Hello all,
Quote from bugg smasher:
a thorough weather brief from a competent dispatcher, [...] the very recent addition of an in-cockpit internet connection that provides us near real-time satellite and radar composite snaps of severe weather areas
I fly for Air France, and both these things are NOT available to us...
We do have SATCOM though, and regularly receive wx advisories from our Ops during flight, warning us of CAT, severe wx or other flight risks ahead of us.
There seems to be no doubt that the A/C entered a monstruous CB, but the only question, to which we probably will NEVER have a definitive answer is : How did they end up in there ?
ALL crewmembers were very thorough professionnals, one of the F/Os even had responsabilities as a "Pilot-on-watch" at our Operations center, and was extremely aware of the dangers of such flights (as were - no doubt - the other two, which I didn't know personnaly...).
As we all know, it's never just one thing... It's a sequence of events...