A-330 Disappears, Ho hum...
On Tuesday morning, June 2nd, when I checked my email, I noticed a small note about an Airbus A-330 missing in the Atlantic on its way from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil to Paris, France. Hmmm, I said to myself, this will be all we hear about for the next three days. I could see the headlines and hear the punch points: “First major airliner to disappear in the Atlantic since WWII” “Are the new airliners safe?” “Is air travel getting riskier?” “Is global warming causing Aircraft-killing storms?” “Could Terrorists have been the cause of Air France 447’s disappearance?” Not finding much on line I moseyed on over to our lobby in Western Flight and checked out CNN, Fox, MSNBC, ABC, NBC, CBS, BBC, BSBS, etc. and found... Nothing? Hmmm...
I asked around. “Say, have you heard anything about the Air France A-330 disappearance?”
Responses: “What disappearance?” “Air France lost a plane?” Etc. etc.
Believe me. These are uncharacteristic responses. In the Carlsbad Airport Air Charter arena, any airplane which that crashes is big news and followed closely. The fact that most people had driven to work and heard nothing about it was shocking to say the least.
I have to admit I was surprised. No major airliner has disappeared over the Pacific or the Atlantic in over 56 years. In fact, the last “unexplained” disappearance of an airliner over any ocean was a DC-6 operated by Transocean in 1953. All of the other airline crashes in the ocean had specific known causes.
Date Location Airline Airline Status Souls
29/01/1947 Azores Avro Tudor 4 South American Airways Missing 34
01/08/1948 Atlantic Ocean Latecoere 631 Air France Missing 52
27/10/1949 Azores Lockheed Constellation Air France Not Available 48
12/07/1953 Pacific Ocean DC-6 Transocean Unknown 58
Luckily, one thing we know for certain (because we have been told so by the authorities), terrorism could not have been the cause. Yes, it may be true that on May 27th an Air France flight from Rio was delayed for 90 minutes while it was inspected for a bomb, but that could have had no relevance whatsoever to Air France flight 447 five days later. Many aspects of the disappearance resemble the crash of a Pan Am 747 airliner on the Scottish town of Lockerbie in 1988 and most of the first reports then also spoke of severe storms and the possibility that the plane had been damaged by lightning or turbulence. However in the Pan Am case, the study of the wreckage, and discovery of traces of explosives, proved that there had been a terrorist attack, later shown to have been conducted by Libya. Unfortunately with the Air France Airbus having vanished into the ocean, the circumstances of the crash may never be fully explained, regardless of the true cause.
If it had been blamed on terrorism, there might have had an impact on President Obama’s recent trip to the Middle East. Even though the US mainstream media did not seem to be interested in the crash at the time, Google has 13,678 Air France 447 related articles compared to Obama’s Mideast trip having 12,371.
Most of my 12,000 plus flight hours have been spent flying the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. Avoiding thunderstorms is part of the job and very routine. It is virtually impossible to fly 3,000 miles or more over planet earth and not traverse a line of thunderstorms. One night flying from Narita, Japan to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia in a DC-10 we were over 120 nm East of course from our “mandatory” airspace entry point as a result of avoiding thunderstorms. In fact, the night of Air France 447’s disappearance there were other planes in the area flying the same route –and they experienced no problems flying through, or avoiding, the weather.
As a professional aviator and former Naval Aviation Mishap Investigator I believe it is absolutely critical that those black boxes be found. It is extremely important to the Airbus fleet and to future aircraft design to know exactly what happened to flight 447. In that regard it was mystifying to hear a nervous French government investigator prognosticating that the black boxes (voice recorder and data recorder) may never be found. It may be difficult to find those Black boxes but they are designed to survive under almost any conditions giving off a homing signal for 30-days, and be found and retrieved by unmanned subs that have demonstrated that capability many times. I personally suspect the black boxes may “never be found” only if the French find them first.
So what are my best guesses as to why the Airbus A-330 disappeared?
1.) Multiple lightning strikes compromised the electric shielding integrity of the aircraft destroying, or temporarily degrading, the computers and electrical systems on board. This most likely would be during strong to severe turbulence and result in the normal attitude, airspeed, and other avionics to be temporarily or permanently inop. The aircrew, without sufficient avionic or visual references to fly the airplane could not stop it from entering either a stall or a high- speed, nose- down death spiral.
2.) The engines ingested excessive hail, pulled themselves back to idle because they were hurt and while sorting out the problem the plane descended into the center of a cell resulting in scenario 1) above.
3.) The aircraft entered a rapidly rising and forming cell with such severe turbulence that either sufficient structural damage transpired or the airplane and its computers were slammed around so viciously that they dropped off line and the crew could not maintain control of the aircraft. And for the first time in modern aviation history a thunderstorm destroyed an aircraft in mid-air.
4.) Terrorism. (Yes, I know this is not possible, but I’m a well-known Devil’s Advocate.) http://www.postchronicle.com/news/original/article_212235314.shtml
5.) Meteors. I found an interesting article which presents the proposition that there is somewhere around 1 chance in 20 that one of the 3,000 or so meteors which impact the earth each day might hit an airliner every 20 years.
A very interesting and thorough discussion of the weather encountered in the Atlantic at the time of Air France 447’s flight can be found at:
http://www.weathergraphics.com/tim/af447/
I have it upon “good authority” that the mechanical failures that were automatically transmitted to the company by the aircraft ACARS systems were as follows:
1. 0210Z Autopilot failure. This would be 2210 or 10:10 PM east coast time.
2. 0211Z ADIRU failure (air data inertial reference unit) The pilot’s primary attitude, airpeed, and altitude displays are starting to fail.
3. 0213Z SEC 1 Fault, Alternate flight control laws: This is one of the computers amongst several the pilot uses to control the elevator and spoilers (the roll axis). NAV warnings and Flight control warnings.
4. Last ACARS message at 0214Z: 35,000 feet, failure of cabin altituide, electrical problems, pressurization problems.
These ACARS reports tend to argue strongly towards a thunderstorm related cause.
