Robots Dive Deep To Solve Airliner Crash Mystery

coondoggie writes "A small squadron of undersea robots has begun to conduct a 4-month, 3,900 square mile search of Atlantic Ocean bottom looking for the deep-sea wreck site of and black boxes from Air France Flight 447 which crashed off the coast of Brazil nearly two years ago. The Air France plane was flying from Rio de Janeiro to Paris, when for exact reasons that remain a mystery, it crashed into the Atlantic Ocean on June 1, 2009, taking with it 228 souls."

Comments

Hole crap! That was two years ago????

[Slutticus]

Am I moving at 0.90c or does that seem like it just happened yesterday?

Re:Hole crap! That was two years ago????

[d1verse]

Am I moving at 0.90c or does that seem like it just happened yesterday?

Totally, I felt like it was last summer!

Re:Hole crap! That was two years ago????

[2.7182]

Charles Widmore can do that by going to the island and turning the wheel.

WHAT THE FUCK IS ALL THIS ABOUT NOW ??

[Anonymous Coward]

Charles Widmoore? Airliner crash yesterday? Two years ago? Is this the California computer guy? I thought his wreckage was found. And that was in the moutains. I am so confuuzed and dased !! It's all the wine they give us priests so we're too drunk to moleste the little girls. Ha! Ha! That's a joke. Of course it's the little boys !

Re:WHAT THE FUCK IS ALL THIS ABOUT NOW ??

[pookemon]

As you stagger home, don't get LOST.

Re:WHAT THE FUCK IS ALL THIS ABOUT NOW ??

[pookemon]

OMG that's funny. Presumably I was modded down by some other dick that doesn't understand the LOST reference. What rocks are these people living under?

Reasons unknown??

[Ark42]

Isn't this the flight that flew right into a huge huge storm that was obscured on their radar by a smaller storm which was safe enough to fly through. As soon as the larger storm was in view, it was too late to change course and fly around it. I heard the most likely case is extreme icing of the sensors that monitor airflow, causing autopilot to disengage as the plane no longer knew its own speed. Without any way to know the current speed, the plane lost altitude and crashed, due to a small window of safe speeds that don't result in altitude loss.

Re:Reasons unknown??

[bradgoodman]

I heard of this same sort of thing happening once to a plane. What happened was that the plane was just painted. During the painted process, they put masking tape over the Pitots (holes/ports used to measure air pressure). They forgot to take the tape off, and when they were in flight, the airspeed, altitude, and stall warnings all went crazy from the erronious pressure readings on the clogged/covered pitot tubes. Result was bizarre instrumentation - overspeed and stall warnings at the same time, etc. They wound up crashing from confusion. Perhaps icing in the pitot tubes were causing a similar thing here.

Re:Reasons unknown??

[Slutticus]

Not necessarily. Even without accurate airspeed readings, the pilots should have still been able to maintain safe airspeed by setting the engines to a specific power output and trimming to a specific angle of attack. Probably pilot error (i.e. being distracted with alarms and not remembering to adjust throttle and angle....) but without that box it's hard to really know.

Re:Reasons unknown??

[Slutticus]

In fact, this happens more often than you know and is a very typical response to a situation like this. Bottom line: loss of airspeed data should in no way shape or form be a catastrophic event.

Re:Reasons unknown??

[Anonymous Coward]

It was not even during painting, it was after a standard cleaning of the aircraft. I guess you are thinking about this accident. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AeroperÃ_Flight_603

Re:Reasons unknown??

[olsmeister]

No, but incorrect airspeed data might.

Re:Reasons unknown??

[countertrolling]

The bottom line doesn't know people. A malfunctioning landing gear light bulb can 'cause' a crash. The word is "situational awareness".. Lose that, and your landing will probably do more than just loosen a few teeth.

Re:Reasons unknown??

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't this the flight that flew right into a huge huge storm that was obscured on their radar by a smaller storm which was safe enough to fly through. As soon as the larger storm was in view, it was too late to change course and fly around it. I heard the most likely case is extreme icing of the sensors that monitor airflow, causing autopilot to disengage as the plane no longer knew its own speed. Without any way to know the current speed, the plane lost altitude and crashed, due to a small window of safe speeds that don't result in altitude loss.

This is the prevailing scenario. However, until we find physical evidence it remains speculation.

Re:Reasons unknown??

[517714]

Pilot error, yes, but the throttles do not indicate their settings on an Airbus except when manually set. The handles can say 90%, but if they will be at the last setting that the autopilot used when it disengaged. This is a counterintuitive design that does not properly consider human interface. Standard procedure for loss of airspeed indicators is to set the control surfaces, angle of attack and throttle to values that will keep the aircraft flying safely. One theory is that the crew made the mistake of reading, rather than setting the throttle.

Re:Reasons unknown??

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't knock speculation. It's big business, and people get paid big bucks. My money is still on the rudder. The autopilot has a history of being pretty rough on it.

Re:Reasons unknown??

[Anonymous Coward]

You might want to re-read parent.

Re:Reasons unknown??

[martyb]

Not necessarily. Even without accurate airspeed readings, the pilots should have still been able to maintain safe airspeed by setting the engines to a specific power output and trimming to a specific angle of attack. Probably pilot error (i.e. being distracted with alarms and not remembering to adjust throttle and angle....) but without that box it's hard to really know.

Honest Question: Why in this day and age do we still have to chase down a black box? More and more airliners now provide in-flight internet connections. Couldn't they just transmit it as well as record it to the black box? TFA says this search is costing them $12.5 million. That would pay for a lot of upgrades and support for this.

Continuous Transmission? Send all of the recorded data to both the black box and some remote data center, too. If this is too much to transmit continuously, then maybe a subset of the data? I know planes are becoming increasingly complex and automated, so there's probably loads more data that *could* be considered for transmission. Still, something is better than nothing (what we have now.) Pick some subset of the available data and send it periodically.

Burst Transmission? Instead of a continuous stream of data, when the pilot (or plane) detects a "dangerous condition", it starts sending a high-speed burst of accumulated data, and continuously until things look "normal" again. Say the plane takes a sudden 200-foot drop in altitude. Or banks unusually sharply. Or... whatever. Just ignore the values that appear 99.9% of the time, and only trigger outside that normal range. (numbers pulled out of thin air; pick whatever works best.)

At this point, there's nothing much to go on. Imagine if we had the last few minutes' airspeed, altitude, as well as settings for the flaps, rudder, and engine would be an enormous improvement over what we've got now. I suspect the pilots' unions might raise a concern about monitoring and potential for it to be help against them, but I could also imagine some kind of escrow mechanism where the data is sent and stored, but only to be accessed upon certain, predefined circumstances.

Admittedly, this is quite rough. I'd like to think that there is at least some part of this which could be implemented in parallel to the provision of internet access on planes. I'd appreciate it if anyone who knows more about these things could comment on the viability of this and/or the technical limitations/challenges which I'm missing here.

Re:Reasons unknown??

[jamesrt]

I heard of this same sort of thing happening once to a plane. What happened was that the plane was just painted.

The plane crash being referred to is this one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XL_Airways_Germany_Flight_888T

Re:Reasons unknown??

[khallow]

Couldn't they just transmit it as well as record it to the black box?

No. For example, if some aspect of an accident knocks out the transmitter or if nobody receives the data at a critical time. Usually, putting it in a black box in the plane works really well since it is hard to lose a plane. Possible, as in this case, but usually you can find the smoking crater where the plane crashed.

Re:Reasons unknown??

[Slutticus]

Incorrect airspeed is one thing. However we know from the telemetry the plane sent as it was going down that the pitot tubes were giving conflicting information, which I would assume would lead the pilots to disregard all pitot information from that point forward and take the appropriate steps. I'm pretty sure that is SOP for any fly-by-wire aircraft (or any aircraft for that matter...). Any pilots want to chime in?

Re:Reasons unknown??

[Anonymous Coward]

WTF is wrong with people? Is there some sort of selection bias that people uncreative enough to survive a trudge through 4 years of undergraduate studies are two retarded to design failsafe systems?

If you're building a nuclear reactor and loss of cooling will cause a meltdown: you need to go stare at a lava lamp for a while.

If you're building an airplane which has a narrow VS1 to VNO then perhaps you should have redundant airspeed sensor fail-safes? Is it really so damned hard to put a strain gauge on the leading edge of the wing? I mess around with rc plane auto pilots and if their plan ab & c is a pilot tube they fucked up.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airspeed_indicator
good visual: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQI3AWpTWhM

Re:Reasons unknown??

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem may have been aggravated by the fly-by-wire system in use. There have been several Airbus Industrie aircraft incidents where the computers assumed the pilots were incompetent and did not allow the pilots to control the aircraft. With matching low speed inputs from the pitot tubes (speed sensors), I wonder if the plane chose to dive on its own to restore flying speed (but instead broke up the plane due to severe overspeed).

Re:Reasons unknown??

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't this the flight that flew right into a huge huge storm that was obscured on their radar by a smaller storm which was safe enough to fly through. As soon as the larger storm was in view, it was too late to change course and fly around it. I heard the most likely case is extreme icing of the sensors that monitor airflow, causing autopilot to disengage as the plane no longer knew its own speed. Without any way to know the current speed, the plane lost altitude and crashed, due to a small window of safe speeds that don't result in altitude loss.

You are wrong. The Chemtrail equipment installed on the plane malfunctioned.

Re:Reasons unknown??

[Slutticus]

Actually, the plane transmitted quite a lot of information to AirBus HQ as it was going down, but that system (ACARS) is quite outdated i think. The last three minutes of the transmissions gave a wealth of data related to alarms and faults that were occurring (i.e. inconsistent airspeed readings, excessive vertical speed, autopilot information, etc...). It would be interesting to see how much voice data could be reliably transmitted in a situation like that.

Re:Reasons unknown??

[jalefkowit]

Yes. The PBS show NOVA ran a documentary on the crash last month (you can watch the whole thing online here) that came to the conclusion you describe. (Though it should be emphasized that it's all speculation until more evidence is gathered.)

Re:Reasons unknown??

[Sir_Sri]

Theories as to what caused the crash are not the same as having the blackbox data and being able to confirm any given theory, or decide that you cannot confirm any theory given the state of the blackbox.

Don't get me wrong. We know enough about aircraft, and the environment factors to make decent educated guesses. But if it flew into a storm it *should* have been able to handle and failed, that's very different than flying into a storm it shouldn't have been able to handle.

Re:Reasons unknown??

[bhalter80]

Actually most GA aircraft have a secondary static system which while less accurate because the input is in the cockpit instead of outside the plane is fully functional. For pressurized aircraft there are redundant ports on the outside of the craft. The difficulty is in determining the instrumentation failure and responding to it correctly. The private pilot training material is very specific about the kinds of issues that arrive from clogged pitot static ports.

Re:Reasons unknown??

[Anonymous Coward]

WTF is wrong with people? Is there some sort of selection bias that people uncreative enough to survive a trudge through 4 years of undergraduate studies are two retarded to design failsafe systems?

If you're building a nuclear reactor and loss of cooling will cause a meltdown: you need to go stare at a lava lamp for a while.

If you're building an airplane which has a narrow VS1 to VNO then perhaps you should have redundant airspeed sensor fail-safes? Is it really so damned hard to put a strain gauge on the leading edge of the wing? I mess around with rc plane auto pilots and if their plan ab & c is a pilot tube they fucked up.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airspeed_indicator
good visual: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQI3AWpTWhM

Yeah...

And when the strain gauge jet crashes because of a bug in the strain gauge / pitot tube sensor fusion algorithm you'll probably call the designers idiots for trying to fix something that has worked flawlessly for decades.

Re:Reasons unknown??

[Anonymous Coward]

http://spectrum.ieee.org/aerospace/aviation/beyond-the-black-box

Yes this is being talked about

Re:Reasons unknown??

[Ark42]

Nova is probably what I remembered that from, as I don't watch a whole lot else.

Re:Reasons unknown??

[Anonymous Coward]

Nothing you said here precludes the possibility of transmitting this data. Transmitting and recording to black box is an excellent idea. Certainly it will not work every time. But it will work sometimes. That is all it needs to save significant money.

It is really terrible when people shoot down a good idea because it will not work 100% of the time. Expecting such perfection out of a system like this is childish.

Re:Reasons unknown??

[kidgenius]

They DO have multiple pitot tubes as their form of redundancy.

Besides a strain gage won't be able to tell you how fast you are flying, as the force of the air will change with altitude and pressure. Now you need to know the pressure you are operating at, which is provided by a static tube....which can clog up the same as the pitot tube that you previously were relying upon. So you still have a common mode of failure.

GPS type systems are probably way too slow and inaccurate to give the necessary readings.

So, any other good ideas for trying to get your airspeed?

Re:Reasons unknown??

[fotoguzzi]

Cite for the autopilot / rudder problem? Also, as the rudder has been recovered, is there anything about it to suggest that it had been roughed up by the autopilot?

Re:Reasons unknown??

[tg123]

I heard of this same sort of thing happening once to a plane. What happened was that the plane was just painted. During the painted process, they put masking tape over the Pitots (holes/ports used to measure air pressure). They forgot to take the tape off, and when they were in flight, the airspeed, altitude, and stall warnings all went crazy from the erronious pressure readings on the clogged/covered pitot tubes. Result was bizarre instrumentation - overspeed and stall warnings at the same time, etc. They wound up crashing from confusion. Perhaps icing in the pitot tubes were causing a similar thing here.

The plane crash being referred to is this one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XL_Airways_Germany_Flight_888T

Ummm I think it might be this one http://ehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeroperú_Flight_603 But the plane was being cleaned , not painted and also it was a Boeing plane not an Airbus.

Re:Reasons unknown??

[tibit]

Without any way to know the current speed, the plane lost altitude and crashed

As far as I know, on that particular type you can continue level flight safely without airspeed data. There are tables and you pretty much look up the throttle setting given air density, the latter can be approximated from GPS/INS in case your static system is dead, too. You just need to be aware that the Pitots have iced over. If you are unaware, shit goes wrong, and my bet is that it's a human factor at play, just like with China Airlines 006 where the underlying wetware problem was similar: a disconnect between pilot's situational model and real situation.

Re:Reasons unknown??

[tibit]

GPS is not too slow for anything here, nor too inaccurate. GPS is combined with inertial reference to provide a realtime 6 DOF position/orientation in space. The problem is you need airspeed, not ground track speed! GPS only gives you the latter.

Re:Reasons unknown??

[ridgecritter]

Yep, screwing with the air data ports can cause some nasty accidents. Take a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northrop_Grumman_B-2_Spirit#Accident for a $1.4 billion (that's 'B') crash caused by water in the air data ports.

Re:Reasons unknown??

[Anonymous Coward]

...is there anything about it to suggest that it had been roughed up by the autopilot?

Yeah.. it broke off.

Re:Reasons unknown??

[jamesrt]

I heard of this same sort of thing happening once to a plane. What happened was that the plane was just painted.

The plane crash being referred to is this one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XL_Airways_Germany_Flight_888T

Ummm I think it might be this one http://ehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeroperú_Flight_603 But the plane was being cleaned , not painted and also it was a Boeing plane not an Airbus.

Maybe; however, the one I referenced was an Air NewZealand owned plane, and it was in the news at lot over here in NZ when it happened.... Point is that I agree with the original poster about flight instrumentation information loss causing control issues.

Re:Reasons unknown??

[Anonymous Coward]

You aren't trying to measure your velocity, you are trying to prevent your wings from breaking off.

Strain gauge is a direct read-out vs. an indirect air speed measurement which goes by manufacturer spec and assumes the wing spars haven't fatigued. That's quite an assumption seeing as Aluminum has a tendency to form stress cracks under dynamic loads, freak exposure to mercury aside. Obviously, Boeing or whoever is going to be conservative in their VNE with a safety factor appropriate to the life or death application.

I re-iterate, a direct readout on the strain gauge will tell you a lot, as would a pressure gauge on any of the control surface hydraulics.

GPS system is too slow to use for some things, but it's certainly adequate for altitude. Which would suddenly allow for strain gauges to measure velocity in addition to stress on the airframe.

Other good ideas? If the issue is ice formation then venting exhaust from the turbofan over the airspeed sensor/pilot tube would go a long way to addressing it. Heaven forbid you circulate waste heat from some other source on the plane. You could even resort to nichrome wire, a voltage regulator, or a power resistor.

Speaking of the turbofan, the tachometer should tell you quite a bit, but assuming it doesn't, there are thousands of ways to measure airspeed, and a frost sensitive piezo-transducer on the end of a soda straw seems to be a continued and repeat cause of plane crashes YET NOBODY FIXES IT.

Pick one:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_measurement

This is some serious low hanging fruit we are dealing with here.

Rather than addressing the problem they blame the user and create elaborate pilot training exercises and procedures.

I'm not being a hindsight is 20/20 bitch. I've heard of several planes getting fucked by these pilot tubes and nobody is fixing the root cause of the problem.

Re:Reasons unknown??

[ShakaUVM]

You forget that all electromagnetic radiation cause airplanes to fall out of the sky. That's why it's so important to shut down your Kindle back in row 79.

It's a wonder that airplanes survive in sunlight, at all.

Re:Reasons unknown??

[Mana Mana]

> Burst Transmission? Instead of a continuous stream of
> data, when the pilot

According to the NOVA (PBS) episode on this subject (which did an excellent job of determining the probable chain of events and solving the mystery though not "exact"ly, if that's a synonym for definitive, for that you need the witness of absent the CVR and FDR) the flight went catastrophic within ~94(?) seconds. Hence your burst implies a window of opportunity. Ultimately this is a matter of resources, or the lack thereof. Record everything? All the time? From anywhere? Tall order. Today. Tomorrow? Not so much is a safe guess.

Re:Reasons unknown??

[Anonymous Coward]

They can't do it because it might fail in some cases? Fascinating thought process you have there. Too bad the current method also fails in some cases, like this one.

Re:Reasons unknown??

[GerryHattrick]

Good point, keeps coming up in expert forums. What exactly is the claimed advantage of a throttle like this? Sure, you can 'get used to it', but does anyone know?

Re:Reasons unknown??

[MichaelSmith]

If the issue is ice formation then venting exhaust from the turbofan over the airspeed sensor/pilot tube would go a long way to addressing it.

Pitot tubes are little things located well away from the engines. They are however electrically heated, though heating can be offset by extreme cold.

Re:Reasons unknown??

[MichaelSmith]

In fact, this happens more often than you know and is a very typical response to a situation like this. Bottom line: loss of airspeed data should in no way shape or form be a catastrophic event.

There was that aircraft in the US which stalled in conditions with ice formation and the pilot pulled up rather than performing a stall recovery. Maybe pilots these days spent too much time programming the autopilot and not enough doing stick and rudder flying.

Re:Reasons unknown??

[MichaelSmith]

(but instead broke up the plane due to severe overspeed).

Debris recovered from the water showed that the aircraft hit the water flying flat and level so it was likely to have been intact at that point.

Re:Reasons unknown??

[MichaelSmith]

I'd appreciate it if anyone who knows more about these things could comment on the viability of this and/or the technical limitations/challenges which I'm missing here.

I work on air traffic control software and ideas like this are being looked at. Aircraft transmit engineering data (among other things) through ACARS satellite links. Messages from this system provided a lot of information to the investigation. Cheaper data links have only recently become available. The turn around time for system design in aviation is very long. Designs are very detailed and rigorous. Integration issues on the aircraft would lengthen the time taken to implement a system such as you describe.

But yeah, it will happen, though probably not in the next few years.

Re:Reasons unknown??

[Anonymous Coward]

It's hard enough getting the pilot's *voice* to ATC. In certain parts of the world there is basically no ATC and even jet traffic operates on position reporting, i.e. say where you are and everyone else listens and tries to work out if there's a collision risk.

These are the same parts of the world whose main jets in operation are forty years old.

Re:Reasons unknown??

[Aviation Pete]

Couldn't they just transmit it as well as record it to the black box?

No. For example, if some aspect of an accident knocks out the transmitter or if nobody receives the data at a critical time. Usually, putting it in a black box in the plane works really well since it is hard to lose a plane. Possible, as in this case, but usually you can find the smoking crater where the plane crashed.

Rolls-Royce is doing this 24/7 with most of their engines. Why should this not be possible for the whole aircraft if an engine maker can do it? Airbus should do the monitoring, because they can profit from it by learning in real-time how their aircraft perform. They can sell this info to the airlines and help with the scheduling of maintenance, forwarding replacement parts even before the airplanes land and so on, just as Rolls-Royce does.

Re:Reasons unknown??

[greap]

The sensors are static ports ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitot-static_system), there are two and the both need to agree for the AP to work.

With one blocked the instruments for one of the pilots would have stopped working entirely and the flight computer would start giving extremely odd error messages. They may well have figured out what was going on but there would be no way to determine which set of instruments were correct and given position & time of day they didn’t have a visual point of reference to be able to orient themselves. This has happened before ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birgenair_Flight_301 and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AeroPeru_Flight_603), when the aircraft is throwing you overspeed and underspeed messages at the same time which one do you believe?

Re:Reasons unknown??

[Myopic]

Yes. Nova did a documentary about it: "Crash of Flight 447". It's pretty good and covers the science reasonably well.

Re:Reasons unknown??

[justaguy516]

I know. And all those cell phone towers my mean neighbour is putting up on his roof.

Re:Reasons unknown??

[justaguy516]

There was an IEEE spectrum article a few weeks back, proposing a continuous transmission system. Here it is: http://spectrum.ieee.org/aerospace/aviation/beyond-the-black-box

Re:Reasons unknown??

[Anonymous Coward]

It's probably cheaper, easier to maintain, and "less creepy" than one that moves to indicate the current setting as changed by the autopilot.

Re:Reasons unknown??

[kidgenius]

A tach on the engine won't tell you your airspeed. The pitot tubes ARE heated by the way, to combat ice formation. Nothing ridiculous like pumping bypass air up to a pitot tube, but they do it electrically. Also, in your case, a strain gage will tell you stresses on the airframe, but you can't really use that for anything but fatigue monitoring over time. Which, planes already do. That won't help you fly the plane though. The hydraulics also have pressure gauges so you know the pressure in the entire system. Feedback on the position of valves. Position sensors on the ram and on the surfaces. Yes, the pitot tubes are an issue, and that's a problem. But there isn't another way around it right now. Looking over your wiki link.... All the mechanical/magnetic options are out (as they are too large/bulky for an aircraft), not to mention you still need pressure readings. Optical isn't reliable. The doppler ones aren't very accurate. Thermal mass sensors still need a baseline coming from a, you guessed it, pitot tube. The pressure based ones WILL work, but they all will rely on small orifices, etc.....which can clog/ice just like a pitot tube, or they aren't designed for open flow, like on an aircraft.

Re:Reasons unknown??

[mikael]

What about the emergency power generator - that little windmill that drops out of the side of the plane, and uses air speed to drive a dynamo?

Re:Reasons unknown??

[UnknowingFool]

A lot of what you said is essentially correct. I just happened to watch a Nova episode on this flight. Here are a few things that Nova brought up:

• The flight probably encountered turbulence. The SOP for that is to reduce airspeed.
• On the Airbus 330 and many fly by wire commercial airliners, the way to do this is to adjust a speed setting and not the throttle. This allows the computer to make adjustments.
• However if the pitot tubes failed, the first response of the computer would be to turn off all assisted controls like auto-pilot, auto-thrust. This action would generate a ton of alarms.
• The SOP for the crew would be to regain flight and thrust controls. In the dark, amid turbulence and a thunderstorm, with dozens of alarms going off, Nova investigators speculate that the flight crew did not regain thrust controls by adjusting the throttle and the plane stalled.
• Commercial airline pilots are not trained on how to recover from high altitude stalls. Pilots who come from a military background might have more experience but not in an airliner. Nova attempted to simulate the conditions with two experienced instructor pilots but they could not replicate the turbulent conditions in a simulator. The test pilots correctly followed procedure by ignoring the alarms until they regained flight and thrust controls.

Re:Reasons unknown??

[UnknowingFool]

Unfortunately, not all pilots are of the same quality. Pilots from smaller airlines tend not to have the same experience as from the larger ones. The larger airlines are more selective and have higher standards since they are more risk adverse. They also pay more for them though.

Re:Reasons unknown??

[Anonymous Coward]

No, I don't think so. There was a much earlier crash that I think happened off the coast of South America somewhere; I'm unable to find it right now. There is a transcript and the pilot freaks out. It's a much-studied crash but my google-fu is weak today.

Re:Reasons unknown??

[Anonymous Coward]

Found it: Aeroperu flight 603:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeroper%C3%BA_Flight_603

Re:Reasons unknown??

[tlhIngan]

Honest Question: Why in this day and age do we still have to chase down a black box? More and more airliners now provide in-flight internet connections. Couldn't they just transmit it as well as record it to the black box? TFA says this search is costing them $12.5 million. That would pay for a lot of upgrades and support for this.

Politics, really.

In an ideal world, we'd have all the planes beaming back CVR and FDR data (the black boxes) to ground stations and satellites, as well as the units themselves (should connections be lost).

However, there are some very powerful forces in the way.

First - where and who stores the data? The US government will rightly demand that it should, while other governments will object to this. Anywhere outside the US will be objected to by the US, and many countries will see the US attempt as a way for the US to get passenger manifests of all flights. (The US already demands it for flights that are transiting through its airspace, so many Canadian flights reroute to stay in Canadian airspace). And yes, anyone on the no-fly list isn't allowed in and the flight must make a stop. Thus, this is really a non-starter.

OK, so we let the airlines store the data. Can we really trust them to not screw this up? It's an IT-heavy issue, and given how bad a lot of airline IT systems are...

Third, we have the whole pilot thing. There's a reason why CVRs are only 30 minutes in recording time, even though they're all solid-state these days and we can record multi-channel full DVD-quality audio (96kHz/24bit) for hours on relatively cheap SSDs (multiple for redundancy, even) and flash storage media - it doesn't take a whole lot. The technology is capable, but we're still stuck at 30 minutes.

Finally - who pays? All the costs are going to be borne by passengers as another fee, and we all know how fun it is that our ticket price triples because of all the fees/taxes/etc that get added on. Plus, you have to equip every aircraft, which is a huge undertaking and very expensive - and the added weight for the short-haul flights may severely cut capacity especially on regional airlines.

The technology is there. The reason we haven't gone to transmitting all the data continually is mostly in the political and monetary side. Heck, the move to 406MHz ELTs has been underway for a decade now (the last satellites monitoring 121.5MHz were decomissioned in early 2010), and we're really only seeing slow conversion and takeup.

Give it 50 years and it'll probably be done in an ad-hoc manner, while in the meantime we can probabl find stopgap measures. Maybe secondary recorders mounted on the outside of the plane that eject when they hit water (and float) with GPS trackers. Because of the harsh environment they have to exist in operationally (standard recorders only have to survive harsh environments once), they can be set to record less so at least some data is availalble.

Re:Reasons unknown??

[MoeDrippins]

There was an episode on Nova that posited exactly this. Ultimately, pitot tubes iced over and the plane was unable to determine airspeed so kicked out of autopilot, and the human pilots were too slow to respond with the suggested throttle and pitch settings in such a case.

What amazes me is the incredibly thin window they (speedwise) they have to fly in to be safe. +/- 10kts or something like that.

Re:Reasons unknown??

[chuckugly]

As with most things in aviation, there is a procedure for this eventuality. They should have remembered the rule aviate, navigate, communicate. The procedure IIRC on this aircraft is something like 85% power, nose up 5 degrees, wings level. This will make the airplane fly properly and reliably if not optimally. It's suspected the crew got absorbed in troubleshooting and failed in some aspect of flying the plane, probably failed to power up since the autopilot on the Airbus adjusts the engine power without moving the throttle levers. If they looked at the levers they would still be at 85% but the power indications on the panel would read the real output.

Re:Reasons unknown??

[lintux]

That article talks about AOA sensors, not pitots.

Re:Reasons unknown??

[Anonymous Coward]

Close! As with most aircraft crashes, it was multiple small failures that led to a catastrophic accident. Poor maintenance, poor pilot response. First off, it wasn't that it was being painted, it was a routine cleaning of the aircraft, done all the time. Clear tape was placed over the pitot tubes and never removed by maintenance. The pilots missed it on their pre-flight inspection.

Once the pilots got it into the air, they realized their AIS (air speed indicator) wasn't operational. At that point, they should declared an emergency, aborted the flight, and immediately turned around for a landing (or at least contact ATC to fly in radar vectored circles to burn off the fuel needed for landing). They did not. Instead, they turned on the auto-pilot. The AP could not obtain a proper speed, and began issuing Rudder Ratio audio alarms. The pilots weren't familiar with this error, which means the flight control computer can not properly calculate how much rudder travel should be used.

Instead of simply disconnecting the AP and hand-flying the aircraft, they dicked around with it until they ran out of airspeed and crashed into the ocean, killing everybody on board.

There is a lot of fault to go around. Airline, maintenance, pilots. Ironcially the aircraft worked precisely as advertised.

Re:Reasons unknown??

[Heretic2]

Honest Question: Why in this day and age do we still have to chase down a black box? More and more airliners now provide in-flight internet connections. Couldn't they just transmit it as well as record it to the black box? TFA says this search is costing them $12.5 million. That would pay for a lot of upgrades and support for this.

And how often does your in-flight Internet or TV stations cut in and out? You gotta have what is likely a directional antenna pointing at certain satellites. There are any number of conditions that make getting that to work reliably quite hard.

Re:Souls?

[Anonymous Coward]

I prefer the term 'meatbag.'

Re:Souls?

[jamesh]

I'm not religious but I think the concept of the soul at the very basic level is valid. It's the program running in your head that is you. That's about where it ends though - I don't believe in any way that the program keeps running once the hardware fails, outside of the bits of your program that have rubbed off on the other people that you interacted with along the way.

Re:Souls?

[Slutticus]

Pretty typical for aviation and maritime communication of how many (live) people are on the vessel. Not sure how it originated though...

Re:Souls?

[countertrolling]

Early maritime was extremely superstitious.. Not that the landlubbers weren't/aren't

Re:Souls?

[NEDHead]

114 pair of shoes?

Re:Souls?

[Samantha Wright]

We're talking about a flight from France to Brazil. Part (a) is not that improbable.

Re:Souls?

[Anonymous Coward]

I beg to differ. France is very catholic unless my child year at a french catholic school were just spreading lies... oh wait, they were...

228 Souls?

[Posting=!Working]

I knew Kia's were small cars, but I had no idea you could fit so many on a plane.

Re:228 Souls?

[Anonymous Coward]

I am tired of these motherfuckin' Kia Souls on this motherfuckin' plane!

Re:Hole crap! That was two years ago????

[hipp5]

Am I moving at 0.90c or does that seem like it just happened yesterday?

That was the first thing I thought too. To be fair, it was 22 months ago, and not a full two years, but still... where does the time go?

I remember

[Anonymous Coward]

Could've sworn that I heard the plane crashed due to the 100mph winds in the storm it flew into...?

Re:Souls?

[ooloogi]

Soul is just old language, not necessarily with religious connotations. A soul is just a living person, and is even used in the bible in that fashion.

Re:Souls?

[Nocuous]

My first thought was "OMG! They proved the existence of souls? Talk about burying the lead!"

Re:Souls?

[artor3]

I wonder if you'll be so glib when one of your loved ones dies.

Re:Souls?

[Anonymous Coward]

that's ugly bag of MOSTLY water to you buddy.

Re:Souls?

[Anonymous Coward]

It should have been "228 lives".

Re:Souls?

[Yvan256]

Since there was 228 people, that's 228 pairs, or 456 shoes. Unless you mean everyone only had one shoe.

Souls?

[Anonymous Coward]

Can we call them people instead of Souls? While less dramatic, I only care about people as opposed to metaphysical concepts. I know when people say souls, they're really thinking about people, but come on. I don't need drama in my news, I can do the emotional math on 228 people dying myself.

Re:Hole crap! That was two years ago????

[barv]

I would think at least 0.9999 C at least.

Re:Souls?

[YandyTheGnome]

Woosh! 228 soles, 114 pairs of shoes...

pitot probe failure most likely cause.

[bongey]

I write flight diagnostic software , special software the tries to determine the root cause after number of BIT/and OR ACARS messages. I was especially interested in this flight. Thank god the air bus aircraft sent the ACARS messages otherwise we would have no idea what happened to it. Nova video is pretty convincing. Especially when in the flight simulator , and they cause a simulated air speed failure. The exact same ACARS messages are produced by the simulator that were produced by flight 447. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/space/crash-flight-447.html . NOVA concluded bad weather caused the failure of the air speed sensors (pito tubes). Air speed sensor failure cause the auto pilot to fail, which turned the cockpit into a christmas tree of error and warning lights. Finally, pilot error in which they didn't react quickly enough .The pilots had to react quickly enough and apply just the right amount thrust and pitch to avoid a dramatic stall. The plane final injuries were consistent with dramatic stall, literally falling strait down out of the sky.

Re:pitot probe failure most likely cause.

[by (1706743)]

First thing I did when I opened this thread was Ctrl-F for "nova". I know nothing about the aeronautics, but I too found this to be a very convincing explanation.

What really struck me as odd was that (as I recall from the Nova video) planes are out of communication from land when in the middle of the ocean. With humanity's level of satellite technology (not to mention radio-wave-bouncing-off-of-atmosphere-skillz), this just seems weird.

Re:pitot probe failure most likely cause.

[DNS-and-BIND]

What is it about modern airliners that makes them so fragile? Increase power, point nose up. These crashes make modern airliners seem like 1920s aircraft designs, before data was analyzed regarding what was safe and what was not.

Re:pitot probe failure most likely cause.

[MadMaverick9]

And if flight 447 would have had an experienced pilot like Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger on board, they probably would have made it.

Re:pitot probe failure most likely cause.

[bongey]

The had some weird designs in the cockpit that makes it so you can easily not to apply throttle correctly. I guess it is designed so you can't just bump the throttle, and end up like this plane http://www.airliners.net/photo/1293784/L/ , but it is weird it is newer plane.

Re:pitot probe failure most likely cause.

[by (1706743)]

My understanding is that at those altitudes, the flight envelope becomes very thin (is that the right terminology?). So too much thrust leads to too much speed leads to structural problems, and too little speed leads to a stall.

If the planes flew at 1920 aircraft altitudes, then there would be a lot of wiggle room...however, fuel economy would suffer a lot.

Re:pitot probe failure most likely cause.

[bongey]

Slow speeds can introduce stalls too, not enough air going over the control surfaces . The lack of air flow over the control surfaces, and lose of lift leads to "mushy" controls. Flaps help but they don't remove the control issue, that is why landing a plane is the hardest part.

Re:pitot probe failure most likely cause.

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Especially odd when most trans-oceanic flights offer calls(albeit at $10/minute) through seatback phones. It might well be, though, that the sort of conditions that cause aircraft to crash don't do much for reception...

Re:pitot probe failure most likely cause.

[Anonymous Coward]

I managed to get one of our more experienced pilots to follow the rabbit down the wrong hole in a similar way in the sim yesterday. It was easy, too. I gave the local pitot and static sources a bad pressure, and then faulted the B bus to kill off the good sensor. The pilot assumed that he was getting good data from the remaining sensors and failed to notice bank angle creeping as the AP pitched down to maintain speed in climb mode. What's 3 degrees of pitch when you've got cascading faults? Every few seconds the computer would spit out another fault; as something exceeded a time limit for being out tolerance.

The plus side is that mine has dual-string flight systems, while the bus has triple-string systems, so the two failures I input won't cause the same scenario. However, if they did encounter severe icing and iced up the pitot tubes, the aircraft could have departed controlled flight before any severe faults showed. My pull it out of my ass guess, though, is that they had an electrical fault before the pitot tubes iced, and didn't have a fair chance.

Re:pitot probe failure most likely cause.

[fatmal]

When I was learning to fly, the instructor would quite regularly cover the flight instruments, and I'd have to fly circuits without knowing how fast I was going, or how high I was. While it is easy to estimate speed & climb from your attitude (nose above the horizon & lots of throttle usually means you're going up, nose above the horizon and no throttle you're slowing down, and will soon stall and descend (quickly too!)), I would hate to have to do that without outside visual references like the pilots of flight 447. However, I would imagine that a blocked pitot tube would not disable the artificial horizon (and if it does, then why?). The pilots should have been able to keep the aircraft flying using a cruise throttle setting (already set) and the artificial horizon. Having said that, it is easy for me sitting here to say that, without multiple alarms going off in a rapidly deteriorating situation. It could be that flight 447 was a unique set of circumstances, and these guys were test pilots.

Re:pitot probe failure most likely cause.

[Anonymous Coward]

oops ... pitch creeping up, not bank. "Bus" refers to the Airbus.

Re:pitot probe failure most likely cause.

[ShoulderOfOrion]

Correct. Google 'coffin corner' for a full explanation. The margins at high altitude are quite slim.

Re:pitot probe failure most likely cause.

[Anonymous Coward]

Saw the Nova ep, had one question about it:

They said that when you get no airspeed readings, the standard procedure is to angle the nose up 5 degrees and stick the throttle at 80%, so you maintain altitude. The pilots were too focused on all the error messages from the flight computer to remember their training and execute the procedure.

5 degrees 80 percent is a dead simple algorithm. Why isn't the computer programmed to just do that automatically when its airspeed readings go bad? Let the pilots override, but make that the default action. It knew the pitot readings were bad, it emitted error messages to that effect. Seems like a simple fix they should put in. That, and adding some supervisory level algorithm to condense the error messages down to one "airspeed indicators are f---ed" message.

Re:pitot probe failure most likely cause.

[MichaelSmith]

Especially odd when most trans-oceanic flights offer calls(albeit at $10/minute) through seatback phones. It might well be, though, that the sort of conditions that cause aircraft to crash don't do much for reception...

Aircraft can send CPDLC messages though the ACARS link but they would usually only do this when they need to communicate with ATC. ACARS is expensive so crews are encouraged not to just use CPDLC to send messages which are not necessary. Once they had an emergency they would have focused on the flying and only communicated if it was going to help them in an immediate sense. We know the satellite links were working because ACARS was working.

Re:pitot probe failure most likely cause.

[MichaelSmith]

What is it about modern airliners that makes them so fragile?

ORLY? Have you done any flying over the south atlantic lately? I have been there in a ship and for me it was like the inside of a washing machine from the perspective of a bacterium.

Re:pitot probe failure most likely cause.

[MichaelSmith]

And if flight 447 would have had an experienced pilot like Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger on board, they probably would have made it.

Sullenberger is a stick and rudder man. Flies gliders and light aircraft. Modern pilots are data entry operators.

Re:pitot probe failure most likely cause.

[MichaelSmith]

How does the artificial horizon stay calibrated during cruise? Your real attitude changes as you follow the curvature of the Earth, so you must use the real horizon from time to time to recalibrate the gyros. Same as with a DG.

Re:pitot probe failure most likely cause.

[fatmal]

How does the artificial horizon stay calibrated during cruise? Your real attitude changes as you follow the curvature of the Earth, so you must use the real horizon from time to time to recalibrate the gyros. Same as with a DG.

Quite frankly, I don't know - I only fly behind steam gauges, and only day VFR, however the 'attitude' won't change, but your 'altitude' will. Even with a 'fixed' or uncorrected articfical horizon, you're only going to (logically) climb, as the earth falls away underneath you.

I would imagine that the avionics in an Airbus are pretty damn smart, and would get GPS position fixes and recalibrate the artificial horizon. In the case of flight 447, calibration of the artificial horizon would be of secondary or tertiary corcern - the emergency (the storm and frozen pitot tubes) would have been over quickly (assume a 50 mile storm system at 300 knots means it's 10 minutes before you're out of the storm).

Having said that, I wasn't suddenly thrown into a very high stress situation, with multiple alarms sounding, and the strange aircraft attitudes that are almost certain to occur when you fly into a powerful storm, so as mentioned earlier, it's easy for me to sit here at home to say that!. Aviation has the possibility of getting very exciting very quickly, and I can't help but think that, maybe, there were too many warnings presented to the pilots of flight 447, which distracted them from the task of flying the plane, which after all, is the primary purpose of the pilot.

Re:pitot probe failure most likely cause.

[temcat]

If they fell straight down out of the sky with no horizontal speed, the wreckages and blackboxes would all be in one place, which wasn't the case here.

Re:pitot probe failure most likely cause.

[temcat]

I thought that for stall recovery you go nose down, not nose up.

Re:pitot probe failure most likely cause.

[MichaelSmith]

Out flying with my dad when I was 16 we had a faulty aircraft with a precessing DG. We wound up flying due west from Sydney over the blue mountains which is a disaster from the air. All canyons, trees and turbulence. Called ATC for help. Climbed under instructions, squawked 7000 and orbited for a bit, then returned to Bankstown by direct radar vector from ATC. They had to guide us in. Visibility was pretty bad. So we got on to final and there is 10 or 20 knots of tail wind and we are running out of runway. Dumped the flaps at 100 feet AGL, pushed the throttle up and went round very fast. Started the circuit again and Bankstown tower came on the VHF instructing us to turn 180 and complete the circuit in the opposite direction.

My Dad froze. I could tell. He had nearly killed his 16 year old son and he wasn't listening or really aware of things beyond stick and rudder right then. ATC repeated the instruction and he did nothing. I thought if I say something he might go crazy and crash us. Is this what happens to the guy in the right seat? Is it better to let the pilot in command crash the plane?. So I said "Dad, they want us to do a U turn" and he got it. Acknowledged the call, made the turn and got us on the ground. ATC told us to report to operations and we sat down before a really old civil aviation guy who had seen it all. He showed us a few happy snaps of people who really stuffed up. Like "you can see where the pilots body sort of flowed around the engine on impact". That sort of stuff.

My point? It doesn't take flight deck full of warnings to push a pilot over the edge. It doesn't take much at all in fact.

Re:pitot probe failure most likely cause.

[fatmal]

Very true, which is why Human Factors is stressed in flight training now. The fraility of people is what causes failures, in any field of endeavour. Early in my flight training, doing solo cicuits, I was a little high so I pulled the throotle right back - the engine stopped (ever been in a powered-down datacentre - there is nothing so quiet!). I was halfway through thinking 'what the hell do I do now', when my instructors' voice ran through my head (like Obi-Wan), "Fly the aeroplane". I had 1,300 metres of runway in front of me, airspeed and attitude was good, so I just glided the aircraft in - restart and taxi off the runway. It was a great lesson for me.

Re:pitot probe failure most likely cause.

[UnknowingFool]

Analysis of what debris they did found indicates the airplane was intact when it hit the water horizontally. However they didn't find the debris until 5 days after the plane was lost. The debris could have drifted quite a distance away from where the plane went down.

Re:pitot probe failure most likely cause.

[Samalie]

I'm sorry, but you're mistaken. Taking off is the hardest part.

Landing is (relatively) easy, with exception to extreme cross-wind scenarios. While it would not be easy, I would guess that probably around 75% of us here could be talked down by an experienced pilot (requires some smarts and situational awareness).

Taking off, however, is chalk full of a plethora of variables, from wind direction and speed, any gusting, thrust, runway length, weight of the aircraft, balance of any cargo/passengers...the list goes on and on. It is by far the most dangerous part of the flight.

-Direct from my uncle, who IS a pilot for a major airline

Re:pitot probe failure most likely cause.

[bongey]

Are you joking? It is April Fools so I cannot tell. I have flown in multiple flight simulators, from commercial airliners, to fighter jets and helicopter sims too, full simulators. I actually wrote flight simulators for military helicopters. I can assure you every single simulator I was able to take off without any help of real pilots in the simulator at the time, but landing is a different story. Most pilots I have to talked agree landing is the hardest part. Unless you have an underpowered aircraft, but if is has any kind of power it is floor it and get up to speed and pull up, not much too it.

Re:pitot probe failure most likely cause.

[bongey]

Oh yeah the NTSB reports shows that more accidents happen during landing , almost twice as many. http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20100618134438AAqiUQl ,.

Re:pitot probe failure most likely cause.

[Phantom Gremlin]

Not sure if you'll ever see this, the newest /. discussion system is a total disaster. Anyway, here goes ...

Pilots are getting "dumber" because planes do so much for them now. But, in order to save lives, I want pilots to be dumber still. I want them to have an "Easy" button, like Staples advertises.

When the situation is totally fucked up, and the pilot can't stabilize it, the pilot hits the Easy button. Then the plane does what it has to in order to at least stay in the air. E.g. in the case of pitot tube failure causing loss of airspeed information, software sets IIRC 85% thrust at a specified AOA. Then at least the plane doesn't drop from the sky. Software can use info from sources that are still available. E.g. if altimeter isn't trustworthy, maybe GPS is valid, so use altitude from that (in case thrust setting varies with altitude). Or if no GPS, then use the radar altimeter. Or maybe the inertial nav system has an idea of the current altitude. Etc. In other words, do whatever you can to keep the plane from crashing. Also, if the plane is already in a bad configuration or even in a stall, then do whatever is possible to recover. A computer should be better at that then a "data entry operator".

This is an incredible can of worms to open. But, given how so many pilots are now "data entry operators" (see a comment below, and see lamentations on various pilot forums), it might actually save lives.

I predict, that ten or twenty years from now, most pilots will be next to useless in emergencies, and something like what I suggest will be de rigueur. Yes, the autopilot can disengage when it can't handle a dynamic situation. But then, after the pilots also can't handle it, there needs to be a "last ditch" computer on board. Given my druthers, I'd rather have Sully fly the plane. But I'd trust a computer over a "data entry operator" any day.

Re:Hole crap! That was two years ago????

[Anonymous Coward]

Well at 0.90c, two years would seem like 138 days..... if you feel like it happened just yesterday, you'd need to be going approximately 0.9999991c (and no, that's not a random number of 9's there).

Re:Souls?

[plover]

I wonder if you'll be so glib when one of your loved ones dies.

The answer is "yes, I was." In my case, humor was a coping mechanism.

And no, there is no way to know how any one person will react to a loss. As far as I'm concerned, humor is a lot more healthy than people who drink alcohol until they die, endlessly weep in a darkened bedroom, or start sleeping with strangers (all things I've seen grieving people do.)

Re:Hole crap! That was two years ago????

[Slutticus]

I KNEW someone was going to calculate this and shove it in my face. That, folks, is why i love slashdot :D Thanks for doing what I was too lazy to do...... 0.9999991c is pretty fast. What Warp Factor is that?

Re:Hole crap! That was two years ago????

[Audguy]

I KNEW someone was going to calculate this and shove it in my face. That, folks, is why i love slashdot :D Thanks for doing what I was too lazy to do...... 0.9999991c is pretty fast. What Warp Factor is that?

less than warp 1

Richesse or largesse?

[gedankenhoren]

The search for this black box has been dragging on and on. I remember a few months back when it seemed that the French government was going to give up the search, given that it's cost quite a bit of money already. Other than humanist pride (which is worth more than we might say prima facie), I can't think of a goal that will be reached by furthering this search that's commensurate with the cost.
Were there some (sons or daughters or grand-nieces) of some well-connected people on that flight? (A quick search reveals no name I can place: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447#Notable_passengers).

Re:Richesse or largesse?

[MadMaverick9]

You really don't know why they're searching again??? Search for "air france 447 lawsuit".

Re:Richesse or largesse?

[Zancarius]

Were there some (sons or daughters or grand-nieces) of some well-connected people on that flight?

I like that your first assumption is that the search is being pushed by rich and "well-connected people" and has nothing to do with the fact that there are many hundreds of other aircraft flying that could suffer from similar potential faults. As another responder pointed out, the French lawsuit also have significant pull (which is protocol AFAIK in France whenever loss of life occurs).

This is less about pride and more about safety. Nice troll, though.

Re:Souls?

[Stormwatch]

Oh, hi HK-47.

Re:Souls?

[Nethead]

Tell me more about this sleeping with strangers part. Grieving just might be something I want to get in to, at least on weekends.

Black comedy aside, this reminds me of Pat Tillman's brother Richard at his funeral after Sen. John McCain said that a loving God will reunite the family in the end: "Just make no mistake, he would want me to say this, he's not with God, he's fucking dead, he's not religious, so thanks for your thoughts but he's fucking dead." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iwsy8FEL0ls

American heros can be godless, not just commies.

Anyway, "Taking with it 228 souls." I thought that, according to folklore, souls were the one thing that actually escaped.

Re:Hole crap! That was two years ago????

[Anonymous Coward]

langoliers

Re:Hole crap! That was two years ago????

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but I think the actual answer is warp factor 0.33333

Re:Hole crap! That was two years ago????

[antifoidulus]

Maybe it seems more recent because there has been only one other fatal commercial airliner crash in the "rich world"(Western Europe, the US, and Japan) since then, and even then only 7 people died. In fact, I'm pretty sure(though I don't have any data on it, tried finding it and couldn't), the US is now at a record number of days in a row without a commercial airliner crash. The last fatal commercial airliner crash in the US was in early 2009(Colgan air). There hasn't been one in Japan since 1994*(a freight plane did crash at Narita in 2009). Now granted there are a lot less "commuter" flights in Japan due to the countries small size and excellent high speed rail service, but that is still pretty impressive.

Re:Hole crap! That was two years ago????

[lul_wat]

Please surrender your geek card on the way out.

Nova Documentary on Flight 447

[catchblue22]

This is an excellent Nova documentary on the disappearance of Flight 447. It is interesting how investigators were able to give a reasonable hypothesis as to what happened, even without the black boxes. The long and the short of it is that they think super-cooled liquid water from a serious thunderstorm overcame the pitot anti-icing heating systems, freezing over all of the pitots and thus depriving the computer of airspeed data. The computer probably panicked, suddenly switching off the autopilot (they did get data from the computer, as its satellite uplink gave some telemetry). Pilots are capable of flying without airspeed readings, but only if they react quickly. They think that prior to flying into a severe thunderstorm, the computer automatically reduced thrust, in order to slow down in anticipation of turbulence. The problem is that the only pilot feedback that the thrust was reduced would have been a tiny circle on a computer monitor...there is no physical feedback in the throttle levers in Airbus planes. The computer then probably switched off the autopilot, overwhelming the pilots with a sequence of warnings. The thrust likely remained at 70% and the pilots probably didn't realize it. After a minute so the airplane may have lost so much airspeed from the low thrust that it became unflyable, in effect causing the crash.

Give this Nova episode a try...it is very detailed, going into many technical aspects of airplane design.

Re:Nova Documentary on Flight 447

[Anonymous Coward]

Comments like this must be from people who aren't pilots. Airspeed comes from angle of attack, not thrust. Thrust only determines how far you'll fly at that given angle of attack. Any airplane, even the largest, is always flyable, even with a complete flameout. Witness the Hudson landing, or the Gimli glider incident. Angle of attack dictates whether you're going to stall or not. Even without power, with the nose of the plane below the horizon, say 20 degrees, that plane (no plane) would stall, assuming the elevators were working. Even without power, a stall has only one cause: pilot error. Sure, they may have glided into the ocean, but even that would have been preferable, as a controlled descent would have given them time to work on the other problems. Of course, in a thunderstorm you don't know which end is up, but even with the airspeed indicator out, the attitude indicator would have been working. If that's the case, there's zero excuse for a stall.

As for "all the lights going off" in the cabin, the rules of flying are "aviate, navigate, communicate." Always fly the airplane. Read "Stick and Rudder." It applies equally to a 747 as to a Cessna.

Re:Nova Documentary on Flight 447

[cffrost]

Link to Nova S38E14 minus Adobe (et al.) bullshit:
https://torrents.thepiratebay.org/6181269/NOVA.S38E14.Crash.of.Flight.447.HDTV.XviD-FQM.6181269.TPB.torrent

Re:Nova Documentary on Flight 447

[MichaelSmith]

Well okay but if the pilot tries to maintain an attitude level with the ground (sea) and IAS is decreasing then the AOT will increase to the point where the wings stall.

Re:Nova Documentary on Flight 447

[Anonymous Coward]

And why would an experienced pilot do such a thing. Airliners give stall warnings too. And I don't mean the electronic ones. You should be able to hold the stick back and recite them.

Re:Nova Documentary on Flight 447

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone know how to watch this outside of the US?

Re:Nova Documentary on Flight 447

[Anonymous Coward]

On behalf of those of us outside of the USA, I thank you for the link. I searched another site, and had not found this program.

Re:Nova Documentary on Flight 447

[cffrost]

You're welcome. =)

Re:Nova Documentary on Flight 447

[catchblue22]

Yes, but if you haven't realized the thrust is low, and you don't know your airspeed, then you may try to maintain an inappropriate angle of attack. I know that the stock way of flying without an airspeed indicator is to set the thrust at a specific level, and then to maintain a specific angle of attack. The issue here is that the pilot may not have known one or both of these facts. And in the thin air at cruising altitude, where there is a low tolerance for inappropriate angles of attack, this may have caused the crash.

Re:Souls?

[dave420]

The term "souls on board" is commonly used by pilots and ATC to describe how many people are on a plane. I guess the submitter might have got confused somehow.

Re:Souls?

[Viol8]

I tend to agree with you. "You" are more than just the hardware in your brain because if you weren't you wouldn't disappear every night when you go to sleep. As you say , the "soul" is some analogue of a program "running" in the brain and this program can and will be suspended and other programs take over - eg dreaming, sleepwalking.

Notes from an airline pilot on Nove

[Anonymous Coward]

My favorite blogging pilot posted an article about the Nova documentary. It is an interesting read and he comments on the documentary from an airline pilot's point of view. I have been reading his blog for a while. He is flying Airbus himself, so he has quite a bit of knowledge about the airplanes.

Here is the link: http://flightlevel390.blogspot.com/2011/02/af-447-part-3.html

Nova seems to have oversimplyfied a bit.

Don't blame the engineers

[mangu]

WTF is wrong with people? Is there some sort of selection bias that people uncreative enough to survive a trudge through 4 years of undergraduate studies are two retarded to design failsafe systems?

No matter how many back-up systems you have, stupid people will always find a way to fuck it up.

Take this accident for instance:

• the runway was too short
• the runway had been freshly repaved and had no grooving on the new pavement
• there was heavy rain shortly before
• one of the plane's engines thrust reverser wasn't working

• the pilot didn't put the engine with the failed thrust reverser on idle

If any one of those facts hadn't happened there wouldn't have been an accident. It was the combination of all five of them that caused the crash.

If only the runway had been a little longer, if only it hadn't rained, if only the runway were grooved, if only the thrust reverser were working, if only the pilot had followed the correct procedure for landing with a failed reverser.

Re:Souls?

[mldi]

I was just logging in to challenge that all 228 people a) believed in souls and b) that (if souls exist) all 228 people had one.

Only if all 228 people weren't gingers.

Re:Souls?

[Candid88]

Maybe you do die every time you go to sleep and every morning a new consciousness awakens for the first time in you mind, but you don't realize because you can remember all of the previous consciousness's thoughts. The old you actually died, but the new you can't tell that it isn't the old you.

How can we ever prove this isn't the case?

Personally, I avoid the use of teleportation devices for the same reason.

Re:Souls?

[Viol8]

I don't think you could ever prove it. If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck etc etc...

Probably, but....

[sgt_doom]

You are probably right, although it is interesting to make note of a crash of a Spanish airliner which occurred around that timeframe and turned out to be caused by malware aboard their avionics system. Now that's scary????

Re:Souls?

[Tolkien]

+1, except submitter wasn't confused. That's how people, not just ATC, pilots, or water-faring vessel operators refer to deceased (or possibly soon to be deceased) people in an emergency. SOS for example means Save Our Souls, if at any point anyone ever thought it was Save Our Ship, they either never heard of the original meaning or are simply non-religious to the extent of refusing to use an acronym's original meaning. I'm not religious but I'm perfectly okay with using the word soul in any context.

Re:Souls?

[parens]

"Save our Souls" is also a backronym. "SOS" was initially chosen because - - - . . . - - - was easy to remember, send, and receive.

Re:Souls?

[ShooterNeo]

Viol8 : are you planning to preserve the data in said hardware when you die? Through cryogenic freezing or some other method not available yet?