I guess we’ll have to wait until helicopters are invented.
I don’t believe there are any helicopters with the range to fly from the site of the wreckage to shore. It really is out in the middle of nowhere. Also, there may not be any sort of helipad on the recovery ship. Really, it’s better to take a few more days to get it safely to shore than risk losing it in yet another crash, right?
Agreed. I’m sure they’re at least as eager as we are to find out what happened.
Well, then, it’s great for carrying dense cargo or extremely obese passengers…probably more relevant for latter today’s air traveler.
Can someone explain to me why this particular crash is of interest to so many US citizens?
I think it’s of interest to many people, regardless of nationality. People are concerned about the safety of air travel, and therefore eager to know the causes of any major accidents. Many people are just interested in aviation in general. And obviously this is a predominantly American board.
If what you’re getting at (I’m not saying that it is) is that Americans are keen to find fault with an Airbus design, I don’t think that’s it. There would be just as much interest in the unexplained loss of a Boeing.
Lol, no, hadnt crossed my mind. I was just wondering if that flight had a lot of Americans on board, and so, was getting more attention in the US. I just couldnt understand, out of this explanation, why you guys were having an interest in it. I’m hearing more about the case here than on French television.
I’m a pilot, so I tend to have more interest than average in air crashes. There are a couple of us on the Dope, and we tend to show up in these threads.
There were 2 Americans on board out of 200+, so the interest is not from loss of American life. Partly, it’s the concerns about the safety of air travel which extends across nationalities. Partly, it’s because decent people have empathy for others regardless of nationality.
The crash is puzzling because there is no obvious clue as to what happened from what evidence we currently have.
Actually, I think it IS that to an extent. Airbus was the first contender to take away serious business from Boeing, and was perceived as an upstart and a threat. And their have been suspicions (maybe superstitions?) that they were dangerous substandard aircraft that shouldn’t be sharing the same airspace.
And this is particularly true of the fly-by-wire software. Airbus has had… well, I’m not sure how many, but certainly more than one crash that has been attributed to software failure. That’s particularly scary because it raises the specter of planes flying themselves into the ground regardless of what the pilots do.
Reading this over, I would say this isn’t the attitude of the public, who don’t know this level of detail. Perhaps it’s more accurate to say it’s the attitude of American aviation reporters who generate the stories.
Just a day or so before the first box was found, I watched a NOVA episode that I think came out just this year about the crash. NOVA is not known for wild speculation, and they (or their sources) theorized that due to stormier conditions than anticipated (a big storm was behind a small one and their radar was minimal), all 3 pitot sensors shut down, clogged with ice. Then the autopilot, not being able to navigate without airspeed, disengaged, leading to some pilot errors and a stall.
If you haven’t watched this show, I hope you can do so and give us the benefit of your pilot experience to critique it. My flying experience is very limited, but it sounded quite plausible to me.
I’ll try to find that episode and if I can say anything intelligent about it I’ll come back and post.
It’s called The Crash of Flight 447. Here it is.
Haven’t seen the show, but wouldn’t the pitot tubes all be equipped with anti-ice heating systems? Or is the heat not turned on at all times?
Even if pitot heat is on full blast it is possible to have weather conditions sufficiently severe that the heating system can be overwhelmed and the tube ice over.
Just one of the many reasons pilots are supposed to avoid flying into severe weather. Of course, weather being unpredictable, sometimes that happens anyway.
About that NOVA episode, if I recall correctly they said that the margin of error to prevent a stall is 5 mph speed different. Is this right? Maybe they didn’t explain it right, but they distinctly left the impression that at any moment the airplane could stall, which seemed really sensationalistic.
Under some conditions near the edge of the flight envelope, this is true.
As others have said, it’s of interest to many people around the world because it’s so puzzling. Plenty of us travel on long trans-oceanic flights all the time. To have one drop out of the sky right in the middle of the flight – not near takeoff or landing – is very strange. We’d sure like to know the cause, so that it can be prevented.
Now that the black boxes have been found, any words on some attempt at retrieving the bodies.
Yes. When the chassis to the FDR was found there was mention in the French media (not so sure about English - as I have some ability with French I’ve been following a lot of this through Le Monde) that remains would be recovered where feasible, but they were in extremely bad shape. I’ll avoid grisly details, but suffice to say that there are scavengers and bacteria down there, they’re hungry, and they’ve had a couple years to work on the bodies. It can’t be pretty.