Air France Flight Missing

[crxpilot]

Lightning damages electrical equipment...heavy turbulence damages airframes.

Heavy thunderstorms produce both.

They had electrical problems and loss of cabin pressure.

Two pilots made horrible decisions to fly into HEAVY thunderstorms.

Chaulk another crash up to "pilot error." We're never gonna reverse this damn trend.

Feel bad for all those people that died because of a stupid decision.

Well cowboy it sounds like you have got it all figured out. Can you tell us who killed JFK, and the events that happened at Roswell as well?

 

[Fly-By-Cable]

debris found along the route of flight confirmed by officials, seats, floatation devices ect from 447. No survivors yet.

 

[PilotswifeII]

Chaulk another crash up to "pilot error." We're never gonna reverse this damn trend.

Feel bad for all those people that died because of a stupid decision.

I think he was just being sarcastic. But it's true, more often than not, a stupid decision is made by other people that the cause of a crash was "pilot error" and many good--often deceased--pilots end up being the blame for a crash and unable to defend their actions.

Then the pilot's poor family ends up being sued and losing their homes, etc. to pay restitution for the loss of other's lives. I believe that many times stupid decisions are made by people at NTSB and other agencies when they fail to find the actual cause to provide closure to victims' families who are harrassing them to do so.

 

[Top Gum]

Theory: lightning strike at 2200 failing certain electrical systems, including weather radar. They are flying blind in regards to WX detection. Unable to contact anyone due to weak radio transmission. They also have their hands full flying the aircraft in moderate to severe turbulance while trying to fix the electrical problem. They inadvertently end up in a cell with tops to 50K. Severe turbulence causes airframe failure 14 minutes after initial electrical failure at 2214.

It’s not a cowboy speculation. It’s very likely that they had multiple problems to have caused such a crash. I was actually thinking about this all day yesterday and was wondering if they would have use of the radar with an electrical failure.

Does someone know if they were down to only the RAT and if so would it provide power to the radar? My guess is that in RAT only power the radar doesn’t work.

 

[bubbers44]

We have no facts so why don't we wait a while. Finding debris is the first step. Now that should lead us to the black boxes. Then we can guess what happened. If an aircraft comes apart in the air of coarse it will send malfunction ACARS reports but they have nothing to do with the accident, just things that failed on the way down. If the report was well before the accident it probably was a routine message of one of hundreds of reports sent out automatically which probably had nothing to do with the accident. Just be patient.

 

[greyskyracer]

New information provided by sources within Air France suggests, that the ACARS messages of system failures started to arrive at 02:10Z indicating, that the autopilot had disengaged and the fly by wire system had changed to alternate law. Between 02:11Z and 02:13Z a flurry of messages regarding ADIRU and ISIS faults arrived, at 02:13Z PRIM 1 and SEC 1 faults were indicated, at 02:14Z the last message received was an advisory regarding cabin vertical speed. That sequence of messages could not be independently verified."

what is alternate law?

 

[Stukadriver]

what is alternate law?

http://www.airbusdriver.net/airbus_fltlaws.htm

 

[PilotswifeII]

When was the last voice transmission? Any indications of problems then?

 

[Scope out RJ's]

Or what?

Yawn!
Or I'll flatten the tires on your trailer!:laugh:
Get back to the regionals you sniveling little ********************!

 

[Lear70]

Does someone know if they were down to only the RAT and if so would it provide power to the radar? My guess is that in RAT only power the radar doesn’t work.

This is all speculation which, as some posters have noted, is useless until the prelim comes out, assuming they ever find the FDR and CVR.

From my rudimentary knowledge of Airbus systems and RAT knowledge from the 3 aircraft I've flown that have one, probably no radar with a complete electrical failure (which is the only thing that SHOULD deploy the RAT - complete loss of AC power to the retaining mechanism on the firing pin with Weight Off Wheels).

However, that's not what gets my attention. There's a couple critical things in that information about the avionics failure chain, IF it's correct, that happened SO fast (less than 4 minutes from first ACARS burst), I wouldn't lean towards a radar malfunction being out long enough to let them wander into a supercell t-storm:

1. ISIS failure. That's a BIG problem. Integrated Standby Instrumentation System. This is ALL you have if you lose everything else. For the ISIS to go or at least have to reset itself, you'd have to have a BAD electrical system spike. The ISIS gets its power directly from its own internal battery, continuously trickle charged through one of the aircraft's primary electrical AC Buses as long as they have power. Even if primary AC power is lost, the battery should provide uninterrupted power to the ISIS. For whatever reason, it appears it may have faulted.

2. Primary and Secondary aileron flight control damper unit failure (PRIM1 and SEC1) with a simultaneous ADIRU failure (Air Data Inertial Reference Unit - what gives the Primary Flight Display your attitude, VSI, airspeed, and heading readouts among other things) fault and almost simultaneously with the ISIS fault (within 90-120 seconds according to that data stream) means that they were at least momentarily (and possibly longer) without ANY instrumentation. No PFD, no ISIS, nada, zero, zilch with a flight control problem...

3. All of that while trying to fight an airplane that had reverted to alternate law on the flight control systems? That would be eye watering enough without anything like severe turbulence associated with a thunderstorm to compound the problem.

I've done a fair amount of over-water flying. Many times late at night, the thunderstorms over the Atlantic and/or Caribbean are still towering to 50,000+ feet and have quite a bit of updraft/downdraft activity with heavy lightning but are NOT producing enough rain to give you a return on the radar. D*mn near stumbled into one in the Lear over the Gulf back in January coming back to Miami from Mexico, just a little over 100 miles offshore of Miami. I JUST happened to be looking outside (was looking for the outline of the coast at night - it's a nice sight) and the lightning highlighted enough of it for us to split the tops of two cells - we were at 43,000 feet, less than 10 miles from the cells when we caught it, the tops were another good 5k-7k above us. There was absolutely NOTHING on radar, at any tilt. We got lucky; if I had been inside the airplane continuously, we'd have bounced right into one of them.

Until (unless) we get the FDR and CVR data back, we won't know anything, but my gut instinct tells me they wandered into one of those by pure accident, radar on but no return...