AF 447 Search to resume

[bearfoil]

JD-EE

Let me attempt a different approach. The Vertical Stabiliser is mounted to the Fuselage in cantilever fashion. Pilots will tell you that it is certainly strong, but also an elegant method for attachment of A/C bits, one to the other. Before the engineering and materials were developed, there would have been "struts" on either side of such a long component, to attenuate some of the leverage encountered in Ruddered flight. It is this leverage that is the "design consideration", for there is no threat that the VS can be pulled out by its "Roots" by some Brobdignagian Gardener, as he would a weed, or you would pull a leaf out of your three ring binder. There is not a vertical component at rest, on T/O LNDG, or stable flight. A very short stop into a wall at considerable velocity (at 90 degrees) would impart a radial stress, I propose that is not a possibility in the engineering specifications. Likewise, the wings and Horizontal Stabilizers are cantilevered.

Your challenge is to posit a situation where at low velocity, the VS was rooted out with a minimal forward velocity, at which it is its strongest relative to failure. My challenge is to propose a designed for failure in its weakest strength at very high speed.

Kinetic energy. One G. Sounds innocuous enough, but be careful. The a/c is designed for structural limit load at 1.51 (stress limit).
What is the device that brakes 200 tonnes at precisely one G in continuous fashion? There isn't one. Straw man, anyway. At 475 miles per hour, it takes very little "sideways" to create extremely high loads on this a/c. You are saying that somehow the a/c decelerated by 350 mph in thirty seconds, then fell like a speedy leaf into the sea?

I think the spoiler tells a tale of desperate deceleration (attempted); with its loss, there would be unbalanced drag, making things worse, if in fact there was a pilot making the attempt.

My tentative conclusion is this.

Airbus has allowed the 330's autopilot way too long a leash. At cruise, trusting a/p with roll excursions, pitch, and yaw, of the value prescribed, means that when it is overwhelmed, it whimpers and leaves, leaving the a/c at the edge of every parameter, with an airplane on the verge of loss of control.

The Pitot Tubes have two Heat selections, neither capable of its defined errand. It is too cool or it is too hot. (Don't touch).

The a/c itself is/was developed with masterful solutions to problems. These are automatic solutions, however, and when the PF gets the a/c at cruise in the dark with red white and blue on the panel similar to fireworks, the manual system is unfairly and impossibly challenged. I propose that the weather may not have been a factor, but that the loss of airdata fooled an otherwise competent platform to:

1. Make corrections that weren't needed, or desirable

2. Left the cockpit to the control of two people who had been hypnotised by it, and were deprived of Situational Awareness, to an extent that they never caught up with a workload that was 75 percent incorrect, by observation.