Ciao.
Trovo interessanti analogie, a parte gli esiti, con quanto accadde a questo volo.
Vi prego di sucsare l'assenza di traduzione, ma spero possiate da soli farvi una idea di cosa capit' allora e del perche' possa essere nuovamente capitato.
Solo supposizioni per il terribile ultimo incidente, mentre il report che troverete segnalato in pdf reca sconcertanti fatti e fotografie a dir poco emblematiche...
Join Date: May 2003
Location: The Roman Empire
Posts: 780
One maybe little known accident involving AF can help start thinking about the unthinkable.
It is quite obvious the airplane was destroyed inflight by extreme turbulence.
Before breaking apart, two things typically happen: the loss of cabin pressure and electrical failures.
The doors come loose or open, and the pax cabin ceiling collapse, tearing apart cables of all kinds...
The accident I'm referring to is reported in details on the French BEA accident reports site:
http://www.bea.aero/docspa/1996/f-tf...f-tf960905.pdf
None would think a crew could try to cross a severe squall line on purpose, instead of a long rerouting or inflight return to the point of departure...
None of the general public could imagine a very stupid design and practice can lead to unaware entry into severe weather, but...
... fact is, as already reported by other people here, the dim selector of the weather display can be turned all the way to off by pilots who leave the airplane to the next crew, and the next crew can very well skip this detail.
I'll refrain from making comments on both of them, but the result is (I've seen this happen various times) one can think there is no weather when actually heading toward a huge storm...
But above all, let's resume quickly what happened on the night of 5 september 1996.
Air France 744, F-GITF, flight AF437 Johannesburg to Paris, about two hundred something pax onboard.
Weather radar antenna became inoperative just before landing on the previous flight.
Instead of delaying the flight, the commercial pressure on the captain was too strong,
and the decision was made to cross the whole Afican continent, at night, with no weather radar!.
A reroute was planned, slightly longer passing over Burkina Faso, but unfortunately meteorology is not an exact science, and the storms on the satellite image they were provided in Joburg were not the only ones, actually...
Amazing as it might seem, the captain went to sleep approaching the FIT - or ITCZ - and only the two copilots were in the cockipt when F-GITF hit hard cbs...
The result was: pax roof collapsed, people flew across the cabin, TV screens crushed some of them, doors 5 left and right signalled open,
and a woman died of her injuries.
A diversion was made to Marseille.
Don't know if the captain went to jail for his crime, but I doubt it.
In conclusion, I won't be surprised at all if the reason for the A330 crash is actually similar to that one.
Before entering real bad weather, one has to make a decision.
Once you are in there, it's too late and you get what you get...