.... trying to catch up
Without good news reports in this part of the world and having tried to wade through 80 pages of the thread with intermittent success, is it fair to say the position is ????? :
The AF447, an A 330, departed from the cruise at FL350 without any radio calls.
It appears to have suffered an inflight break up or at least a partial break up which made it uncontrollable.
Potential reasons are overspeed or stall due to issues with speed sensing or violent turbulence in CBs. The aeroplane's composite structure may have some or no bearing.
AF are replacing some parts of the pitot system because of issues of icing on one type of pitot assembly found on some airbusses. Some other owners in the world fleet of A330 and other models of Airbus are following suit or may even be further advanced with retofitting.
A number of ACARS messages over a 4 minute period indicate various malfunctions or changes in system configuaration but without specialist access to the data it is not clear what that is telling us.
When / If the FDR and CVR are recovered that may / probably will, tell us more.
Without shooting me out of the sky for not having read all the posts (I have an airport to build) is that a fair summary ? or can somebody please help me understand the full story to date.
Dave Gittins
Last edited by Dave Gittins; 15th Jun 2009 at 14:11.
Reason: corrections to add "stalling" and more about the pitots following some help from others