737 Crash Near Athens

[User546]

Isd this common in most airline crashes? Maybe it is, but I've never heard of a CVR being ejected out of its container. Doesn't make a lot of sense to me considering there was enough lack-of-force to have decent sizes of human remains, yet the impact was great enough to rip the CVR apart? But I know nothing about this, so someone educate me on it.

http://www.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/europe/08/16/greece.crash/index.html

Officials on Tuesday said they had found only the exterior container of the cockpit voice recorder from the plane, hampering investigative efforts into the accident's cause.

The device's internal components were ejected from the container when the plane crashed into a mountainous region north of Athens on Sunday, Akrivos Tsolakis, head of the Greek airline safety committee, told The Associated Press.

"The only fortunate event in the investigation is that we have the flight data recorder," Tsolakis said, adding that the box would be flown to Paris on Wednesday for decoding.

He said a group of investigators would search for the rest of the voice recorder. He told AP that American experts, including a representative of the plane's manufacturer, were providing assistance.

 

[Simon Says]

Here is an idea of why the windows were not iced up........If the window heat was on would the windows frost up on the inside......hmmmm. I don't know?

We fly around without our window heat unless we are in icing conditions, but in the past we used to always turn the window heat on on the "After start checklist"

Any 737 guys out there have an answer to this?

 

[User546]

Here is an idea of why the windows were not iced up........If the window heat was on would the windows frost up on the inside......hmmmm. I don't know?

Wouldn't the cabin windows have frozen up regardless?

 

[ms6073]

The device's internal components were ejected from the container when the plane crashed into a mountainous region north of Athens on Sunday, Akrivos Tsolakis, head of the Greek airline safety committee, told The Associated Press.

Sounds like the ramblings of a talking head who really does not completely understand the related complexities about which he is being asked. Now I do not completely understand the Data recorders used on the accident aircraft but I do know that although designed to withstand extreme conditions, typically the 'contents' of the data recorders end up in disarray. Ideally we like to think the recorders come out the aircraft and are taken to the lab for analysis where the recording apparatus is immediately plugged into a machine that will play back the recorded data but most of the time that simply is not the case.

Unlike recorders used before the digital age, the type of data recorders on the accident aircraft used a recording media similar to the hard drives found in most home and office computers. Now the flight data recorder uses data streams from various sources allowing for the recording of numerous parameters (128 in this case) and allows for very long periods of recorded data. Voice is different because without some sort of voice compression algorythm in concert with large storage media, recording voices on that type of recorder is limited by the size of the storage media. That does not mean the data is lost, just that the voice recorder will begin overwriting older data so if the event leading up to an accident occured more than the specified 'loop' time for the recorder, the older voice data gets progressively overwritten by newer voice data. Speculating here, but I am under the impression that like a hard drive on a home computer, even though voice data gets overwritten, the voice data can still be retrieved for the recorder in the accident but takes a considerable longer amount of time. Even then, the older voice data may not be very useable due to the techniques used to restore the data.

All of this makes the assumption that the data recorder is in good condition but typically such events result in damage to the data recorders as a result of impact forces and heat from post impact fire. For example the hard drive case may split open resulting in damage to the magnetic recording. But even if the media is completely expelled from its container, all is not lost because like a hard drive from a home computer, a technician can then attempt to insert the media from the accident recorder into the mechanism of a functioning unit so that the data can be played back and recorded on other media for further review. Depending on how much abuse the magnetic media from a recorder experiences during the accident will dictate how much time technicians will need to get a usueable playback of the data.

 

[habubuaza]

The more information that comes out the stranger this accident is becoming.


http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20050817/ap_on_re_eu/greece_plane_crash

 

[EAP]

Here is an idea of why the windows were not iced up........If the window heat was on would the windows frost up on the inside......hmmmm. I don't know?

We fly around without our window heat unless we are in icing conditions, but in the past we used to always turn the window heat on on the "After start checklist"

Any 737 guys out there have an answer to this?

Window heat is always on in the 737, at least in every airline I've flown the airplane at.

 

[NYCPilot]

Some new info on the 737 crash in Greece.

Apparently a male flight attendant aboard who was learning to fly may have been the one in the cockpit making "may day" radio calls. Albeit, on the wrong frequency. Recent evidence also speculates that the pilots incorrectly handled the depressurization, believing the warning horn that sounded was for a malfunctioning flap.

http://www.sptimes.com/2005/08/23/Worldandnation/In_Greece_crash__new_.shtml