I think it has already been stated that the recorders have been recovered and will be read by the NTSB

Nowt to do with Namibia, if they were conducting the investigation we could be confident of seeing a final report and we would probably have had an interrim by now.

Embraer will be involved and maybe a year from now they will recieve a confidential draft report for comment. As is usual for Angola, the final report will be buried to avoid embarrasing anyone.

The Namibian - Nam radar captured plane fall (News | Namibia)


Officially naught to do with Angola, rather Moz (aircraft registered there) and Nam where it crashed


"He said the black boxes and voice recorders of the plane, which were retrieved from the scene of the crash on Saturday, will be sent to the United States for analysis as part of the investigations into the accident.

According to Nengola, a Namibian investigator will accompany the voice boxes and the voice recorders to the state-of-the-art National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) laboratories in Washington DC for the analysis.

Although he could not say when exactly the black boxes and voice recorders will be sent to the USA, Nengola indicated that this could be as early as today.

He said some investigators from the NTSB arrived in Namibia yesterday while two more from Brazil also joined the investigation team"

Hmmmm - did it come down inside the namibian border ?, there seems to be some confusion about which side of the Namibia / Angola fence it landed.

Namibia is very good at publishing reports.

TAG,

You're wrong. Embraer is already there and will help in the investigation. The team is huge.

It came down in Namibia. When looking at a map this is a strange extension of Namibia running east between Angola and Botswana, only about 50 km wide. Guess this is lucky for the outcome of the investigation on the cause of the crash.

The "Caprivi Strip." a.k.a Okavango Panhandle, etc. Created to give Namibia (then German West Africa) access to the Zambezi River.

Anyway - I'm waiting for the data. I can imagine numerous scenarios that account for the rapid descent and lack of radio transmissions as reported so far. But without further detail they are just possibilities, not probabilities.

And I'm willing to wait. Absent an obviously identifiable and imminent threat to other aircraft and crews, I don't see a lot of value in handling investigations as "data dumps" into the social-mediasphere.

According some recent sources two very important informations were released some hours ago.

1) There was some luggage collected in Botswana Soil...!

2) Searching for 2 bodies still going...

If this 2 items are true, can we be in the presence of some fuselage ruptured, explosive decompression or even structural failure?

First of all:
Again, there are not too many proven ways to get a modern airliner crashing down from cruise altitude.
One of the few ways that will surely lead to this is any kind of explosive device. Be it from the outside (shot down - not so likely) or the inside.
And these two bits of information seems to fit quite well to this kind of incident.

The only mysterious bit in such an instance would be why there was no distress call received.

Structural failure would theoretically be another possibility but in a pretty new aircraft of a type with a (so far) impeccable record this doesn't seem terribly likely.
Occam's Razor says: Rather Not.

Here's waiting for more information.

Emphasis on IF. Investigation sources do confirm two bodies unaccounted for, but I have not seen any reliable source suggesting that they are being searched for anywhere other than the crash site.

Source ?

I have read an article in a newspaper stating two bodies are still missing.
Could have caused by aircraft disintegrate in midair.

However it is also possible the remains of the two bodies are at the crashsite. The police found only one body intact. he rest were either dismembered or strewn into pieces of flesh. The Villager-Flight TM470: Only one body intact

So DNA research has to be done on all remains of bodies to find out how many bodies are actually found at the crash site.

This is writen by Namibian newssite
The Namibian - Nam radar captured plane fall (News | Namibia)

THE Namibian Directorate of Aircraft Accidents yesterday said they now have radar footage showing how the Mozambican plane, which crashed in the Bwabwata National Park on Friday, fell.

Captain Ericsson Nengola told The Namibian that flight LM470 fell at a steep angle and high speed.

In most cases, Nengola explained, planes falling from a height of 38 000 feet at that speed would disintegrate in midair before crashing. He said the pilots did not send a mayday signa - See more at: The Namibian - Nam radar captured plane fall (News | Namibia)

Before talking about explosives lets first look at something much more likely that happened before - say like Air France flight 447 quite recently, a jetliner full of people plummets from high cruise alt. to sea. Or numerous business jets that fell from their cruising altitudes after penetrating a thunderstorm (a Westwind jet out of Dallas executive airport is a particularly nasty case), so yes, it had happened before that a jet aircraft fell from their cruising altitudes and there were no explosives involved. By the way a structural failure often happens during a way down when pilots try to recover and overstress the aircraft - this was the case for the Westwind scenario - overstress caused the gear door to separate which flew off and severed the horizontal stabilizer. Overstressing has little to do with old/new aircraft.

This is one post that makes a lot of sense. Overstressing (or even structural failure) has little to do with old/new aircraft

The NTSB incident summary on the crash of the Westwind mentioned two posts above can be read here. http://libraryonline.erau.edu/online.../AAR88-01S.pdf

It starts at page 9. Accident happend April 4, 1986. Aircraft had malfunction of radar. Flew into a level 6 thunderstorm and crashed.
No mayday call of the crew. Part of the report listed in this image.


http://oi39.tinypic.com/33jhixl.jpg

And no thunderstorm is even needed to fall from the skies.

China Airlines 747 flight 006 plummeted from FL410 to 11000 feet over Pacific, they barely recovered, at some point they were even upside down (!), they landed in SFO with parts of the aircraft missing. And the cause - pilots badly mishandled an engine failure.

The speculation is getting a bit wild here - it was clearly under control when it met the ground rather slowly. Looks like a forced landing to me.

I highly doubt it was under any 'control' and the 'speculation' was helpful in discounting assertions that only explosives could force such outcome.

olasek:


On autopilot at cruise. No one minding the store. The engine failed and the autopilot tired to compensate, until it couldn't.


As I recall one of the pilots was out of the cockpit and the events overwhelmed the other pilot and F/E.

Just to summarize what we know up till now:

• Aircraft suddenly descended from FL380 at around 6000 fpm with no communications until impact with ground.
• Continuous long straight ground track and relatively large pieces of wreckage remaining indicates low to medium energy impact with ground at a shallow angle (I recall the An12 that crashed on approach fully configured for landing somewhere in central Africa after descending into the ground in patchy fog left a very similar ground track and wreckage)
• At least one engine produced some power at impact.
• Two on board are still unaccounted for.
• Weather at accident site was clear at time of impact, some contradiction whether there may have been T/S cells along the original flight path.
• Pilots plenty of experience both in terms of hours and on type.

I find this the most puzzling accident since AF447, I'm sure Embraer will go to very great lengths to figure out what happened, if will not be obvious from FDR/CVR.

That's what I meant when I said : No proven ways. AF447 was almost a first in its kind. I didn't consider AF447 a proven way, rather (hopefully) an exception.

OK, flying directly into a TS is indeed a proven way but my understanding so far was that they flew along some TS but not straight into it.

But this requires complete LoC upfront which -except flying directly into a cell- is a very rare occurrence.