What would a plane crash like the Air France one be like from inside the plane?

Factual Questions
81

People experience something like this all the time in the northern latitudes by just going outside briefly on a cold & windy day with normal clothes on. Maybe I’m just running outside to get something out of the car or take out the trash and I don’t feel like bundling up for just a minute or two.
I’m sure that the winds are higher on a falling aircraft, but depending on where you are sitting the wind may be mostly blocked by the seats/people around you.

Heck, in early January go outside of a popular nightclub on Friday night in Saskatoon or Edmonton. You can often see barely clad people waiting for 30 minutes plus to get in, even though it is -30 and quite windy. Uncomfortable, sure, but if anyone is blacking out it is from alcohol consumption and not the cold.

82

That’s the sprit! Always look on the bright side!

83

I think the only people who really can relate to these experiences are those who have survived a plane crash, or those who have survived a similar experience, such as a very bad car or other accident.

I was in a very bad car accident 20 years ago and I know that about 5 seconds before I crashed, I knew it was going to be a bad accident and actually passed out from extreme fear. I woke up a few minutes later and couldn’t feel my body. I had sustained massive damage to my lower leg and needed to be pulled from the wreckage. I truly believe that the only real thing the passengers felt was the few seconds or minutes of terror, knowing something was terribly wrong and not knowing how it was going to end. Fear can make someone black out, which is what I think is a common response in this type of situation. Not to mention all of the environmental factors that would also help this along.

As for pain, most survivors of extremely traumatic events recount how they did not feel pain until many hours later. I really don’t think the human body is capable of comprehending the damage it is sustaining in a situation like this.

I am not a medical doctor…strictly speaking from my own experience and my limited research of other traumatic injuries sustained by people.

Hope this helps.

84

I think the sensation would be the same as from a bad accident.

A few years ago, I was riding my motorcycle far too fast and clipped the edge of a road and went down. I recall only a drunken haze as I picked myself off the ground. I have assumed that the violent trauma to my head dulled all senses and only allowed fight or flight sensations to register; I lost a chunk of flesh from one arm and did not feel it.

Another time, trail riding on my dirtbike, I gave too much gas off a bridge and hit a tree. I was thrown a distance from the bike without any injury until impact. Again, all I recall was a drunken haze such that a person could have shot me in the back with a gun and I would not have felt it.

In both cases, circumstances happened far faster than I could register. I recall no physical discomfort, only detachment and confusion.

I like to think that an accident like the Air France one would have left most people with that same detachment/confusion. Perhaps they were conscience of the impact, but not knowing or caring of the outcome.

85

It seems to me that automobile/motorbike accidents, while potentially very traumatic, are different in that they typically happen quickly and are over in seconds as opposed to minutes. From the descriptions I’ve read in this thread it seems likely that several minutes of turbulence would preceed the aircraft actually breaking up. At that point one may still have several minutes to go before impact. I’m sure impact is over quick, but the minutes of the aircraft failing would drag out much more than a typical car accident.

Thank you LSGuy for a sobering and honest response.

86

LSLGuy,

Thank you for your replies to this. It is actually comforting (for me anyway) to know from an experienced pilot what would happen. I found your replies to be knowledgeable and well thought.

Broomstick, thank you for backing him up and adding your knowledge to this thread.

87

I’ve left this thread alone for awhile since the OP and I were clearly failing to communicate. It being his thread, I had the duty to disengage.

I just wanted to stop by to say thank you to Broomstick, yet again in this thread, for this insightful comment:

You read my mind. This topic isn’t fun.

If you haven’t woken up shaking in a cold sweat in some strange hotel room having just completed an accident and besides being dead, you’re the one who killed those 250 people thorough some actual or imagined error, well, you haven’t done this job for very long yet.

The way to build the psychological distance to do the job when the going gets really tough is to simulate, either deliberately, or sub-consciously, the worst the aviation world has to offer. Some would call that callous, or gallows humor. We call it practising for the worst-case scenario.
If I get some free time later this week I may start a new thread to try to answer some of the other non-accident issues raised here on page 2. No promises though.

88

Im new here and read your description and want to thank you for taking the time out to describe something that I have wondered about from time to time when reading about a plane crash.

I’m sorry that you encountered rudeness from the OP when you kindly answered his question. I very much appreciated the fact that you didn’t beat around the bush. If you had, none of us would have ever really been able to (morbidly) picture in our minds the events.

89

Write a book. Write many. I would buy them all. I was completely engulfed with your description.

90

I meant an aviation GPS which would come with an antenna. On older aircraft that didn’t have the new equipment it was common for pilots to bring their own personal GPS’s with them. They still had to use the equipment bolted to the panel to be legal but the information on the GPS was far more accurate than the panel mounted systems. And in the absence of ground radio beacons they used inertial navigation systems to cross the ocean. I’ve been told some of the older jets such as the DC8 had navigation domes in them for sextant measurements at night but I’ve never seen one.

Today a private pilot can buy a portable GPS that displays current chart information in color as well as download satellite weather information in near real time. For less than $5000 you can have the same information that a $100,000 panel displays.

91

My father was a commercial airline pilot for 25 + years, so these are things I’ve thought about a lot and for a long time. Fortunately nothing (at least that he’d share) bad happened to my father. I have a few questions and I’ve asked him, but things have changed a lot since he retired… First, what will the Black Box, if found, tell investigators? What will be different than the automated messages sent? Sorry, that’s probably really basic but havent seen much about that… There was a Commercial airline crash off the Coast of CA in 2000, Alaska Airlines MD-83. Sounds like a totally different scenario and they were much lower (pilot was attempting an emergency landing in Los Angeles)… but in that scenario I’ve always wondered but suspect folks essentially either died from impact or drowned. Here’s link to that… Alaska Airlines Jet Crashes Into Pacific Ocean Updated

I’m assuming also (with Air France) from the condition of some of the bodies they’ve retrieved they’ll be able to get some idea of what happened even if they dont recover the black boxes?

And finally (and this maybe way naive) but I keep wondering if so many aspects of life are getting overly technological that it eliminates a person’s ability (or minimizes significantly) to compensate/correct? I read somewhere that for the Pilots on that Air France flight, flying w/o auto pilot was like using a “joy stick” from a Game cube and another analogy was like streering the QE2 with a 2 ft rudder. Link to that article:

So my question, and absolutely realize some level of computerization needs to be part of any sophisticated device/vehicle… but have we taken things so far such that the pilot of an airbus such as this has little control over the plane once off auto-pilot? Or when there’s computer failure (computers fail all the time)? I may be really misunderstanding but my feeling from so much of what I’ve read is that these pilots esp in situation they were in , had virtually no ability to get control of that plane…

I appreciate LSL Guy’s description. It’s something no one wants to think about. And it’s something that’s downplayed out of respect for the families who have lost loved ones. I’ve always assumed the actual scenario was unfortunately way more intense.

92

One more quick note… as an RN who spends a lot of time in the ER, I unfortunately see a lot of death. Often… not very pleasant. Often… very tragic. When someone asks me about generalities (depending on who they are… if it’s family, my explanation will be different) I’m pretty factual and it may come across as un-caring… it’s not. I’ve shed lots of tears with families over the years. BUT when it’s something you do a lot, you have to remove or distance yourself a bit. You have to, or you cant do your job effectively. Just trying to share another perspective… and why LSL guy’s post may have come across as too hard core for some… AND LSL Guy… hoping you will do that separate post!

93

Current rules require that the Flight Data Recorder record a minimum of 88 parameters. I haven’t googled them, but I imagine these would include airspeed, altitude, vertical speed, heading, time, date, temperature, air pressure, various control and actuator positions, engine conditions, and so on.

The Cockpit Voice Recorder records about two hours of audio on the flight deck; conversations, ambient sounds, and the like.

An aircraft is perfectly flyable off of autopilot. The Airbus is fly-by-wire. I don’t know if there is a mechanical backup, but someone here does. The danger of FBW, as far as I can see it from my far-from-expert viewpoint, is what happens if every system fails? There are redundancies on redundancies, so this is very unlikely; but what if? Someone else will have to answer that. I can say that things got a little weird in my Prius when a sensor failed.

I think the advantage of FBW is efficiency. The pilot tells the system what he wants to do, and the system does it. In an inherently unstable fighter aircraft, the system makes corrections faster than the pilot possibly could, which makes it possible simply to fly the aircraft. In the same way, FBW can configure the control surfaces, engines, etc. for whatever the pilot wants to do (e.g., maintain 525 kts at 35,000 feet on heading 270).

How much control did the pilots have once the feces impacted the rotating oscillator? I don’t know. We may never know for sure. There seems to be some attention being paid to the Pitot tube. It’s possible that the aircraft was flyable, but that the instruments were not telling the pilots what it was doing. Though crashes are uncommon, there have been many where a pilot, not having visual references, believed the airspeed indicator and misunderstood (or rejected as faulty) other instruments that were telling him that he’s not about to stall. He puts the nose down to pick up the speed he hasn’t lost, exceeds the design limitations, flutter ensues, and things start departing the aircraft.

Or they may have had no control. The cell they flew into might have been so severe that, even as strong as a commercial aircraft is, it was too much for it.

Or it could have been a bit of both. Or neither. (I’m not betting it was neither, based on what little evidence we have so far.) We can speculate what caused the accident, but I don’t think any of us here will say ‘This is probably what happened’ until we get more evidence. If the orange boxes – sorry, ‘black boxes’ – are found, it will take months at least for an answer.

94

Mine can - a Garmin nuvi car sat-nav system. I tried it out on a plane out of curiosity and it worked fine, although I was sat by the window.

95

Well, who wants to buy my plane tickets for 4th of July weekend? I will be walking :wink:

96

No whiplash injuries? I got some minor ones in a car crash. I can’t imagine the ones I’d get in the gyrations you describe. Your description seemed to indicate abrupt changes in direction (or did I read into it?). With only a lap belt, my arms and head should be whipping about as the plane spins and rolls.

97

I’ve read a different theory of how and why the plane broke up in flight, not related to stalling.

I’m not sure why there seemed to be an immediate focusing on sensors called the “pitot” tubes, which tell the pilots and computers what their airspeed is, but it is suggested that they froze in the storm and provided incorrect or no information. According to this theory, the plane must have been traveling faster than the sensors indicated. So a stall would not have been the primary cause of the crash.

It is possible to snap the rudder or other control surfaces off the plane if too severe a control movement is made at high speed. Because of this, plane’s computer limits the amount the surfaces can move, and the limits change based on the airspeed, regardless of how hard the pilots crank the yoke. The slower you go, the more movement is allowed, and as the speed increases the amount of travel becomes more restricted. So if the plane “thought” it was moving slowly when in reality it was moving much faster, it might have allowed to pilots to move the rudder so far that the wind forces snapped it off, along with the vertical stabilizer. Then the plane might begin to yaw uncontrollably, leading to a different kinf of stall if the plane’s nose moved so far to the side to disrupt the flow of air over one or both wings. At that point the plane might have spun or even flipped over.

Last I heard, the vertical stabilizer was the largest part recovered so far, and relatively intact, with no signs of fire or explosion. Supposedly that means it came off while still in flight, so this is a theory to explain how that might happen.

I’m sure the theory might change or be dropped as additional information becomes available.

98

Thank you for your comments and the expertise that generated them, LSLGuy. I found them riveting, beyond expectation and without reservation, in other words you told me exactly what I didn’t know but honestly wanted to learn. My wife asked me recently almost exactly what the OP questioned. While I won’t share everything with her as she a bit of a nervous flier, at least I know and find it quite useful. It won’t keep me from flying but I think it does serve to make a more educated decision regarding what travel one will deem necessary and at what weight risk, accurately assessed, figures into the equation.

99

If the airspeed information shows too slow, then the natural reaction of the pilot would be to push the nose down to increase the airspeed. As I posted earlier, this can lead to flutter, and flutter can cause parts to depart the aircraft.

100

For might I’d read would. After the 2001 AA crash, where excessive rapid rudder movement caused the stabilizer to snap off, I read news accounts that quoted “aviation experts” as saying that this sort of failure was sufficiently destructive that they didn’t even bother testing recovery maneuvers on the simulator – it was deemed basically unsurvivable. The JAL 747 that crashed into a mountain did so after 20+ minutes of semi-controlled flight after losing a section of the tail (the pilots tried to correct course by selective pulsing of the engine). They did rig up a simulator after that, and I think found that the IRL pilots had survived longer than anyone managed to in the simulator – most quickly crashed.