The various protections available in each flight law may be explained on this site:

SmartCockpit - Airbus 330

Thats a good source of generic Airbus information. It's not specific to each company but most conform to the airbus procedures.

The short answer is that there are still protections available in Alternate Law, not Abnormal Law, although I guess thats gramtically correct, but that's just semantics.

I'm out for tonight, catch up again from Oz.

re: tailchase post at 1922
 

"59 km seperation of debris fields possibly suggests aerial breakup into 2 components."

If it were on solid ground, maybe... but you have to take ocean currents into the consideration here. On top of that, there's no confirmation yet that the two debris fields are related

I am thinking Pulkovo 612, the other recent instance when a plane crashed during cruise in a severe thunderstorm. Except no sophisticated electronics or composites were involved. That case was thoroughly investigated, and it was concluded that flight at near ceiling + severe turbulence = stall +double flameout = loss of control.

Optimum use of Weather Radar
 

http://www.airbus.com/store/mm_repos...V_WX-SEQ07.pdf

Of particular interest from this note is (emphasis mine):

"It is important to note that reflectivity of particles is not directly proportional to the hazard that may be encountered in a cell. Air can be very humid, when close to the sea for instance. In this case, thermal convection will produce clouds that are full of water. These clouds will have a high reflectivity, but will not necessarily be a high threat. On the other hand, there are equatorial overland regions where converging winds produce large scale uplifts of dry air. The resulting weather cells have much less reflectivity than mid-latitude convective cells, making them much harder to detect. However turbulence in or above such clouds may have a higher intensity than indicated by the image on the weather radar display."

And CMC ( central maintenance system ) is powered by AC1 normal and AC ESS on gnd ......

Jo Cedar
 

One of the commercial MV diverted to search looks like it is in a search pattern now. Link to position plot.

JO CEDAR tracking map

While debris reports give locations to the southeast of route, various maps of ocean currents in that area shows the flow to be toward northwest. That would rule out currents.

Brazilian secretary of defence Jobim just stated that the FAB has spotted a 5 km wide (long?) area of debries and that there would be no more doubts that they are of AF447...

DAC
 

Watching to a FAB spokesman on TV today I heard the word barrel/drum.
Makes me wonder about the cargo manifest and if there was any DAC, Dangerous Air Cargo.

Reuters, Tuesday June 2 2009

Not likely to be the case, currents are likely to be uniform over several 10's of miles so if debris went in over an area of a few miles they would stay that way for some time. Even if they happened to fall at a boundary between 2 oceanic currents the drift would only be a Knt or two, insignificant over a few hours. A few exceptions of course but I don’t think there would be any in this area.

Final Four Minutes of Reports
 

We can deduce:

The Satcom was powered at least until after the last ACARS message, so other systems to keep the plane controllable should have been powered also.

There was not so much flight upset that it took the Satcom antenna out of line of sight of the geostationary satellite, which would have been almost directly overhead. What kind of antenna did it have?

The Satcom antenna was receiving valid steering signals from an IRU to keep it pointed, since it was surely a steered antenna.

GB

AF447 SAR effort
 

Hi Guardian 11
I'm not a pilot. But I have a question to the FAB (Brazilian Air Force); The last tower contact with cindacta 3 was 22:33 right? At 2:20 FAB started to search for the lost aircraft. My question is; why did it take 4 hours for them to realize that?

Perhaps to better understand the problem, it would be best to review the timeline leading up to the mishap...

At 2233LT, AF447 performed a VHF contact with CINDACTA III (SOLANT ACC), reporting INTOL, indicating that it expected to report TASIL at 2320LT;

At 2248LT, AF447 exited CINDACTA III radar coverage. At the time the flight was cruising at FL350 and 453kts - as per the flight plan;

At 2314LT, AF447 issued a number of ACARS messages to AF maintenance center;

At 2320LT, AF447 failed to report its passage by TASIL and entry into Dakar ACC.

Failure to report waypoint passage at the expected time does not entail the immediate launching of a SAR operation. Unless, of course, a distress call is made or an ELT transmission is detected - and neither occurred. Under those circumstances, there is a standard waiting period before placing SAR resources on alert status. At the moment I cannot recall the duration of that waiting period, but I very faintly recall a 90min period - but I might be in error.

Hence, should memory be serving me correctly, the Brazilian SAR system would only be placed on alert footing at around at 00:50LT. Once placed on alert status - and in the absence of solid information as to where the event took place - you can add an hour for mission planning and preparation.

As for resorting to Mirage 2000s, bear in mind that these are based at SBAN - which entails a 1.880 km flight to SBNT - easily a 2:30hr flight. They would have to land at SBNT, refuel and then take-off to fly some 1.200 km to the general area where the mishap might have taken place. Although I do not have the Mirage 2000C performance charts at hand, I think it would be safe to say that a pair of Mirage 2000Cs would be unable to execute a meaningful search pattern, in the dark of night, for more than 10min before reaching "bingo fuel"...

Cheers

For what it's worth (not much):

Today, a TP pilot that was flying a paralell route (in his words about 80nm west from the AF's route) at basically the same time and in a similar acft (not said in the interview, but it would be a TP's A330 or A340) was interviewed in a portuguese TV channel (TVI).
For those who understand portuguese, the vid of the interview can be watched here.

Basically he said that:
- He doesn't believe a plane can be brought down only by turbulence. Although not impossible but highly unprobable.
- He doesn't believe in a single factor for the accident
- He stated that aircrafts are prepared for lightening strikes.
- He found turbulence on his flight path but nothing "unusual" for that particular route. He did had to re-route to avoid, but nothing unusual (10/15nm).
- He didn't hear any distress call from the AF's crew
- He acknowledge that sometimes they experience difficulties with radio (HF) transmissions and "use" other aircrafts to relay the information
- He DID hear some requests from the ATC to other acft in the 'area' to try to reach AF447 on different frequencies, including another TP flight that departed from Natal

He spent a good part of the interview "evading" the (usual at that TV station) sensacionalism-inducing questions, and stick to the (IMHO correct) posture of "noone knows nothing for sure at the moment and I'm not going to speculate, but it was a strange and fast happening".

./J
(an idiotic anorak)

If the debris is in the north equatorial counter current it could drift eastward at up to 3 knots which is like 70nm in 24hours:

from: The North Equatorial Counter Current

hey wiley...check your definitions of turbulence
 

saw you on CNN and you spoke of mild turbulence

that isn't in my AIM!
light

moderate

severe

extreme

Well as someone has seen fit to delete my link to and quote from the BBC lets try again. An official statment says that the wreckage 400 miles off the Brazilian coast is from the aircraft.

France is sending a reasearch ship with two mini subs.

Does anyone know the exact level of turbulence reported by the flight some 14 minutes prior to the last transmission of data?

I've heard the Air France head use the term "heavy" turbulence. Would this correspond to ''severe'' or extreme. Was the turbulence report made by the crew?

Applying proper recovery technique might not be possible if the aircraft was descending in conditions as severe as what caused the jet upset in the first place, say, down through the CBs they were flying above and around. On top of that, there's the issue of engine flameout due to aerodynamic blanketing, hail, fuel pump unporting, or component failure of auto-relight features, etc.

The fact is, most pilots train for unusual attitude recovery where the recovery is accomplished in benign conditions with all flight controls working normally, a full panel, not to mention the engines running and outside visual reference. Many places don't even give "jet upset" training...i.e. loss of aerodynamic control at high altitude.

And a real-world jet upset, let alone sever or extreme turbulence involving all the forces, cannot be rendered or trained well in a simulator because the test pilots during certification don't even put the aircraft through those paces.

Ole, of course ocean currents aren't constant. Go here, click the map section for recent charted flow depictions. You can even play a java-loop. No eastward flow is depicted in the debris area
http://i.cdn.turner.com/cnn/2009/ima...azil.plane.jpg