traffic control love the system, it allows them to see visually where everyone is located/speed/atlitude/GPS and all broadcasting is done from the plane to ground based radar.
Doesn't take much bandwidth at all, as they can use the VHF channel, 978 MHz UAT and another mode.
Yes, but the point of the gp and the gggp is that once you go past a certain distance away, it becomes too abstract to get a grasp on. An airplane is just a flying car to the ancient man--it is cool that it flies, but it all boils down to the "superman vs. flash" argument. Which one is better? It depends on who you ask and whether they find flying more awesome than being able to run really fast.
Thats correct. Here in Mexico, the recently privatized Aeromexico has a route Mexico City-Tijuana-Narita (Tokyo). To cut costs, instead of changing crews at Tijuana, a single crew used to make the whole fligth. Until a stewardness died for overwork and stress, and a local paper made public the mess the administration was doing, the company reverted to the old operating procedure. I believe that this change had more to do with the FAA and japanese autorities than our own air traffic autority. It is not uncommon to see news of local planes at local routes dropping pieces at take off.
Mexico: 100% conservative's America now!
How fast was the Pony Express circuit (trading out a new horse/rider every so often)?
You may want to check this out (a report for the NTSB on TWA 800, I believe):
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~chance/teaching_aids/books_articles/Cassidy.pdf
The conclusion is a little different from TFA, as it surmises that there should be a 'hit' every 50,000 years or so.
Really, if you think about it one would think there'd be a good amount of anecdotal evidence of pilots seeing meteorites shooting by in-flight (as they have pretty amazing visibility up there), if that last bit of atmosphere made such a difference.
Answering to your sideline question: no, I think it's not the same, in case of a bus, as it is in case of airplanes. Certainly I don't feel any anxiety or excitement when using buses/trams/trains (while I still slightly do in case of airplanes, even though I know the stats and the underlying cause of my perception)
Why is that? Not sure...perhaps buses/trams/trains are conceptually similar enough to a car so we can put it in the same category (especially since we're used to driving as a passenger in ground based transport from an early age). Following the original point, most people would say to themselves "yeah, I could drive those" (even though that's not true in most cases)
Plane otoh is totally alien for them.
BTW, another thought: perhaps beeing fully aware of not knowing how to fly a plane causes lack of trust in those who do fly airplanes?
One that hath name thou can not otter
I'll buy that your chances are dying are lower, but brother, if you truly spent that much time in passenger planes, you'd lose your legs to injury!
Are you adequate?
A fast horse on good terrain could make 100 miles per day.
Uh, that is day one.
You better have a fresh horse or horses waiting or you will be walking on day three or so. A fit human can reasonably cover around 20 miles per day for days on end if they are supplied well. The same human having to pack food and water or forage en route might be able to keep up half that pace. A horse roughly doubles what a human can do. They are big and then need LOTS of forage and water.
In the military I studied quite a bit about effective combat loads and the logistics of moving men around, and having personally walked 30+ miles with 60+ pounds of gear I can tell you that it is not a sustainable pace. There are accounts of great marches under duress or for tactical advantage, but they are "great" because if they did not work out they get called somebody's folly in the history books.
A total of about 190 Pony Express stations were placed at intervals of about 10 miles (16 km) along the approximately 2,000 miles (3,200 km) route.
They ran the route in 10 days, so around 200 miles a day, but it was 20 horses per day.
I for one welcome our Intense White Light Overlords.
Reckless driving is fun (until it isn't), especially for adolescent males who cause most car accidents, and that's not because of their lack of technical driving skills. An out-of-control airplane isn't fun. Chances of surviving an airplane accident are much lower, so it's not something a pilot would want to risk for the lulz. The subset of pilots that are into adrenaline prefer bombing Asian villages anyway. That's why commercial planes are safer than cars.
the crew has no good idea about the true speed and orientation of the plane
(my highlight)
why would they not know the orientation? the gyros don't depend on pitot tubes etc, so wouldn't be affected by icing. The only thing which would kill the attitude-indicator would be a power failure, at which point most aircraft have a standby attitude indicator that's powered by an internal (ish) battery and uses its internal gryo to sense which way up you are.
You mean that it's even longer than the walk to the chemists?
Yes, the stats neglect to mention that safety is measured over miles. An airplane covers a lot more miles than a car, so of course it comes out safer on a per mile basis. A better metric would include take-offs and landings versus the number of trips one makes in a car.
I'm thinking it was an alien abduction.
Today's captcha is: wriggles
Guess which part of me is wriggling.
The Variation in the Frequency of Meteorite Impact with Geographic Latitude.
For the vast, vast majority of 21st century humans, Turin and Tokyo are just names of far away places and if Jaywalking is any indication, they likely won't have heard much if anything about them either.
In highschool I went on a trip to France and Italy. The girl next to me, at the age of 17, had never been further than 30 miles from her home, and neither had her parents. As the plane was taking off, clutching her pillow in terror, she asked me where we were going first. When I told her "Paris," she became confused. She was certain we were going to see France first.
I imagine for her, up to that moment, the travel time of a 747-400 arriving in Paris from Los Angeles was about as meaningful as the travel time of a photon arriving from Proxima Centauri.
That may be true, but:
1) on the inside, many cars smell better than the outside of a horse
2) not many horses have climate control
3) My Tomtom just won't plug into a horse
Cars are still pretty wicked cool. Not saying that planes aren't as cool - but a 1700'der would be impressed with my humble Echo - let alone my neighbor's RV.
And falling off a plane 50k ft up might hurt a little bit more than falling off a horse, but I haven't tried either so don't quote me on that.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
TFA says 1 in 10 planes from 30 years to today could have being hit by an meteor.
What are the chances of a car then? Must be much higher...
There is no God, so it is just really bad luck if this is true.
I haven't checked the math, but intuitively, the statistics seem flawed. OTOH, most statistics that are useful are not intuitively obvious.
Given current pilot training I think your initial proposal is unlikely.
If the plane were caught in a 100mph updraft, the updraft is providing lift dramatically lowering the stall speed at any AOA. The reaction should be to nose the plane down within structural and g limits to prevent dramatic altitude excursion. This will very quickly raise the speed well above stall.
There is a possibility of entering a downdraft shortly after the updraft (though this is much more likely near the ground). Therefore if you have headroom before hitting the max turbulent air penetration speed, you'd want to increase engine thrust and be ready to pull up.
I think it is much more likely as you allude to that a combination of pilot inputs and fast changing wind currents overstressed the aircraft and a control surface failed (much like AA 587).
This is pretty much what happened to TWA flight 800. See "Zoom Climb Theory" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TWA_Flight_800#Accident_sequence
Probably not what you want to be relying on during an electric storm.
I think you're right: we don't worry as much about buses as airplanes because we can tell at a glance if there's going to be a problem, as it's a skill we have.
(I happen to be a pilot, as well, so I might not have the same definition of 'we' as other people.)
What's interesting to me is that people don't really like buses -- they're definitely considered inferior. But chauffeurs are at least somewhat considered superior. Obviously the use of both of these reflects the user's finances to the observer, and that drives some of it, but I can't help wondering if our desire to run our lives, be the ones in control, isn't part of it. There isn't much demand for chauffeurs, considering how many very rich people there are out there. Complicated: if you're rich you buy a big car and then you want to drive it, and so forth.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
This sounds plausible but does not explain the extremely small amounts of debris found so far. A plane disintegrating at altitude should have resulted in many floating objects.
It is more likely the plane body reached the water in one piece and the debris found has reached the surface from where it's currently sitting broken in two on the ocean floor, the distance between the objects due to ocean currents.
Or maybe you're right and the bulk of the remains has been carried and deposited by the storm elsewhere.
I am reminded of the Pan Am Flight 214 crash of a Boeing 707 in Elkton, MD, in December, 1963.
The CAB found the probable cause as "Lightning-induced ignition of the fuel/air mixture in the no. 1 reserve fuel tank with resultant explosive disintegration of the left outer wing and loss of control."
There was a similar lightning-induced fuel tank explosion of a Iranian 747 near Madrid in
Here is a report on airplane fuel tank explosions.
Unless it's very localised an updraft is just like a wind, but vertical. Any pilots familar with typical updraft speeds? 100mph sounds rather excessive, unless you're above a firestorm or something.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
and earlier, when i told a senior coworker, he said, "We don't know WHAT it is, yet. For all we know, it could be alien abduction..."... I had to laugh at that.
As for car vs plane travel, i was talking with another senior employee (very intelligent, respectable and impressive person from Germany), and he said, "Statistically, flying is safer than driving just to get TO the airport." I laughed, like the kid in Battle Royale, at the end when he realized his life was over... i laughed hard and wryly, and he had this semi-astonished look on his face, and said, "What? It's TRUE.".... I told him, "If i'm in a car, driving it, i can at least FEEL like im in control, and maybe swerve, or go off the road to avoid collision-- if i frequent the road and calculate to emergency point. If i'm in a plane and it's going down, I'm able to ony kick and scream. And do NOTHING..."
Hell, worse, i might scream crazily and kick the shit out of the seat in front of me, only to survive, but be prosecuted by an injured person complaining to the police.
Personally, i've had a SEVERELY hard landing in Vietnam on an Air France 747, back in 1998. I thought the gear would collapse or penetrate the cabin. The plane was sandy-dirty and i wondered about the weight and friction effects. I've seen shiner planes. On that same vacation, going back to San Jose, i flew out of PDX (Portland) and the SWA (Southwest Airlines) got caught in a storm, a MAJOR system that was in the area (~mid/late Jan 1998-early Feb88). Our plane was dipping and climbing, doing crazy shit. Not like in "Turbulence", but is WAS unnerving due to the amount, duration, and time. We all thought it was our last flight. The attendants were even passing out alcohol (IIRC, or it was so surreal that i seem to recall it), clapping, jumping around, and generally trying to cheer us up. When we landed, people cried, many of us clapped, people shook hands, and some stayed quiet, but it was probably most terrifying flight in my personal experience.
My brother used to be a jet engine mech in the USN. One day, they were on a MAC flight, and on rotation (I guess that's nose-up/wheels going up?) they had an engine blow. The pilot cooly and calmly got the plane back down. IIRC, from what he said, NORMALLY a pilot would gun the remaining engine and try to go around and declare an emergency and try to land ASAP. But, this pilot measured the situation and decided to get on the ground without full feet up. When they landed, he felt their survival partly or mainly hinged on the fact that this particular pilot (female) was female and had no hero complexes going on. I suppose being a jet engine mechanic, he's had LOTS of conversations with superiors and ranking enlisteds who confide certain things.
Everytime i fly, i consider it could be my very last major decision. I never give much thought to being mowed down, mugged, or an elevator floor opening up, or so on. I DO, however, enjoy some stiff turbulence now and again, but not like the Air France 747 i flew which had flapping wings. I don't recall the SWA wings... I think it was too cloudy and bad weather keeping us from seeing much most of the rougher times in that flight.
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
However the probability of it happening would be less than one in a brazillion...
The article uses the number of meteors which hit the Earth every day however there are many more that do not turn into meteorites because they simply glance off the atmosphere or burn up in the atmosphere so the probability calculations must take these into account. I failed statistics because I never could figure out exactly which factors must be included and which are excluded when calculating probably. With that said, doesn't the probability of a plane and a meteor being in the same location both in space and time have to be factored in to the equation? The article discusses the probability of a meteor striking an area the size of a jet but not a specific area (identified, for example, by lat and long coordinates) at a specific time.
this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom. -- Lincoln, Gettysburg Address
Agreed. I didn't mean to imply that I thought lightning actually downed the plane...Planes are struck often enough that we would be well aware if it tended to knock planes out of the sky.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Speak for yourself dumbass slashdotter
Ah okay, just misunderstood your post then. It wouldn't be slashdot without misunderstandings causing nerdguments (conjugation of nerd and arguments)
The shuttle's tiles are extremely fragile. They are basically made of what amounts to blown glass, with 95% empty space (air) by volume. It doesn't take much to damage them. Judging by how fragile they felt last time I held one, I'm guessing I could snap one in two with the fingertips on one hand. Aircraft skin is a LOT stronger....
Don't get me wrong, I did find one case of a DC-9 crashing from hail, but it encountered it at only 14,000 feet. If there was enough hail at FL350 to bring an airplane down without anyone having time to radio a distress call, that's probably a once-per-millenium event at most.
I could speculate on the cause of the crash, but I won't. The ACARS data is still too incomplete and the lack of FDR/CVR make it somewhat premature. From what I've seen thus far, I have serious doubts that weather caused whatever in-flight event led to the crash, though it may well have contributed to the crew's inability to regain control of the aircraft afterwards.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
I read that this storm was abnormal in that there was a lot of seawater sucked up into it.
You know how weather sometimes causes fish and frogs and such to rain from the sky?
What if amazing numbers of small crustaceans were in that cloud? What if they PLUGGED the pitot tubes?
Radar would not see that the squall line up ahead was full of waterbugs.
A blocked pitot tube would mean you had no real airspeed indication. The static port would still feed the altimeter, but if you climbed your indicated airspeed would go down and the computer would throttle up, and if you descended the indicated airspeed would go up and the computer would command throttle down.
And as they became blocked there would be a change in the pressure of the system that would result in a throttle-up.
And if the static port were blocked, the vertical airspeed alert would not have happened.
What do you think?
Dog is my co-pilot.
I was flightcrew of a commercial airliner that had a meteor fall close enough to us that it raised the temperature of the air in the cockpit and cause the crews eyes to water (as in exposure to extremely bright light). Night turned to day. We were carrying cargo. It was pretty spectacular.
TL;DR
However, in response to the first bit about "sudden icing of the pitot tubes"
Pitot heat is on basically whenever the aircraft has electrical power. For the tubes to ice over, the entire nose of the aircraft would just about have to be covered in ice.
Also, An iced over pitot tube would give a zero airspeed reading. Any competent pilot (read: any pilot who is good enough to have a career flying airliners) would realize that this is a malfunctioning sensor and not an accurate indication of his airspeed, and take action accordingly.
Or sharks? They were over the ocean after all...
I don't know what a MAC flight is, but I bet any trained pilot will tell you that there's almost never an excuse for aborting a takeoff at rotation (unless the plane is virtually guaranteed not to fly, for example).
Most of the speculation could be ended if the plane or flight recorders were found. I'm surprised that this day and age this should be so difficult. The methods I would apply are: 1) radio triangulation of airplane signals - weather conditions may not have been favourable, but if the automated messages were received by Airbus, surely they must have been registered with various military electronic listening posts to pin-point the last known position of the plane prior to impact. 2) impact detection using Hydroacoustic listening stations - according to articles these kind of devices can detect the explosion of 300kg TNT half way around the globe, so my thinking is that a high speed impact on a large plane on the surface of the Atlantic should not go unoticed. Also there seem to be >3 CTBTO stations available in the atlantic (http://www.ctbto.org/map) for this.
...Personally, i've had a SEVERELY hard landing in Vietnam
Flying in a 737 from San Francisco to LA a few years ago (quite a few years ago) about mid-way we lost all lift in bad weather. When we took off it sounded like potholes in the runway or explosions from the back, all the way. Mid flight we started falling very hard with the nose still up. I started counting, one-onethousand, two-onethousand. Got to 45 before we bottomed out. The stewardess in the aisle had been holding on to both aisle seats and there was air between her feet and the floor for most of it.
Not sure how we survived that.
When we were safely on the ground the captain came on and said "...and if you enjoyed that ride and want to go on it again, please pass a "D" coupon to the front". (Old Disneyland visitors may remember that Matterhorn reference).
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
The upshot of all this, even working with absurd (in the meteorites' favor) numbers, the odds of the Air France Flight 447 accident being caused by a meteorite are astronomical .
Agreed, that's why I don't buy it, either.
My point was that the fact that other factors have a vastly higher chance does not change the chances for this unlikely event.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Vulcan is only three minutes from earth, we know that...
Don't worry, we're about to discover, somewhere underwater, a mostly intact plane filled with bodies (from some distant cemetery), though only once they're absolutely impossible to identify.
Could someone be sure to get the whole pilot's-wedding-ring thing correct this time around?
I disagree. You may be supprised to find out running stamina of man vs horse with or without riders. That has been tested and known since even the days of ancient Creeks.
On a complete randon tanget probability is proof that time is not infinite: if time were infinite all things would have an equal probability of happening. perhaps we don't have large enough samples yet, but there are certian things that are just VASTLY more likely to happen than others and this seems to support a non-infinite timeline.
[/random]
A Call For A New Slashdot Moderation Level!
I agree that hail probably isn't going to compromise the cabin. The suggestion that I've seen, however, is the hail being ingested into the engines (at 500 mph closing speed) and killing them like a bird strike. Not sure how realistic this scenario is, but it sounds plausible to this amateur observer.
damn, I thought the langoliers had got them.
> Is it possible there was a mid-air collision with an unregistered plane/jet?
Just as likely as it colliding with the USS Eldridge briefly appearing at 35,000ft during its return to Philadelphia Naval Yard, 1943.
Timeslips can be responsible for flashes of bright light.
(David Bowman, EVA near HUGE Monolithic Win-PC in orbit around Jupiter) "My God - its full of Malware!"
if time were infinite all things would have an equal probability of happening.
Proof?
While you could potentially say "in infinite, time, everything has a probability of 1", I don't think that's a valid argument. Things with higher probabilities will still happen more often, and thus the entire argument hangs on the semantics of "probability".
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
And the best part about your answer is your handle. Thanks four-digit!
Obviously shuttle tiles are fragile but what they are attached to is fairly similar to an aircraft skin, especially this aircraft. The tiles of the shuttle are attached to a carbon-carbon composite shell that is rather strong. That piece of foam is believed to have punched a hole through both the tiles and the shell underneath and was confirmed to be possible when they blasted a piece of foam at a similar section of the Enterprise wing that is identical to Columbia's.
Well my post was a joke, but kudos for working it out.
The odds of it having been a terrorist bomb are practically nil at this point, given that no one has been able to convincingly claim credit.
That depends on the assumption that all terrorists will claim credit immediately for each attack. Sure, weather looks far more likely, but there are many ways to create terror.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)