Air France Plane down

yahoo news had posted hours ago that there was a huge storm in the area. and they were expecting turbulance. So that may be what caused the plane to go missing.

I have 2 theories:
One: that it came to close to Chavez island compound off the coast of Venezuela.

Second : that it came to close to the mysterious LOST island and was sucked into it. thus causing a new direction for an already lost show.

I know, not funny when we are talking about 233 people going down.
What i dont understand is why it is soo hard to find a plane that has gone down, when they all have to follow certain flight paths to and from desitinations? They can not be THAT far off route that they would be soo hard to find.

I would also like to know myself why is it taking so long to find a downed plane with all our modern technology.

God be with the passengers and their families.

The aircraft was carrying 216 passengers, three pilots and nine cabin crew. Air France said there were 58 Brazilian passengers, 61 French people and 26 Germans, as well as several other nationalities.

Those on board included seven children and a baby.

Among those presumed dead were Luiz Roberto Anastácio, the president of the Latin American operations of Michelin, the tyre manufacturer, together with two other employees.

Eich Heine, the chairman of CSA, the Brazilian steelmaker, was also on board, the company said.

The airline said the twin-aisle A330-200 had entered service in April 2005 and had completed 18,870 flight hours. It had last been in maintenance on April 16. It was powered by two General Electric CF6-80E engines.

The captain of the flight had 11,000 hours of flying experience, including 1,700 on the Airbus A330/340 family of jets.

The Airbus A330 has never previously had a fatal crash in commercial service, although a test aircraft crashed in 1994 at Toulouse, killing all seven crew. The A330-300 first entered service in December 1993, followed by the A330-200 in April 1998.

An A330-200 operated by Air Transat of Canada ran out of fuel over the Atlantic in 2001, after a maintenance error, while carrying 306 people. It managed to glide to an emergency landing in the Azores.

Paul Hayes, director of flight safety at Ascend, the aviation consultancy, said that it was highly unusual to lose an aircraft, especially a jet from the latest generation, in mid-flight. Most accidents occurred on approach and landing or during take-off.

“It is difficult to know what may have happened. A loss during turbulence is very unusual, and a total electrical failure is also very unusual. Lightning strikes of aircraft are relatively common. There have been aircraft lost due to lightning strikes, but they are extremely rare.”

He said: “My concern is getting the flight data recorders back. They don’t have that close an idea of where the crash site is. They may never find anything and that is very concerning.”

Aircraft were designed to be able to survive lightning strikes, he said. “They have to be, because they occur often, usually causing minor damage but, very rarely, serious damage to electrical or control systems.”

The A330 is the most successful long-haul aircraft built by Airbus, the European aircraft maker, with more than 600 A330-200s and A330-300s (the higher- capacity version) in service with 72 operators around the world.



-- IT SEEMS IMPOSSIBLE FOR THIS PLANE TO MYSTERIOUSLY WENT DOWN FROM A STORM --

Kotisan- I too joined this site today in response to what happened to AF 447. I also, like you, absolutely appalled by the fact that French Navy did not send a rescue escuadra. But I concur to the sentiment that was expressed here earlier-"cool down". N.Korea has nothing to do with it.

I haven't heard anything about this, but then again you never know.

Maybe the plane is on a LOST island.

Does anybody know anything about this:

Its route took the aircraft through the Intertropical Convergence zone, a turbulent area along the equator known in France as the "pot au noir" or murky cauldron.

Don't in situations of "loss of electrics" modern airliners can deploy that small windmill generator out of the side which allows the plane to run essential communications etc?

Whatever happened must have been quick or completely destroyed all electronics. Even in a bad situation I would have thought the pilots could have got some kind of mayday out, unless whatever happened was instant?

Originally posted by rusty35
According to Reuters, this flight had been preceded safely on the same track 30 minutes earlier by a Boeing 747-400 heading to Frankfurt for Lufthansa, citing a source with access to data transmitted from jetliners for the World Meteorological Organisation.

Two hours later an MD-11 cargo plane also flown by Lufthansa passed just south of the same spot on the way to West Africa, the source told Reuters, asking not to be identified.

Neither aircraft reported any anomaly.

"You can't tie it down to lightning with the information we have; for me it's a red herring," said the source, who specialises in aviation weather. Lufthansa declined comment.

Can we verify this info?

I havent been able to locate it.

What a tragedy, machines really dislike us...i hate planes, rather travel on boat even though i don't trust oceans

reply to post by markymrk720


www.alertnet.org...

New picture from BBC detailing where the plane was and its flight path .. maybe someone who has good authority is some nation can get some sat photos ?

reply to post by 281011


You are referring to the "RAT"....the Ram Air Turbine. Usually, depending on airplane, designed to be an electrical generator (since modern airplanes are heavily dependant on hydraulics, for flight controls) to provide power to the electirc hydraulic pumps. Of course, if the engines are running, then they are likely providing hydraulic pressure....because of the engine-driven pumps.

On the old A-300 there was the ADG (Air-Driven generator) that was designed just to supplement hydraulic pressure for basic flight controls.

Still, modern airplanes have the APU, which has its own dedicated battery for starting. Takes, maybe a minute or two to complete the 'start' cycle.

AND, there is still the airplane battery...always fully charged by normal electrics, and available for emergency use....for radios, certain cockpit instruments, lights, etc.

SO....engines 'flame out', in flight....airplane glides, doesn't "FALL FROM the Sky" (nothing that dramatic).

Engines can be easily re-started, in flight....they 'windmill'...unless there is some catastrophic destruction rendering them inoperable.

I mean...an engine just needs fuel, and a spark..and air. They are quite reliable.

This a very puzzling event......

Having followed this story all day I am amazed at the way the plane and its passengers have been written off so fast.

From the moment the story broke it had already been hours since the plane "vanished" from radar both commercial and military.

Even after the allotted fuel/time had passed it was still being called missing / vanished / late - the word crashed has not crossed any news reporters lips.

They are now basically saying that they will never find anything and that it will remain an unsolved "disappearance" !!

They seem to want to put this one to bed very quickly - out of sight out of mind.

Very strange reporting terms used on all UK TV channels.

Considering this is ATS, I want to be a bit more expansive about possible and even outrageous theories as to what has happened...

Firstly, how do we know that the government/media is not covering something up and everything we've been told about the pilots communication is a lie? Even the automated warning about electrical malfunction could have been due to them being tampered with.

What if the plane was hijacked and the brazillian and US air force acted quickly after new security policies were undoubtedly imposed since 9/11.
Perhaps fighter jets shot it down over the sea and are now trying to cover it up as an accident?

Despite the fact there are over 200 civilians on board, rational thinking would deduce that shooting it down would be the most logical and appropriate form of action. However, even with rational thinking - most people would not be able to accept such a truth and a global backlash would ensue. It's in our nature as humans to react badly to the killing of innocent people.

What if terrorism just got a hell of a lot more sophisticated and they have managed to completely take over the plane, disable all its communications and land it at a makeshift runway somewhere?

Maybe there are plans to use the passengers for demands. A plane is the most ideal way that terrorists could capture and encapsulate a large mass of people at one time and keep them controlled upon landing it.

What if the plane is being armed with bombs and is on its way to a densely populated city....

Can these radical theories really be dismissed as silly or impossible!?

[edit on 1-6-2009 by The Blind Watchmaker]

reply to post by Did you see them


"Written off"???

No....search is certainly underway. Weather conditions (which likely number one suspect in this accident) will certainly hamper the Search....I almost wrote 'SAR'....but, I tragically doubt there will be an 'rescues'.

What a shame.

It is currently 1647 EDT.....that is 2047 UTC (or GMT....same thing). I've flolwn to Brazil quite a lot, but not on that route, since I flew for a US carrier. Also, have crossed the North Atlantic numerous times.

It is getting dark, again, off the Coast of South America. Searching will continue, at daybreak, I would imagine.

Originally posted by sy.gunson
It took four hours for Air France to disclose it's disappearance and that came an hour after it failed to land.

It went down without broadcasting a mayday so whatever happened was very sudden. Either catastrophic break up or else pilots were so busy fighting to keep control they had no time for a mayday call.

I would speculate either a catastrophic decompression, terrorist bomb, or else a failure of electrical systems in darkness. It was an early morning flight wasn't it?

Anyone know which type of Airbus aircraft ?

I had a strange vision yesterday or evening in my time zone where i was viewing a strange set of tracking lights ... when I heard a two toned alarm ring
I believe it was hit by a missile. There won't be much found of this plane.
I'd suggest a careful look at the manifest of passengers. The location seems really strange off the coast of western Africa.

it sucks to think a state of the art plane can just disappear. i pray for all the people on the flight and their families but this just doesnt look good at all for them.

It seems kind of strange to me that a plane this size would just disappear like this.

No radar beacon or anything?

Originally posted by solidshot
[
Doesn't look good makes you wonder if the recession is having an impact on the maintenance of the aircraft given the numbers of crashes we are seeing lately?

why couldnt it be the simple fact that huge numbers of airplanes fly daily now (more than ever in history for passenger travel)

IMO that is why we see so many plane crashes now, because there are so many planes in the air risking it

100% perfect maintenance does not mean the airplane is "uncrashable"

If I read right the plane was between the brazilian and african territories, hadn't entered the later yet.

Besides the flight 30 minutes before that, there was another one 15 minutes later that went through a similar route that experienced turbulence.

This is still weird, the pilot apparently was in the radio but was abruptly cut, besides the automatic messages of electric failure or something. But airplanes don't just disappear like that.

Worst thing is that I may know some people that were inside...

Originally posted by platosallegory
It seems kind of strange to me that a plane this size would just disappear like this.

No radar beacon or anything?

Right, well, even if the plane was intact, it would still be really small in comparison to the Ocean it is in. A comparison for an intact plane would probably be something akin to a Biro in the middle of a soccer field.

Since the plane will probably have smashed when it hit the water, the largest piece will probably be one of the seats or part of a jet turbine. There will not be much for anyone searching to find, and in a storm it will probably be even worse.

And IIRC there are beacons, on the FDR and CVR at least. I'm not sure how long they last, but they'll be the only pieces that will have survived a high speed crash and still work.

And finally, to anyone else, they would still prefer to find survivors. They just won't and they know that. The aftermath of an airliner crash is not a good environment. Even if the actual impact was like that of the Hudson river crash, or the Comoros Islands (Ethiopian 961, I think) crash, any injuries, would by now likely be non survivable, since they've had a good 20 hours of cold, panic and stress. Likely without fresh water or food too.