I must confess before God and a jury of my peers:
I'm an airline disaster buff.
They're the ultimate Sherlock Holmes mysteries. You're given mere scraps of information, the wreckage is usually twisted beyond recognition, and you're faced with the knowledge that nine times out of ten you're looking for a chain of failures, not just a single part that suddenly went kaflooey.
And unless it's an actual bomb, which is fairly easy to detect afterward because of the micro-pitting that takes place during an explosion, the one thing that modern airliners almost never, ever, do is suddenly just go poof and drop off the radar screen without a peep from the crew.
As Air France Flight 447 did two years ago, taking 228 people to a watery grave.
Below the fold I'll present a 1-hour video on the mystery and an update on the recent findings. Unlike normally, where the black boxes provide the vital clues that solve the enigma, this time around the complete opposite occurred.
You may have seen how they finally located the flight recorders and issued their initial findings the other day. There is still one huge question to be answered, though, so the matter is hardly resolved and, in fact, may never be.
When it comes to gripping suspense, my favorite airline disaster show is
here. But when it comes to pure sleuthing with almost nothing to go on, I thought the show on Flight 447 was tops. Back at Air France headquarters that fateful night they received a small, routine databurst of info from the plane's computer in the final minutes, and then...
nothing.
It appears they nailed everything except answering the one, big remaining question;
why did it crash merely because the automatic systems had shut down? In the show, they posited a plausible theory, but they were working on the assumption that the pilots had reacted as they had been trained to do.
Such, however, doesn't appear to be
the case.
As control was handed over the stall warning sounded, yet the pilot flying the plane decided to climb. A stall usually requires the nose to be dipped downward to gain airspeed and regain the missing lift. Yet AF447 climbed inexorably to its ceiling of 38,000 feet at a very high angle of attack of more than 35 degrees. With the stall warning sounding, the nose remained tipped upward. The plane stalled, losing altitude at 11,000 feet per minute. It fell for 3 minutes 30 seconds when it hit the water nose up 16-degrees and belly first - just as the BEA had predicted from their analysis of floating wreckage.
That's really stunning, in that a climb of 35 degrees in an jetliner would feel like you're almost going straight up. How all three pilots could collectively ignore a lesson that's taught from day one in flight school is beyond comprehension.
On the other hand, as the article notes:
Some wonder if cockpits are being over-computerised leaving pilots baffled when it comes to manual flight in an emergency.
Others are worried about crew workload, coping with a blizzard of alarms in a thunderstorm in the dead of night. Mostly, they are so surprised the pilot kept the nose up in a stall - and for so long - that they think there has to be more to it: did other instruments fail?
So further examination of the black boxes might yield an answer, but everything I've read indicates that the only parts to actually fail were the ice-clogged air speed indicators, and while that inaction shut down the autopilot and associated systems, everything else on the plane (attitude controls, engines, etc) functioned normally.
But for three seasoned pilots to fly the plane in a horrifically nose-up attitude that must have had their inner ears screaming in protest — and for three and a half minutes, at that — indicates that something very weird happened in the cockpit that night, and perhaps we'll never know the truth.
The one outrage, as I see it, is why the transponder signals sent from the black boxes is so weak that they couldn't be located in thirty days. That's the life of the batteries. They can put a man on the moon but they can't invent a beep-beep-beep radio transponder that actually works? If the depths and ocean water are a problem, use a VLF signal like submarines do. Nor does it have to burn up a lot of battery power with a constant beep-beep-beep. One plaintive beep every half-hour would be a lot more effective than no beep at all.
The current thinking on solving the problem of missing flight recorders is to have them broadcast their info home if they sense a problem. There's an article on it here. The flip side, if one of the commenters is correct, is that there have only been three crashes where they couldn't find the black boxes; an Israel Airlines crash and the two that hit the Twin Towers on 9/11, so it's really not much of a problem.
Still, it seems crazy that they would use transponders that don't actually work when they're needed the most — such as under 13,000 feet of deep, dark ocean and a sea of mysteries above.
Lastly, on the list of "Countries You Don't Want To Be Caught Dead Living In", please add France. Did you hear how the Italian authorities arrested the state seismologist and his associates for failing to predict a recent earthquake because people died? They're being tried for manslaughter.
Likewise, the authorities in France want to try the top dogs at Air France for — wait for it — manslaughter.
Ostensibly, this is because the air speed indicators (pitot tubes) had a small history of problems and were currently being upgraded (447 had the older model), but this is pretty thin because (1) pitot tubes, which are mounted outside the aircraft and thus take the full brunt of punishment, are known to be unreliable, and (2) as noted above, just losing the air speed indicators and autopilot is no cause for alarm. As the above video shows, you merely put the nose in a specific attitude and adjust the engine throttles accordingly and you're automatically flying in a safe mode.
Best guess is that, while the corporate execs won't actually face the guillotine (probably), the courts will still find it to be the airline company's fault. In general, because this is a socialist nation where the worker bees (the airline pilots union) must be protected at all costs, and specifically because it's always easier to blame the greedy, filthy-rich corporations than it is to acknowledge human fallibility.
By any stretch of the imagination, there is no reason for the pilots to have reacted as they did — and yet they did. If they don't come up with something in the next few weeks, this may go down as commercial aviation's greatest mystery.
