To assume that the AF crew was operating this flight, transatlantic and during night, with the WX radar turned of or without monitoring any WX radar returns is an insult for the crew, an insult for all of us professional pilots!

These pilots where professionals, trained for 100s of hours with a vast experience.

So NO, the WX radar off theory does not FLY!

What happened here is a domino effect of events, leading to a disaster! You can be sure of that!

Radar contact was not "Lost". AF447 simply transitioned to an area of non-Radar coverage. They did not make the proper radio calls to report their position, but there are many possible reasons for this.

Four minutes from 35,000 feet is over 8,000 feet per minute. If the report was triggered by the same event that caused the aircraft loss, that's a rate of descent faster than would be achieved by the pilots in an intact aircraft in an emergency descent.

It would also be no surprise that no radio calls were received, as the pilots wouldn't be wearing radio headsets in HF airspace (you only put them on if you are called over SELCAL, or intend to transmit a position report.)

Well, nobody here knows what was the cause. Idol speculation is pretty harmless, but the only clue, until the aircraft is found, is the ACARS messages.

The CEO of AF says its to early to know what happened.

I think it will take years to find out for sure.

PPRuNe is again shown on the background screen of CNN news anchor Richard Quest, I guess he's reading it, I wonder what his username is? :}

If the AF 330 had a SATCOM system then they would be utilising FANS am I right. The entire Atlantic is covered by a FANS system from Santa Maria, Atlantico, SAL and New York area.

Otherwise it would be only an HF/VHF system. but, if technical information is sent via the aircraft AIMS to maintenance then I'm assuming that there was a satellite link up or ACARS link up. Then from the last ACARS message or FANS position the aircraft's last position can be fixed within an hour flying radius...

Any ideas?

Depends on where you work I suppose. I and many of my colleagues wear those designer noise cancelling headsets out over the water. Also, a hand mike is readily available at each crew station. We normally have 121.5 in one VHF, 123.45 in the other and ACARS on the third one.

We have ATC on one HF, HFDL on the other one.

Thunderstorms. IF (big IF) this was the cause (we'll probably never know for sure) of this, it's a shame. When will pilots EVER learn to respect thunderstorms ?!?! Thunderstorms have claimed far too many aircraft and lives already. There is absolutely NO excuse to be anywhere near those things.....especially in the middle of an ocean!

Checkboard
This is just an example of silly, misinformed posts on this thread. Pilots still listen out even in HF airspace by means of a loudspeaker and making a transmission is as simple as grabbing a hand held mike. They would have been tuned to 123.45 and 121.5 and able to transmit on both at any time.

I am not sure my priority when dealing with a malfunctioning aircraft in these particular airspaces would be communicating with a difficult to reach ATCO. Comms with Atlantico are notoriously poor and they would have been out of range of both SAL and Dakar (VHF), the latter sharing the poor comms status. HF contact with most of these ATC centres is problematic due congestion and various other factors. CPDLC is available now on a trial basis with Dakar, whether it was used, or if it was, whether it was being monitored will be investigated I am sure.

Unless one is sure of what one is writing here why on earth would one bother to post?

This is a sad event - no doubt not caused by one isolated fact.

Pilots DO respect thunderstorms, believe you me!

Sat picture
 

According to the BBC, it would appear that the French have asked the Americans if their super spy satellites managed to pick up the last known position and also to see what the wx position was.

AF appear to be very professional in their response to this awful catastrophe. Good disaster management is being shown by AF and the French government.

I know the server is struggling at the moment so I wont elaborate but AF's approach is highly professional

The A330 can be flown quite well on the RAT, especially in it is being powered by the hydraulic engine pumps i.e. you will still have AP1, WX radar. Unfortunately, as is usual whatever occurred will have been a seris of events.
Are AF330's fitted with Northrop Grummon-Litton ADIRUs?

Air France A330-200 missing
 

Flying over the atlantic in the middle of the night (to be fair the moon is currently 68% full) in the middle of towering CBs is a stressful situation but hardly uncommon. Crashes are hardly ever the result of only one thing gone wrong. The crew might have been trying to navigate around towering CBs or might have decided to fly into one and as a result were probably battling severe turbulence. Now to a very stressful situation add another problem, temporary loss of electrical power (whether caused by lightning strike or another undetermined factor) which would have caused the AP to disconnect, forcing the crew, on top of all the other issues they were having to deal with to manually fly the aircraft. A temporary loss of spacial orientation might have led to a complete loss of control which could have been impossible to recover from. All speculation of course at this stage.

hotelmode.

Highly cynical comment but I'm cynical too.

AF appear to have put in crisis centres before the news hit the TV screens... highly important for the relatives.

Theya re also being very up front about what sparse information they have, again it keeps speculation (which can run in odd directions) to a minimum.

Respecting CBs.........
 

To DC-ATE:


What makes You possibly think and write such a nonsense?

I do not know any pilot in an airline cockpit who would knowingly fly into a storm cell.

I remember one day Peking ATC would deny me to avoid WX and turn to the right of track. I just did it. I think we are paid for taking decisions and not to let ATC or stupidity guide us into harms way.

If it happened there must have been a reason for it.......

Sat Picture
 

That's a pretty nasty looking orange spot out there in the mid-atlantic on that equatorial string of storms. Might not look much from 22,500 miles but if you're right on top of it that is something else. These things can bubble up at night if the water temp is greater than 80 Farenheit.

Wire mesh to redirect a lightningbolt? Designed in accordance with FAA regulations? Brought to you by the same free market Capitol Hill lobbyists who watered down the SEC? yeah right.

Reports that Flight 447 sent a dozen messages over 4 minutes
 

AFP reports at AFP: Air France flight vanishes after multiple breakdowns
And Daily Kos relates at Daily Kos: Air France Flight 447 presumed lost in Atlantic (UPDATED 2X) :
CNN quotes Gourgeon about what may be Flight 447's last moments before it lost contact.I obviously don't know if this is accurate, but 12 messages over 4 minutes would seem to relate a lot more than we've heard so far.

To CNN and all
 

I'm an airline Captain with hundreds of ITCZ crossings. Believe me, it'll keep you awake.
In darkness with all that lightning going on around them they would've surely have the Weather radar on and noses glued to the windshield to look outside.
Proper use of Weather radar is difficult and needs practice, but, considering the experience of those pilots you can be sure that that was covered.
Looking at the Sat plots of the weather at their datalink message to their maintenance base you can determine they were in the middle of the worst weather on the planet at time of transmission.
No, a lightning strike will NOT bring any plane down. But I have heard of cases where it wrecked the (only) weather radar antenna on board. And that would have been like the worse place and moment to loose that piece of equipment.
Funny, really, if you ask me. With all redundancy on board there's actually only ONE weather radar antenna that shares it's signal with two independent weather radar computers. I've had a case of loosing that single antenna in Take off from MIA in horrendous weather. Luckily for me and my passengers Miami radar gave me precise heading instructions to stay clear of those huge showers. I guess AF447 was not that lucky there....

DC-ATE Thunderstorms. IF (big IF) this was the cause (we'll probably never know for sure) of this, it's a shame. When will pilots EVER learn to respect thunderstorms ?!?! Thunderstorms have claimed far too many aircraft and lives already. There is absolutely NO excuse to be anywhere near those things.....especially in the middle of an ocean!

Never worked with a pilot that did't respect thunderstorms and weather.

Absolutley!

Jets flying through thunderstorms and taking lightening stikes happens on a DAILY basis. There is an awful lot more to this accident than that !!!

How about the ELT? Does that work underneath water?


Regards
JZ123

A few years ago on a B777, to see the ITCZ while northbound (from a couple of hundred miles) sparking away at night AFTER the radar antenna had failed (as Steve suggests, two radar systems but the data from a single antenna), together with ACARS and Satcom down left me with only one option... Lagos.

Qantas plane given 'piggy-back' ride across Pacific by another aircraft after it had to fly blind with equipment failure | Mail Online
.
The above link may be of intrest to some, also the paste below.
.
Centralized maintenance computer–Airbus

A significant step forward for Airbus maintenance is the centralized maintenance computer. "Formerly, built-in test equipment was scattered and you had to work on several computers on the aircraft," Tessier said. Now the CMC gives comprehensive information (including history of parameters) in plain English. Some pieces of information are in hexadecimal format but "these are very specific details that only the manufacturer is interested in," Boniau added.

Datalink via the satellite-based ACARS system allows real-time monitoring of in-flight aircraft. Data are received in Charles-de-Gaulle and forwarded to other bases if necessary. "This way, we can anticipate what kind of maintenance equipment and spare parts are needed at the next stopover," Boniau said. Sometimes, experts can even find a solution that can be performed during flight. "This is often a reset of the system," Boniau said.

Radios Don't Work Under Water
 

No, and they don't transmit four minutes worth of data after water contact, either in a crash or a controlled ditching.

Sonar pingers do send out sound waves after water immersion. They are installed in the data recorders and the batteries last about 30 days.

There is a huge amount of unremitting drivel written on this website, some of which seems unfortunately to be read by Richard Quest...

Apart from a strong of ACARS messages, nobody here knows a thing about what happened last night. Uninformed speculation about the manufacture of an extensively tested and operated aircraft with experienced crews serves absolutely no useful purpose to anyone.

At this stage, we know only that a tragedy occurred and that the aircraft reported numerous failures caused by circumstances unknown.


I suggest that anyone wishing to speculate about any of those matters, either in the media or elsewhere, consult a list of all accidents since the Wright brothers took to the skies, and list out all possible accidents that have occured since then.

Anything else is uninformed speculation.

If they were on top, the moon was up last night while AF 477 was in flight.

I hit the ITCZ mostly in Asia. There are cells that tower in the moonlight but are all but invisible on radar. You can be cruising along fat dumb and happy and suddenly find your self in a cell. I try to stay high but keep a good stall buffet margin in case the bumps start.

dix188 Wrong.

There may be considerable difficulty in avoiding storm cells in that part of the world, particularly if there's a broad band of them.

I've been through the ITCZ many times en-route to Ascension. Sometimes you've just got to to for the 'Least Bad' option as depicted by your wx radar/Mk1 eyeball. Not fun.

No-one here on this forum, or elsewhere it seems, knows what happened so some of the crass comments appearing here are way out of line.

RIP to all involved.

Seems to me that given the forecast and reported (by the Captain to his Company) "hard" turbulence due to dynamic CB activity over the area they were in, and the aircraft was operating at 35,000' loaded with fuel for Paris, the starting point for speculation (if you must) would be the possibility of a jet upset/loss of aerodynamic contol situation if the aircraft entered moderate-to-severe turbulence (such as you'll find above and around developing CBs), warmer ISA deviations than forcecast with even light to moderate turbulence, or an unfortunate combination of both.

Heavy weights while operating from the mid-30s up combined severe turbulence can lead to a hairy "test-pilot" situation very quickly. Cruise altitude tables etc. do not account for it, and although an airliner is stressed to survive severe turbulence encounters with "merely" broken equipment,components and/or injured passengers and crew while the wings stay on, the stresses involved in recovering from a jet upset/loss of aerodynamic control at altitude can quickly exceed those parameters. Having to recover from one at night while possibly descending through or into the CBs that put you there in the first place reduces everything to a strong odds-against situation.

Data messages indicating failed/failed electrics and/or components during prolonged moderate - severe turbulence as they get bounced around wouldn't suprise me, but the sudden loss of an aircraft directly due to a CB-generated lightning strike is almost a non-starter theory given what you're also finding along with it (possible extreme turbulence, hail shafts) while operating heavy at high altitude.

Just my 2 cents, and a tangental reminder for all of us operators to heed the red flag of moderate or > turbulence being forecast at altitude enroute and carefully consider the aerodynamics for our given weights and temps for likely encounters. You never want to get into a boxed-in situation where conditions dictate you must descend to maintain aerodynamic control but descending also means you're no longer able to deviate around tops of CBs but rather find yourself more in the #@$@.

Oh, and anyone downplaying CBs because "they flew through one and it came out Ok" is, quite simply, an idiot for so many reasons and at so many levels they don't belong in a cockpit where they have to routinely deal with grown-up weather conditions. They sound like the worst kind of severe-weather neophyte probably not even understanding the the differences between airmass and steady-state and what they produce, what K Index and Skew-T are, and couldn't you the relationship between the reflectivity dB on their own contouring airborne radar and it's relationship to the probability of turbulence/severity and hail/diameter encounters let alone the basic, proper use of tilt and gain.

Post 299
 

It is not improbable, in case of partial Electrical or Network failure to have several maintenance messages/alerts appearing on the WD / sent to the ground; the big question is : are these messages related to one another (originating from the failure of a unique system) or are they independent (weather conditions put the aircraft under so much stress that several systems fail within a few seconds).

AF , BEA and Airbus must have been working on it today/yesterday.
We know no communications were made between A/C and ATC at the time of the disaster, but knowing what was said within the cockpit and the noises in the cokpit (CVR's recording suggesting a lightning strike?) + FDR telling us what weather was encountered.

Let's hope the wreckage will be found soon and the DFDRs localised promptly as this accident may also cast doubts onto the specifications that current A/C must satisfy. I already hear you scream but what if extreme weather conditions were met (hail, lightning, turbulence, heavy gusts, ... or combinations) and brought this airplane down?
We will need the DFDR to cut speculation short but most of all to know what happened to flight 447. Media already start using movie-like headlines about this accident.

Hi all. First post on PPrune, unfortunatly for the worst reasons :(
First things first: I'm just an aviation enthusiast, nothing more... A "MSFS Pilot" as you (pro) guys like to refer to us. I just hope that doesn't make me some kind of "persona no grata"...

That said, just a couple thoughts about this:

Besides the ACARS (automated) message(s), there isn't (AFAIK) a single registered (reported) comm attempt or distress message. Not on HF, not on VHF (guard, for instance), SATCOM, nothing that we know about.
That just makes me believe in an (unknown caused) explosive decompression that also rendered the aircraft's comms U/S. The "decompression" alarm (ACARS) may somehow corroborate it.

Forget the "causes" (T/S, CB, severe turbulence) and focus on the "outcome": it was fast. Way too fast.



./J

Flyinheavy -
Well, I won't go through and list all the accidents that were the result of a thunderstorm encounter. The statistics are readily available elsewhere and besides, I said IF...BIG IF. I was merely pointing out that pilots have been known to fly into or near TRWs with fatal results. The record speaks for itself.:(

Other a/c
 

No one has news about others traffics in the same area at the time?
Would be interesting hear about their crossing to avoid useless speculations....just my opinion

godspeed...to our mates in the plane and to all people onboard

This is ABOSOLUTE rubbish! Lightning strikes yes, but jets flying through thunderstorms on a daily basis? Who? Where? Pilots avoid and deviate around thunderstorms on a daily basis, and inadvertent encounters flying through the guts of one will more than likely result in damage or injury if they're lucky. If jets were flying routinely flying through thunderstorms every day we'd also routinely be losing aircraft to microbursts/etc near airport boundaries and suffering jet upset/hail-encounter losses at altitudes.

I cringe to think of non-pilots reading that statement, and have nightmares of pilots inexperienced with severe weather taking it on. What did you do, amble through a dissipating airmass shower once that was contouring red and came this this conclusion that it's no big deal?

Contrary to what you've asserted, there ABSOLUTELY DOES NOT NEED to be "a lot more to an accident" than flying through a thunderstorm....it's one waiting to happen. The bloody record of CB-produced accidents proves it.

Cabin fire or a bomb would be far more likely than severe weather to bring the aircraft down. I wonder why AF are concentrating on wx rather than the more likely scenarios? Maybe we'll never know the truth?

(quick and dirty translation of DenisG's post):

"Brazil's "substitute president, José Alencar, has stated tonight that he has received "vague" news about the whereabouts of the AF's Airbus A330 that has disappeared this sunday with 228 souls on board, between Rio and Paris.

"There's a vague report of a brasilien aircraft, from TAM, that would have saw something catching fire somewhere in the [Atlantic] Ocean. That was the plane that arrived this dawn", stated Alencar while questioned if the brasilien government had any preliminary information about the Airbus location."

./J

This is the correct translation.... follow this statement..

Would it be possible that the crew was only able to communicate through ACARS, hence the 4 minute communication? From what I've read on ACARS sites it's not just limited to automated technical info:

eg:
N156DL B767-3P6[ER] 25354/406 1506 PQ-DK [A40-GR]
Delta Airlines USA DL0124 Atlanta GA USA-Brussels Belgium
Using Ground Station E Amsterdam (AMS) .Message No. M57A
Message Type 80 POSITION REPORT
IN RANGE TYPE REPORT/23 Atlanta Hartsfield Int. Airport GA USA / Brussels Airport Belgium .N156DL
/DESTINATION STATION: Brussels Airport Belgium /ESTIMATED RAMP TIME 0725/CHAIR /MNR /PASSENGER AGENT REQUIRED TO MEET FLIGHT N/MEDICAL
N/SECURITY ASSISTANCE REQUIRED N/LANGUAGE INTERPRETER REQUIRED N/LAVATORY SERVICING Y/CABIN SERVICING REQUIRED Y

or:
9V-SPA B747-412 26550/1040 ER-AF
Singapore Airlines SQ0308 Singapore Singapore-London Heathrow United Kingdom
Using Ground Station X Birmingham (BHX) .Message No. 203A
Message Type H1 CENTRAL FAULT DISPLAY (Up/Downlink)
#T2B/ London Heathrow Airport UK KKSQ London Heathrow Airport UK KDSQ. ENGINEER NEEDED
PASSENGER MR REYNOLDS (14K) HAS DROPPED HIS NEW DIGITAL CAMERA REMOTE CONTROL IN NARROW SLOT NEAR ARMREST.
SUSPECTED TO BE INSIDE AREA UNDER SEAT.

(source: Vliegtuigen en Communicatie:Acars Wacars Analyser - Stego)