# Mysterious disappearance of AF 447



## jis

Anyone been following the unfortunate events that overtook AF 447 over Atlantic Ocean in the remote area several hundred miles North of Fernando de Noronha island in equatorial area, near the border of Atlantico and Dakar Oceanic control areas near a checkpoint named TASIL?

You can get a very good cross-reference summary of what is known so far in Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AF_447.

You can also follow an ongoing discussion on it at airliners.net.

It took 6 days to find and positively identify the first pieces of wreckage from the plane. When the incident happened the plane just mysteriously disappeared and failed to arrive in Paris. It will possibly be a long while before the FDR and CVR are recovered from the bottom of the ocean which is quite deep in that area. Just before disappearing the plane automatically sent 24 maintenance messages over a period of 4 minutes via ACARS, and that is about all that is concrete that is known about any unusual occurrences on the plane just before its disappearance. The plane did report normal operation at FL350 at the previous checkpoint at the boundary of Recife Region and Atlantico Oceanic region as it entered Oceanic and radar coverage ceased. It failed to report from TASIL which was its next checkpoint. It was reporting from checkpoints because it was under Oceanic control (Atlantico region controlled by Brazil) where there is no radar coverage. TASIL is where it would have transitioned from Atlantico to Dakar region controlled by Senegal.

May the souls of those that were on the plane rest in peace and that their loved ones find solace.


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## WhoozOn1st

Yes, I've been following the story of this mysterious tragedy, and thanks, Jishnu, for posting those resources. Interesting caveats on the discussion at airliners.net.

Though a mishap of the first magnitude this story seems to be sort of under the radar, as it were, at least in the United States. Several reasons for this, I believe: 1) Not a U.S. airline; 2) Few Americans aboard; 3) The main one, in my view - No video of flaming wreckage to repeat endlessly each time the story is told. Not a "good" crash for electronic media, so kind of on their back burner. Shots of search activity and recovered debris just don't have the same visceral impact as clearly visible calamity. Almost as if no pictures, no story.


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## Neil_M

WhoozOn1st said:


> 3) The main one, in my view - No video of flaming wreckage to repeat endlessly each time the story is told. Not a "good" crash for electronic media, so kind of on their back burner. Shots of search activity and recovered debris just don't have the same visceral impact as clearly visible calamity. Almost as if no pictures, no story.


Probably right there.....


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## PRR 60

I think the bigger issue with the lack of US press coverage is the absence of a "local angle". The press feels that few Americans lost means little American interest. Sadly, they might be right.

This incident shows the potential value of ADS-B. Having a position of the aircraft when whatever happened actually happened would make finding the data and voice recorders a whole lot easier. Without those recorders, it is possible that we will never really know what happened. By coincidence, the new A330-200's being delivered to US Airways are ADS-B equipped. The first of those aircraft was ferried across the Atlantic last week for final fit-out at Mobile, AL.


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## the_traveler

Neil_M said:


> WhoozOn1st said:
> 
> 
> 
> 3) The main one, in my view - No video of flaming wreckage to repeat endlessly each time the story is told. Not a "good" crash for electronic media, so kind of on their back burner. Shots of search activity and recovered debris just don't have the same visceral impact as clearly visible calamity. Almost as if no pictures, no story.
> 
> 
> 
> Probably right there.....
Click to expand...

I too think you're right. 

This crash does not have the visual impact of other crashes. (And TV is visual!)

Most of the footage I've seen are shots like


An AWAC on takeoff

A guy looking out the window at the ocean

A sub on the surface of the ocean

A very few pieces of metal being picked up

etc ...


It (to the TV stations) just does not provide the same impact as


A plane that ran off the runway

A plane that broke in 2 or 3 pieces

A plane that is stuck into the side of a building and in flames

etc ...


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## jis

WhoozOn1st said:


> Yes, I've been following the story of this mysterious tragedy, and thanks, Jishnu, for posting those resources. Interesting caveats on the discussion at airliners.net.


You are welcome.

I have actually been very very impressed with the quality of discourse at airliners.net. Yes it has its contingent of the clueless. But the moderators have done a great job of keeping the discussions on line and away from descending into an Airbus vs. Boeing or US vs. Europe fist-fight, which often tends to happen there.



PRR60 said:


> This incident shows the potential value of ADS-B. Having a position of the aircraft when whatever happened actually happened would make finding the data and voice recorders a whole lot easier.


They have been having this very discussion at length at airliners.net. They do have the rough position from where the last of the ACARS messages were sent.

Of course the real challenge is that if one of the failures was a system-wide power failure (and we do not know for sure that was the case), then it would be quite unclear what the correlation is between the last reported position using whatever technology was used, and the final position where the plane came down. I remember that initially the search area included everything from TASIL all the way to the African coast because no one had a clue what might have happened after the last ACARS messages. They surmise that after the 24th message main AC power bus, which powers ACARS went dead for whatever reason thus interrupting any further ACARS activity.

Incidentally, the entire summary of the 24 ACARS messages is available on one of the airliner.net threads around number 7 or 8 or such. It is quite chilling really, the last one being the one that is being interpreted as one reflecting a sudden depressurization of the cabin.


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## jis

They found the vertical stabilizer in a single intact piece with the rudder attached to it!


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## jackal

jis said:


> They found the vertical stabilizer in a single intact piece with the rudder attached to it!


Is that recent?

Isn't the black box in the tail fin on Airbuses? Would that mean they've found the black box?!


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## jis

jackal said:


> jis said:
> 
> 
> 
> They found the vertical stabilizer in a single intact piece with the rudder attached to it!
> 
> 
> 
> Is that recent?
> 
> Isn't the black box in the tail fin on Airbuses? Would that mean they've found the black box?!
Click to expand...

This is within the last couple of hours. What they have found is the vertical stabilizer. The Black Boxes are in the tail of the plane on which the vertical stabilizer is normally attached. So depending on when in the sequence of breakup the vertical stabilizer separated from its mounting point, the black boxes could be very nearby or very very far away. Hard to tell given the information currently available.


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## PetalumaLoco

The photo of the vertical stabilizer does not agree with the wikipedia photo






The wiki photo shows a stabilizer about twice as tall.

And the stripes on the recovery pic look about 45 degrees. The wiki photo stripes angle is much steeper.


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## Ryan

I'm not sure what you're saying, they look like they match perfectly to me.


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## jis

This has been discussed over a hundred messages from people in the airline industry both pilots and maintenance people on airliners.net and their conclusion is that it is almost the entire vertical stabilizer intact in a single piece that broke off at the base with some additional damage to the base of the rudder.

After one takes into account the angle from which the floating VS is being viewed and also the fact that the rudder is slightly deflected and not fully in the same plane as the stabilizer, the match is exact.

Anyhow, a better place to argue the point if you must, is at airliners.net where thread number 14 is now in progress on the subject of AF 447 at the URL http://www.airliners.net/aviation-forums/g...d.main/4439893/


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## PetalumaLoco

jis said:


> This has been discussed over a hundred messages from people in the airline industry both pilots and maintenance people on airliners.net and their conclusion is that it is almost the entire vertical stabilizer intact in a single piece that broke off at the base with some additional damage to the base of the rudder.
> After one takes into account the angle from which the floating VS is being viewed and also the fact that the rudder is slightly deflected and not fully in the same plane as the stabilizer, the match is exact.
> 
> Anyhow, a better place to argue the point if you must, is at airliners.net where thread number 14 is now in progress on the subject of AF 447 at the URL http://www.airliners.net/aviation-forums/g...d.main/4439893/


I'm not going to argue the point. Must have been shot with extreme zoom to foreshorten that much.


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## WhoozOn1st

jis said:


> I have actually been very very impressed with the quality of discourse at airliners.net. Yes it has its contingent of the clueless.


As a proud member of the Clueless Contingent I might resent your implication, Sir, if I knew what it was.

Although perhaps overtaken by more recent developments, AF447 Did Not Have Pitot Tube Upgrade, from Aviation Week.

Long as I'm at it, and as noted in another thread in this non-rail forum, the NTSB's public hearing on US Airways flight 1549 - the Hudson River ditching - will be webcast beginning Tuesday, 6-9-09: Hudson Ditching Hearing To Be Webcast and _NTSB Advisory_.


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## jis

Take a look at Message 146 at http://www.airliners.net/aviation-forums/g...in/4439893/#146 if you are interested in an excellent analysis with lots of simplified technical details of the data that is available so far.


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## jis

WhoozOn1st said:


> jis said:
> 
> 
> 
> I have actually been very very impressed with the quality of discourse at airliners.net. Yes it has its contingent of the clueless.
> 
> 
> 
> As a proud member of the Clueless Contingent I might resent your implication, Sir, if I knew what it was.
Click to expand...

By clueless I particularly mean those who "know not and know not that they know not" e.g. someone that loudly proclaims that only Airbus uses FBW in its planes and Boeing does not, never mind that a Boeing 777 is as FBW as any Airbus 330/340 is; and then proceeds to launch ad-hominem attacks on anyone that disagrees with them.

I have no problem with someone who "knows not, but knows that they know not". They by their own admission are students and that is a good thing.


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## jis

The French nuclear submarine is now on station to join in the search:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/8092715.stm


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## jis

Here is a map provided by the Brazilian Rescue Ops






To help interpret this:

Destroços is wreckage, debris.

Grande peça is the Vertical Stabilizer.

The last know position is "Ultimo Contato" or last contact point.

TASIL is the next navigation point where the flight was supposed to report transition from Atlantico Oceanic to Dakar Oceanic.


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## GoldenSpike

Adding to the mystery: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,525642,00.html

<H1 class=head _extended="true" itxtvisited="1">Two Air France Passenger Names Probed for Terror Links</H1>

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,525642,00.html


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## jis

The fact that they took so many days to figure this out suggests that the French do not use APIS (or something like it) like most flights originating and departing from US airports are required to, or even if they do, these names were so secret that even their security checkpoints did not know about them, which would be kind of fierd I should think.

At Edinburgh Airport on the way back from Scotland I actually got to see an APIS screen inadvertently while they were checking me on a laptop at the security questioning rigmarole before one checks in for an international flight. The screen looks like a dashboard with about 8 itmes with a red/yellow/green indicator next to each, and a passport reader attached to it. They scan the passport through it and in a moment the indicators light up an appropriate color. In my case they all lit up green. The guy who was handling me basically waved me on to checkin after that, since he was already done asking me the usual questions about who packed your bag etc.


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## PetalumaLoco

GoldenSpike said:


> Adding to the mystery: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,525642,00.htmlhttp://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,525642,00.html
> 
> http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,525642,00.html<H1 class=head _extended="true" itxtvisited="1">Two Air France Passenger Names Probed for Terror Links</H1>http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,525642,00.html


From the above news story;



> While it is certain that there were _computer malfunctions_, terrorism has not been ruled out.


Were they running Vista?


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## jis

The black (orange) boxes have not been found yet. The current conjecture according to press conferences and news releases from the French invetigating authority apparently is that the plane did not break upin mid-air. It crashed into the Ocean at very great vertical speed and broke up upon impact.


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## jis

The Flight Data Recorder has been found and retrieved. The Cockpit Voice Recorder has not been found yet. But the FDR is in relatively good shape and data recovered from it will be absolutely invaluable to get a better understanding of what happened, and hence to make changes so as to reduce the likelihood of recurrence.


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## jis

And now the Cockpit Voice Recorder has also been found. This should enable a complete reconstruction of what happened.


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## MrFSS

jis said:


> And now the Cockpit Voice Recorder has also been found. This should enable a complete reconstruction of what happened.


Jishnu - how long do you think it will be before the results are made public?


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## Ryan

I think that a lot of it depends on what they find. If there's an obvious smoking gun like one of the pilots saying "Holy crap, we just got struck by lightning and everything quit working", then it'll be a lot sooner than if the data is all mangled up and needs work.

I would think that weeks into months is about the right time scale, but I'll defer to those with more knowledge. I just hope that there's enough data there to give us a good feeling about what went wrong, and if there are any changes that can be made to help prevent it from happening again.


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## jis

Normally it takes anywhere between 6 months to a couple of years. My hunch is that this is a complicated one and will take a while. The outcome may be as drastic as significant change in procedures for going past tropical storm lines etc. that may have significant impact on some schedules and routes even.

I get the impression that thunderstorms over Indian Ocean specially during Monsoon, are the worst, and much worse than typical ones in the Atlantic. The phenomenon of "Black Rain" is peculiar to that part of the world. So trans Indian Ocean flights may be the ones more affected than the trans-equatorial Atlantic and Pacific flights.


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## jis

Discussion on airliners.net suggests now that initial data from CVR and FDR should be available within four weeks. Of course the complete analysis etc. will take much longer.

There are some interesting undercurrents about the credibility of the French investigative authority, which is accused by some of having tampered with data recorders in the past before handing them over to investigators. This allegation has been made specifically in connection with a Airbus 320 crash. So they are probably going to be extra cautious to make sure that no apparent impropriety or even appearance thereof happens this time.


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## jis

The third interim report is now out from BEA, and it give an event by event description of what happened with a complete time-line, and frankly it is scary reading. Seems like there were a series of individually recoverable events that cascaded together to lead to disaster with possibly inadequate pilot training and cockpit management playing a significant part.

The report can be found at: http://www.bea.aero/fr/enquetes/vol.af.447/note29juillet2011.en.pdf

Safety Recommendations at: http://www.bea.aero/fr/enquetes/vol.af.447/reco29juillet2011.en.pdf

The passengers never knew anything was amiss since no announcements were made.


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## Ryan

There weren't any announcements, but I would guess that falling at 10,000 feet per minute that they knew that something wasn't right.

Absolutely terrifying - of course it's easy to think rationally about it while sitting at a comfortable desk.


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## jis

Ryan said:


> There weren't any announcements, but I would guess that falling at 10,000 feet per minute that they knew that something wasn't right.
> 
> Absolutely terrifying - of course it's easy to think rationally about it while sitting at a comfortable desk.


I wonder how much the passengers felt, other than a feeling of falling into an air pocket. Afterall even the pilots did not quite understand it, even with the altimeter whizzing away in front of them.


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## saxman

Early indications seem to be that the pitot tubes failed, possibly with ice. Pitot probes are always heated, so I'm sure we'll see something about that. Now the question is if the pilot flying responded correctly. The first thing a pilot learns is stall recovery, and the one thing they have to do is lower the nose, and add full power. The engines were operating normal. Several times the pilot flying raised the nose which upset the situation. It remains to be seen if he knew if they were in a stall. Obviously his airspeed information was not accurate.

Hopefully it's not the same as the Colgan crash in Buffalo. That was totally the pilots' fault.


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## amtrakwolverine

Another flight Birgenair Flight 301 crashed due to blocked pitot tubes. They can be blocked by other things then just ice.

Birgenair Flight 301 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birgenair_Flight_301


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## jis

saxman said:


> Early indications seem to be that the pitot tubes failed, possibly with ice. Pitot probes are always heated, so I'm sure we'll see something about that. Now the question is if the pilot flying responded correctly. The first thing a pilot learns is stall recovery, and the one thing they have to do is lower the nose, and add full power. The engines were operating normal. Several times the pilot flying raised the nose which upset the situation. It remains to be seen if he knew if they were in a stall. Obviously his airspeed information was not accurate.
> 
> Hopefully it's not the same as the Colgan crash in Buffalo. That was totally the pilots' fault.


The Thales Pitot Tubes were known to have this problem, and at least 10 other flights had experienced similar problem (and even in bad weather) (both Airbus and Boeing aircrafts) and recovered. That particular type of Pitot Tube is not used by any responsible airline any more. Air France was in the process of replacing them when this event occurred and even the very aircraft involved was supposed to get the replacement Pitot Tubes before its next flight! Some sections of the press have alleged that they and the French in general dragged their feet for a while since after all Thales is an upstanding French company. Just allegedly mind you. No matter which way you look at it, two and a half French companies are in a bit of a soup it would seem.


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## jis

What was finally determined to have happened to Air France 447 can be seen in this Popular Mechanics article. Extremely serious pilot error causing loss of control and stall. The aircraft itself would have recovered if the pilots had not lost situational awareness as completely as they apparently did.

And Here is the discussion thread on airliners.net.


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## jis

Air France almost pulls off another stall!

http://www.flightglobal.com/news/articles/a340-zoom-climb-inquiry-backs-shock-tactics-372060/


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## PRR 60

jis said:


> Air France almost pulls off another stall!
> 
> http://www.flightglobal.com/news/articles/a340-zoom-climb-inquiry-backs-shock-tactics-372060/


Yikes!

What is the first thing taught in flight school? View and trust your instruments.


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## CHamilton

How Statisticians Found Air France Flight 447 Two Years After It Crashed Into Atlantic 


> After more than a year of unsuccessful searching, authorities called in an elite group of statisticians. Working on their recommendations, the next search found the wreckage just a week later.
> 
> Lawrence Stone and colleagues from Metron Scientific Solutions in Reston, Virginia,... are statisticians who were brought in to re-examine the evidence after four intensive searches had failed to find the aircraft. What’s interesting about this story is that their analysis pointed to a location not far from the last known position, in an area that had almost certainly been searched soon after the disaster. The wreckage was found almost exactly where they predicted at a depth of 14,000 feet after only one week’s additional search.
> Today, Stone and co explain how they did it. Their approach was to use a technique known as Bayesian inference which takes into account all the prior information known about the crash location as well as the evidence from the unsuccessful search efforts. The result is a probability distribution for the location of the wreckage.


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## Rover

Air France, Airbus face trial in Paris over fatal 2009 Rio-Paris crash


Air France and Airbus will face trial starting Monday in Paris, 13 years after the crash of an A330 shortly after takeoff from Rio de Janeiro that resulted in the deaths of 228 people. Civil parties…




www.france24.com





After more than 10 years of proceedings and a reversal of the court's decision to dismiss the case, Air France and Airbus will be tried on charges of "involuntary manslaughter". From Monday, the two aeronautical giants will appear before the Paris criminal court. They will face the families of the 228 passengers and crew members who died onboard flight AF447 from Rio de Janeiro to Paris when it crashed on June 1, 2009. 

Civil parties, who have been caught up for a decade in a judicial labyrinth of expertise and counter-expertise reports requested by Airbus, have been long awaiting this extraordinary trial.


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## west point

This is what to do unless a pilot has visual reference to the horizon. Whenever unusual indications of airspeed & or altitude place the airplane attitude horizon level wings and on the zero pitch. airplanes usuall have 3 independent attitude indicators. Set engine power to whatever setting needed for last known cruise altitude or slightly less if that attitude would cause too much airspeed.. Then check wings for ice and look at windshiel wiper shaft connection for ice Usually for most airplanes first location to ice.

At lower altitudes set attitude for whatever pitch will hold altitude and airspeed. If known ground hazards set attitude recommended and engines to max continous power. 

Then tell ATC you have a problem. All the above will only take 10 - 15 seconds. Now why Air Chance experienced pilots did not do this ????


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