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Flight 447 'Black Box' Decoded
fermion writes "An initial report has been released by the BEA concerning the details of the last minutes of Flight 447 en route from Rio de Janeiro to Paris. According the report, the autopilot disengaged and stall warning engaged at 2 hours 10 minutes and 5 seconds into the flight. Less than 2 minutes later the recorded speeds became invalid. At 2 hours 14 minutes and 28 seconds, the recording stopped. The final vertical speed was recorded around 10,912 ft/min."
1. Unless it's pressurization system was faulty (it wasn't) the pressure change wouldn't have been great.
2. Unless accelerating, you wouldn't know you were going down (or up, or banked or upside down...).
So the claim that the passengers probably didn't think it was anything more than turbulence is not hard to believe.
It is perhaps surprising to non-pilots that you can be in unusual attitudes and not know it, pilots however are acutely aware. VFR (Visual Flight Rules) pilots flying into IMC (Instrument Meteorological Conditions - ie, zero visability) is a big cause of crashes, not because they can't see where they are going, but because they don't know which way is up.
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To a layman like me, it is amazing that without the benefit of all the data that has been recovered from the flight data recorders, experts were able to get so close to the mark.
Airbus records remotely some telemetry data, this is how experts where able to make a sensible guess.
Surely, a species with such (magical?) technical expertise could have expended the effort into preventing such a failure?
Yes, of course. This will be taken in account in future projects and into airplane maintenance routines. But ya know, those damn birds are already very reliable. It's a disaster, my heart will be always with the families. But some times, you know, shit happens. We should always be aware of how fragile the human condition is and understand that despise all of our hard work into making things safe, some times the unexpected happens and a disaster awaits our destiny.
Yours sincerely,
Someone who deals with safety systems (not at Airbus ) and it's tired to see people blaming designers: we did our best.
It seems very scary that on an aircraft with everything working but the airspeed indicators (and I understand that those are very important), after more than 3 1/2 minutes the aircrew was unable to prevent the plane from hitting the ocean. This was a state of the art aircraft. Makes you wonder how many close calls there have been that luckily didn't result in catastrophe.