Experts Reveal Air France Disaster In June 2009

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Expert opinions on the fateful Air France flight, Flight 447 from Rio de Janeiro to Paris on June 1, 2009 that crashed and killed 228 people on board had just been revealed and I must admit that the details are rather factually frightening. Human Error: Several other flights that night took the same route as Flight 447, but the pilots made detours of up to 90 miles to avoid the storm system, which towered to an altitude of 50,000ft. The investigating team believes that a smaller storm in front of the larger weather front confused the flight's radar system, so that the crew did not see the thunderstorm coming. It meant the flight had no choice but to ride out the turbulence. The pilot would have slowed down the engines - the standard method for flying through such conditions. At 2.10am - the plane's last known position - it appears that Flight 447 entered a rapidly developing storm system that its radar detected too late. A little more than four minutes later, everyone on board was dead. Those Critical Intervening Minutes: Just after 2.10am, the flight computer sent a torrent of automatic fault messages to Air France in Paris. Called by one pilot 'the last will and testament of the aircraft', these messages show that Flight 447 suffered 24 critical faults in just four minutes and 16 seconds. 1. The first message showed that the autopilot had switched itself off, so the pilot had to take manual control. 2. Then the systems controlling air speed and altitude failed. 3. In the cockpit, instrumental display screens would have gone blank, and flight-control computers would have died. 4. One by one, the most critical safety features in the cockpit failed. By then, 'It must have been a very busy and confusing situation on the flight deck,' says Cable. It is a harrowing image, indeed. The cockpit would have filled with a multitude of audio and visual alarms, while the pilots desperately fought a losing battle to control the aircraft and keep it in the air as it was buffeted by a gigantic thunderstorm. 5. A final, ominous warning was sent by the plane to Paris: the Advisory Cabin Vertical Speed message, which means that the aircraft was descending at a high rate. 6. This last, terrifying message came just before Flight 447 and its passengers hit the water at hundreds of miles an hour. But what could have caused all the vital automatic systems to malfunction at once? It appears that the three pitot tubes (speed sensors) failed simultaneously. Accident investigators believe that super-cooled water in the clouds - well below freezing, but too pure to turn into ice - could have disabled the pitot probes. Tony Cable (1) has discovered that since 2003, there have been 36 incidents involving frozen pitot tube on A330s or the similar A340s. Indeed, in 2007, Airbus recommended a refit of all A330s with upgraded pitots. Flight 447 had not yet been refitted. With no airspeed data, Flight 447's automatic systems would have collapsed one by one - which is exactly what happened. It seems that in total darkness, and in the midst of a storm, the crew were forced to retake manual control of the plane. John Cox (2) explains how the pilots would have been bombarded with confusing information, saying: 'That crew faced an almost unheard of series of failures, one right behind the other.' The most immediate danger was that the airplane would stall, which would lead to a sudden, uncontrollable descent (it had already slowed suddenly to cope with the turbulence). Cox says: 'There is a good possibility that at some point in the last four minutes, it did stall.' An unlucky series of events caused the accident, then, culminating in the automated systems failing and engines stalling. Used to flying with high levels of automation, it seems the pilots did not have the skills to recover the situation. Tragically, from the way the airline hit the water - nose up, with wings level - it appears that the crew may have come close to saving their passengers' lives. It is likely they were recovering the situation but ran out of time, and suffered a second, and this time terminal, stall. So could such a tragedy happen again? Tony Cable believes that Flight 447 raises some vital issues for airlines. One of it being that pilots are being over and increasingly reliant in automation, whereby crews don't get a great deal of opportunity to manually fly the aircraft. Airbus has also been criticized for not yet replacing all pitot probes in its fleet. This is indeed a terrifying technical disaster that led to a very tragic human tragedy. At the end of the day, I am rather concern with the aircraft manufacturer - Airbus for their inability to replace all the pitot probes and God knows just how many more of these "faulty" aircraft planes are in the air. This is definitely scary and I just hope that the relevant authorities, airlines and flight maintenance be wary of this and stop aircraft planes that are not fitted with the new pitot probes. This is sad and shocking indeed! Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1282367/Air-France-crash-The-truth-disaster-killed-228-people.html Footnote: (1) Tony Cable worked for the UK Air Accidents Investigation Branch for 32 years. He was the senior investigator on the fatal Concorde crash in Paris ten years ago, and on the Lockerbie bombing. (2) John Cox, one of the world's leading aviation safety consultants, Chief Executive Officer, Safety Operating Systems, Washington, DC. As the founder of SOS, Captain Cox has led the growth of from a start up in to into a major consulting success. P.S. The fateful airplane's black boxes, recording the last moments in the cockpit, had not been found. It is disclosed that these boxes had stopped transmitting location signals after one month. Efforts to find them using imaging sonar are still in progress.