Possibly because the model of pitot tubes in question were scheduled to be replaced in the entire Air France fleet from April onwards, and blaming it on that one device would neatly satisfy the impulse many people have to blame it on one, simple, easily fixable thing.
In reality, airplane accidents are almost always multi-factorial in nature.
The person at this website has done a pretty detailed analysis of the weather the aircraft flew into.
What kind of hail could you encounter at 30k feet? A loss of weather radar for just a few minutes and decision making on which way to turn? With perhaps no good choices?
How big does hail get in the convergence zone?
Well done. That is a site.
Hail unlikely. Ice perhaps. More that I can wade throught at this time. But very interesting.
Just reading this thread has made me a nervous wreck. I am so terrified of flying that some would call it a disability. Just a simple flight from Memphis to Chicago a couple of years ago literally had me sick at my stomach. And that was only an hour and 20 minute flight. My wife wants to go to Hawaii next summer. I don’t know if I can do it.
I was always much more scared of being mutilated then incinerated by a moron in a Chevy on the way to work than I ever was scared about getting so much as a paper cut while on board my airplane. You should think the same way.
Why? Because its the statistically correct way to think. Morons in Chevy’s kill 30,000 Americans year. Used to be closer to 60,000. Airliners kill more like a couple hundred a year, and in some years, zero.
I freely admit it’s hard for most folks to *emote *that way. Flying is inherently an unnatural act. But you can *think *that way, and your thinking mind can, if you push it, overcome a lot more of your primitive emotional mind than you normally give it credit for.
A thunderstorm is a massive churning engine of air and moisture. It’s very easy to have hail at 30k feet.
What I found interesting in the site listed was the idea that there is less lightning along the equatorial waters.
According to Wikipedia, in terms of deaths per x journeys, air travel is actually considerably less safe than travel by car. It claims that that is the statistic that airlines’ insurers use. In terms of deaths per x hours, air is four times safer, true. It’s only if you use the slightly meaningless “deaths per x miles” that air seems dramatically safer. I mean, by that measure riding in the space shuttle is a fairly low-risk venture.
[edit] I should concede that car accidents often involve non-fatal injuries, while air accidents are more often fatal. So that skews things.
Do you know why you’re afraid of flying? Is it the strange noises? Being confined? Not understanding what’s going on? Lack of control? Is it fear causing your stomach troubles, or is there some air sickness involved, too? Sometimes understanding what is generating the anxiety can put you on track with dealing with it. I mentioned up thread that at one point I was so fearful of flying that I was actually throwing up more than once before boarding a plane to Arizona, I do understand what you’re talking about.
There are ways to reduce the anxiety around flying. I don’t recommend my method (getting a pilot’s license) as it’s both expensive and time consuming, but there are programs out there that help desensitize you to the anxiety you have and you might want to look into them. They vary considerably in price and duration. Also - and while I don’t really like mentioning this I always put it on the table - there is the option of going to your doctor for a medication to help with the anxiety. It’s a LONG way to Hawaii, know what I mean? One or two pills that take the edge off is a perfectly valid approach if done under a doctor’s supervision. Make sure he/she understands it is fear generating the upset, not motion sickness, unless you really are having motion sickness. DON’T self-medicate with alcohol, please. Follow doctor’s instructions. You wouldn’t be the first or the last person to take something to help get through a long flight.
And, prior to the flight, stay out of threads talking about airplane accidents, m’kay?
Hmmm. Like someone else up-thread, I hesitated to open this thread. I don’t know that much good can come from trying to imagine what a passenger might have experienced in a crash like this. I have imagined what some of my friends were thinking and doing before they crashed aircraft they were piloting, not much good came from that either :(. There’s a difference between figuring out what went wrong, or maybe thinking about what frame of mind someone may have been in that lead them to make a particular error, and just picturing their last moments of terror.
Anyway, I’ve opened it now, so here I am. I think LSLguy’s post is pretty much on the money. One thing he didn’t take into account is that the manner of depressurisation and aircraft break up will have an effect on whether the passengers remained conscious or not. If they ended up in a vertical dive before or shortly after the depressurisation, then they may well have got into progressively thicker air so that they remained conscious. On the other hand, if aircraft maintained flying roughly level for 30 seconds after depressurisation, they may have become unconscious. Unfortunately they were probably consciousness once they got to lower levels in either case.
I’m not quite sure what to make of that. I spend six months of each year picking my way around equatorial ocean storms and they produce plenty of lightning, but then maybe it is not as much as a higher latitude storm produces.
My limited, non-professional, understanding of the way the Airbus fly-by-wire works is that normally, when flown by hand, the aeroplane will not permit any control surface movement that will exceed certain aircraft limits (angle of bank, pitch, g, etc). Basically the pilot gives a control input but it goes through an “is that a good idea” filter before being passed to the controls. However in certain circumstances these protections are taken away and the pilot will have direct control of the aircraft just the same as a Boeing pilots does. In addition to this there are several layers of redundancy for the FBW system. If the absolute worst should happen and the FBW be completely unserviceable, the elevator and rudder both have a mechanical backup.
Was this followed by a rapid climb and full power? If so, then you may have had a near death experience. There are times (not common) when that system sounds in error though, and if you didn’t have the above response from the flight crew, it may have just been a false positive.
Insurers use deaths per hours and deaths per journey. Everyone else uses deaths per mile (or km). (I note that the article was written by a non-American, and that footnote 24 appears to be Australian or from New Zealand. Maybe things are done differently there.) The charts use billions of km/journeys/hours. The most common numbers I’ve seen are 100,000 and 1 million miles. Since ‘everyone’ uses fatalities per distance, it is accurate to say that airlines are the safest mode of travel.
A few years ago I read the then-current Nall Report. IIRC the Nall Report includes twin-turboprop commuter aircraft in its General Aviation statistics. It’s been a few years since I’ve read it, but I don’t think it includes airlines. The reports show that GA flying is less safe than flying on airlines, which is to be expected. Having said that, the year I looked at it most crashes were not fatal. I believe that less than 20% of GA crashes involved a fatality, and in crashes that involved a fatality not all of them resulted in fatal injuries to all of the occupants. (One of our own crashed a small plane once.) I don’t know what the statistics are for ‘heavies’. Obviously a catastrophic structural failure is often not survivable. But taking into account all airline accidents, not all are fatal. Everyone aboard the plane that crashed in the Hudson River survived. Even the fiery crash in Sioux City had a good number of survivors. So while you may be more likely to die in an air crash than in a car crash, it’s not a done deal. And air crashes are very rare things.
Thanks.
I don’t know why you would think that “deaths per x miles” is “slightly meaningless.”
If anything, “deaths per x journeys” is “slightly meaningless.” A direct flight from Connecticut to Florida constitutes one journey. How many journeys would the corresponding drive be? Is it a new journey every time you pull over at a rest stop?
All in all, it makes perfect sense to compare “deaths per x miles” for someone contemplating what method of transportation to use. If I want to travel cross-county to to Florida, the only way to properly compare flying with driving is to to use this metric. It makes no sense for a traveler to use the “deaths per x hours” metric, because a flight takes considerably fewer hours than the corresponding drive.
A flight to Florida is considerably more safe than driving to Florida.
Because that is not a typical car journey. If you are claiming that flying is safer than driving, it makes sense to compare typical journeys by air with typical journeys by car. Like my space shuttle comparison before – my rough calculation comes out with a figure for space shuttle travel of about 40 deaths per billion kilometres. That is comparable to the fatality risk of riding a bicycle.
I think most people would agree with me that riding the space shuttle is more risky than that. 14 deaths in 126 trips makes it pretty bloody dangerous in my book.
Forgot to add - most accidents occur at take-off or approach, which is another reason to count journeys rather than miles.
Ximenean, I don’t get it. The only way to compare that makes sense is to compare driving vs. flying on the same trip. For example, if I want to travel to Florida, is it safer to drive or to fly? The “deaths per mile” stat is what’s useful here.
If you’re looking at journeys, then you’re comparing an airplane trip of hundreds of miles, with going down the street to the grocery store in your car. I don’t see any value in that comparison.
I was always taught as a pilot that you associate hail with lightning as a general rule of thumb (hail being a component of lightning and a clear indication of heavy convective wind current). In that vein of thought, the author was suggesting that the pilots may have flown into heavier turbulence by accident.
My uninformed wag was that they lost their radar in a lightning strike and wandered blindly into the worst of it. While it’s easy to map out a lightning storm flying VFR it’s just the opposite flying IFR.
Question for all the current and past pilots here…
Why do you think the pilot made the decision to fly through the thunderstorm? Ive seen where pilots have written about this crash saying they wouldn’t have flown through it, but would have flown around it.
Could pilot error, error in their decision in choosing to fly through the thunderstorm, be a contributing factor in this crash? If they hadn’t flown through it then the theory of the pitot tube freezing up never would have happened.
There’s been plenty of discussion of this. It boils down to (1) sometimes the storm cells are too big and widely spread to fly around; (2) sometimes the route you choose because you don’t see a stormy area ahead, is a stormy area ten minutes later when you arrive there; (3) storms are normal and you can’t avoid every one, and radar is imperfect at identifying which ones you really need to avoid; and (4) we’re not sure their radar was available, working, giving them the data they needed.
If we ever get this figured out, I highly doubt that the answer will be “the pilots had a clear indication there was a dangerous storm area ahead, that could have been definitely avoided, but they chose to go through it anyhow” – it might be another flavor of “human error played a part,” but nothing, I would think, that starkly irresponsible.
There was a LINE of storms that blocked the route. The flight would have been dispatched based on the ability of the plane to navigate through a weak point in that line. If the weather changed en-route then the pilot would have turned back.
I’m a low time VFR pilot and go to great lengths to avoid lightning. In a fabric winged aircraft using gasoline instead of jet A, it’s paramount that I never get hit. With that said, I’ve flown between 2 really weak storm cells with lots of clear sky above and witnessed lightning cross cloud-to-cloud in front of me. The only predictable aspect of lightning is that it’s unpredictable.
In this situation, the pilots were IN the clouds which gives them no visual clue on where the worst weather is. They have to rely on the onboard weather radar and storm scope. Lose this and you are a blind man in a mine field. You can’t back out the way you came in without making a wide arc of a turn. So what started out as a simple transition through the weakest part of the front quickly ramps up into a serious situation. At 425 knots the plane is moving at 7 miles a minute and flying a mile in the wrong direction is a serious problem.
Imagine a lightning strike that takes out the main video display. All your weather and navigation is gone and you now have to rely on secondary gauges. If they are also affected then you’re left with an old style compass and an airspeed indicator. The airspeed indicator is driven off the pitot tube which requires heat to work in adverse conditions. If the pitot heat fails (a common problem) then you are riding a bucking bronco while looking at a bouncing magnetic compass in the middle of an electrical storm. I don’t know about the A340 but a lot of modern cockpits put the compass in a location that makes it tough to use as a directional device. And, if by some miracle, the pilot had a handheld GPS stowed in his/her flight case it would take a few minutes to get it out and established before it could produce heading and speed information.
This could easily have bee a situation like the Hudson River landing where the correct decision had to made within seconds only in this case without enough information to make it.