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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."
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?"
A company called Air Comet is saying they saw a meteor do it?
Does anyone else smell some blame-shifting?
Glad they hang out on Slashdot.
Fair?
Finding the REAL causes - through speculation and investigation - are the route to improvements that prevent this sort of thing from again happening.
I can think of no more fitting tribute to the departed ones, and their families.
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
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?
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.
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.
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.
I enjoy flying simply because the idea is so absurd. I often try to imagine what it would be like to show someone from the 1700s or so around the world as it is today and modern flight is one of the more ridiculous things - you have these massive hunks of metal held in the air by the air itself that carry people at high speeds and high altitudes all over the world. In flying, I feel I have experienced something amazing the human race has achieved. Car travel, by contrast, is largely mundane.
Mount Everest is only 8km high. Where the fuck do you ski?
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
What you want (and what you are getting with your thought process) is the illusion of control.
We want to feel as if we are in control of our destiny, not handing it over to some faceless being behind a locked cabin door. It doesn't matter if you are the sort of driver that spends more time on the sidewalk racking up points for hitting old ladies; you believe in your heart that you would be better at saving your skin than some highly trained but anonymous professional.
This is also why there is such a huge push against automated driving, not because it isn't safer than letting the average driver control things, but because we as a species have a difficult time trusting in a 'higher power' to save us.
(Incidentally, you probably don't want me to get into my ideas on what the implications this has on our 'need' for religion.)
Well, living in the Boston area, I can say that locally I am better than 80% of the drivers - due to the fact that, at the very least, I use my signal when turning/changing lanes. That's gotta count for something...
Belief? Hope? Preference?The Existential Vortex
That's interesting.
I don't want to knock air travel, which is truly remarkable, but on a holiday weekend, when a highway is at capacity, but not over, and dusk is upon me, the sight of thousands of cars traveling together at 70+ MPH truly amazes me.
The fact that I can, at a moments notice, simply travel hundreds of miles (days or even weeks of travel historically), with hundreds of pounds of stuff, do something and travel back, all in a weekend is quite marvelous.
And I would never fly anywhere in that short of a period willingly (yuck!), though I did it once pre-911.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
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.
> Statistics are cold hard ideas, but don't account for personal decisions. ...
>
> You're not just a sitting duck, y'know?
It's exactly the attitude you've so nicely expressed which keeps people from living happier, healthier, and safer lives. Since perceived control is *so* much more important than outcome, you'd rather run riskier odds on the hope that you've got some special stuff in you that will make you an outlier in the statistically probable outcomes of your actions.
The fact is, that on the road (or on a bus, or on a bike) you *are* a sitting duck to an inattentive, incompetent, or otherwise overly aggressive driver... regardless of your actions. The reason we even have most traffic accidents is that many drivers overestimate their abilities and underestimate the risks involved with their actions. When you get on the road, you're out there with other multi-ton vehicles where there is no barrier of entry (other than a key or a hotwire job) for control of those vehicles.
What the statistics actually show is that if you replaced all of the hours you spend in a car on the road with hours in a plane in the sky, you're chances of being injured or killed are still *lower*. So, if you take how many hours you fly during the year, your chances of dying on a plane are just about zero. Got it? So stop spreading the fear and ignorance and enjoy the plane ride.
Sorry for the counter rant.
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/
You may not be able to move your whole body that fast, but you can get parts up to that speed. It's not too hard to throw a small object at highway speed, so being able to react to someone else doing it could be quite useful. Same idea applies to a punch or kick.
If it's not on fire, it's a software problem.
10 cars struck in the last 50 years.
over a longer timespan -
http://imca.repetti.net/metinfo/metstruck.html
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/
...Statistically, 1 in X number of men will have a heart attack- but eating healthy and excersizing changes your odds.
But suddenly revealing automobiles and airplanes to someone from the 1700's significantly increases their odds of having one.
Fedex Flight 80, McDD MD-11 crashed TWICE??!?!
Now THOSE are some long odds!
What if you get blindsided by a Mac truck when you are going through a green stop light?
It's probably because Apple made a truck with only one pedal. Such a senseless decision :(
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
What?!? Man, that's just like telegraphing your punches! Rule #2 of driving in Boston: don't give the other drivers advance warning of what you are going to do; that only gives them the opportunity to cut you off! (Rule #1 is "Never make eye contact.")
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
And you actually trust that every plane gets every bit of scheduled maintenance done properly and on schedule?
Actually, yes I do. As a pilot, I know very well how strict and picky the FAA is with this stuff. They're not exactly a "wink, wink, nudge yeah we did the maintenance" kinda group. You get caught fudging records, and it's your ass. To put it simply, doing the maintenance correctly and on schedule is financially cheaper and safer than trying to creatively interpret the regs or forge records.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
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.
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