johnso29

This is getting too wierd. I smell a slew of conspiracy theories coming on. I have a feeling this could end up like TWA 800, where we never do get the real reason behind the crash.

cactusmike

Wow, that CNN story puts a heck of a twist on this.

I like the part about the pilots may be flying too fast. Airbus will put out anything to avoid blame on the airframe.

80ktsClamp

cactus- you're quite right. Airbus and AF are both homegrown and they will probably fight hard to try and protect their image.

TurnAndBurn

That CNN story is interesting....I saw the picture of the "oil slick" two days ago and my first thought was, are you really going to have an "oil slick" visible after a breakup at 350?

Bri85

TWA 800 broke up at altitude, and there was good amount of oil/ fuel slick and fire on the water surface.


*this definitely sounds like an investigation that will take a very long time (years) to solve.

tequilatamm

I was thinking that too, that it sounds like Lost!

I'm not sure about NONE of the debris being from the plane.

They are saying the wooden Pallet was not from the plane, nor was the 23ft piece of metal, and that they don't think the oil slick was from the plane either.

However, the earlier items they found, like the float and the plane seat, those things were.

There is a map of where they've been searching, and it still sounds like they have a pretty specific (for the size of the are) area they are still searching.

Let's put it this way, all the reports I've read about the debris not being from the plane say that "some" items were not from it... CNN said that NONE were from it. Get my point?

tequilatamm

I'm sure if the pilots were "flying too fast" it's either because they had no way to gauge their speed, or no control over influencing it.

satchip

Has the wx channel blamed it on global warming yet?

Winged Wheeler

Sadly, the type of intellectual assclownery to which you refer is not confined to the weather channel:

Did global warming help bring down Air France flight 447? | Top Stories from 2009-06-04 | RT

Did global warming help bring down Air France flight 447?

dragable_items[dragable_items.length]="doc482830";
04 June, 2009, 21:35
As the investigation continues as to what brought down the French airliner over the Atlantic Ocean with 228 people on board, a Russian climatologist believes global warming played a significant part.


For even the most experienced pilots, flying over the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ) is oftentimes a white-knuckle affair.
The ITC zone is a constantly fluctuating band that is located between 5º north and 5º south of the equator. It produces some of the heaviest precipitation on the planet, as well as the bumpiest airplane rides.

This meteorologically active region, which gives off a constant vertical updraft of air along its path, was known to sailors as ‘the doldrums’ due to the absence of any refreshing breeze. But for passengers on an airplane traveling over the ITCZ, the sensation can be much different.
Read more
Indeed, as vertical-flowing air masses move upwards from the surface of the water, sometimes at great speeds, airplanes may feel a lot like a roller coaster ride. Meanwhile, storms in this volatile region can climb to 50,000 feet, thus forcing pilots, who usually stay at an altitude of 35,000 feet, to find a way to skirt them.
Tragically, it seems that the pilots of Air France 447 met exactly this sort of perfect storm.
William Voss, head of the Flight Safety Foundation, told Bloomberg that there was an “explosion of weather” along the flight route of the doomed aircraft where three storm fronts converged.
“If you take a look at the satellite information online it was like an explosion of weather at the time the Air France flight would have been trying to pick its way through the Intertropical Convergence Zone,” he said.
“The area of weather along that route of flight wasn’t even there when the aircraft was leaving the coast,” Voss added.
But for the most part, these transatlantic trips, as every seasoned pilot and passenger will tell you, are usually uneventful. That optimistic point of view was greatly challenged on June 1, however, when a state-of-the-art Airbus A330-203 vanished over a remote stretch of the Atlantic Ocean four hours after it departed Rio de Janiero, Brazil for Paris, France.
Does global warming pose a threat to airline industry?

Although the exact cause of the tragedy may never be fully known, most investigators already agree on one thing: severe weather conditions played an important part. And that conclusion is leading some climatologists to wonder if the airlines are properly prepared for a world of higher temperatures, and therefore more stressful flight conditions in the future.
“A consequence of global warming is that the frequency and severity of such events (severe weather conditions) is higher,” Alexei Kokorin, head of Russia’s World Wildlife Fund’s Climate Program, told RT. “Unfortunately, the risk for airplanes, especially in tropical areas above water, will be higher. This could be difficult for pilots to understand.”
Kokorin said that global weather conditions are becoming more severe, and the cause goes back to one source: the acceleration of the greenhouse effect due to the activities of man on earth.
“We are seeing the same with other (meteorological) events… We see more powerful typhoons than before. We see more powerful cyclones from the North Atlantic, which causes very heavy rainfall and floods in Europe. These are different events of the same reason: warmer surface of the ocean due to global warming, which is a result of the greenhouse effect, unfortunately man made,” he said.
The climatologist then explained why increased global temperatures could make flying in some parts of the world especially challenging.
“If the temperature of the water surface is higher, this produces a stronger convective movement of the air and a high probability of very severe thunderstorms.”
Kokorin then advised that airlines consider using “safer routes” to avoid severe weather patterns in the future.
“Air companies should use maybe a bit more safe routes to… minimize the risks that airplanes have with very serious convective movements of air,” Kokorin said, before acknowledging that more intense ‘convective movement of air’ is not just limited to the tropic regions. “Sometimes it may happen not just in the tropics; therefore we must monitor these conditions around the world.”
Should we be afraid to fly?

Industry experts all seem unanimous in the belief that modern aircraft can handle anything that Mother Nature can throw at them. Indeed, pilots regularly share their experiences about having their aircraft hit by a bolt of lightning, or bounced by bone-breaking turbulence. And at the time of this writing, French media is beginning to wonder if pilot error, as opposed to bad weather per se, was the real culprit.
Airbus will advise its pilots on how to handle severe weather conditions, Le Monde reported today. The information will remind pilots to maintain adequate speed during moments of high turbulence, as well as keep the plane from banking too sharply.
Some observers interpret this to mean that investigators might know the real cause of the accident but aren't saying.
“If they know what happened, they have a duty to make a recommendation, for safety reasons,” Jean Surrat, a retired airline pilot, told Agence France Presse. “The first thing you do when you fly into turbulence is to reduce speed to counter its effects. If you reduce speed too much you stall.”
However, this version of events doesn’t mesh with the present theory, based on the widely scattered wreckage of the aircraft, and in-flight data sent from the plane's on-board computer, that the aircraft must have come apart while in mid-flight.
One Russian commercial pilot, Alexander, who requested that his last name not be used, said that the absence of radio communication from the pilots to ground control seems to prove the plane experienced some sort of “catastrophic” damage in flight.
“Because the aircraft’s last automated messages was sent by the onboard computer system to another computer at the airport, without any communication that we know of from the pilots,
suggests to me the plane broke apart in flight,” the veteran pilot said. "I am even tempted to believe that a bolt of lightning punched a hole in the aircraft."

Meanwhile, Russian General Pyotr Deinekin, a former commander of the Russian Air Force, postulated the tempting theory that although the flight crew was equipped with “onboard devices enabling it to see a dangerous situation beforehand” the pilots would have needed “great courage” to turn their planes back to base due to financial considerations.
“Since this (turning a plane around) involves great financial losses for the airline, the captain apparently decided to continue the flight, which ended up tragically,” Deinekin told Interfax.
This theory brings to mind the crash of a Pulkovo Airlines flight in August 2006 after the pilot made an attempt to fly over a storm, instead of turning around.
Russia’s Interstate aviation Committee blamed the crash, which killed 170 aboard the Tupolev TU-154, on pilot error.

deltabound

Um. Really? The actual experts (not the crazy "loose change" type) seem pretty confident they know what caused that one. They recovered enough forensic evidence to prove their theory.

NTSB - TWA 800 Public Hearing

NTSB Abstract AAR-00/03

This particular tragedy could go the way of TWA 800 (lots of crazy theories) if they aren't able to recover anything, that's for sure.