The French navy has located the immediate area around the flight recorders from Air France flight AF447 which crashed in the Atlantic last year. They are now within a 3 nautical mile area of the black boxes, which is 200 nautical miles north-west of the Brazilian archipelago of Sao Pedro and Sao Paulo.
However retrieving the Air France Airbus black boxes from the ocean floor might be near impossible.
The cause of the crash remains unknown but the aircrafts airspeed had given false readings, but officials believe other factors must also have contributed including blocked pitot probes or rudder failure similar to a crash in New York in November 2001.
Finding the black boxes from AF 447 will reveal flight data and cockpit conversations, allowing investigators to build a computer model of the final moments of the flight.
A French navy spokesman said: ‘It’s like trying to find a shoe-box in an area the size of Paris, at a depth of almost 10,000 feet and in a terrain as rugged as the Alps.’ and this search for AF447 is apparently ‘one of the most complex undersea operations ever’.
It will be interesting to see if any black boxes are found almost 1 year after the disaster.
Airports, including Heathrow, Belfast, and the main airports in Scotland and Norway are facing massive disruption for the next 24-48 hours as ash from Iceland’s volcanic eruption moves towards UK airspace. Transatlantic flights through UK airspace are also badly affected.
Following advice from the UK Met Office, the National Air Traffic Service introduced these restrictions to UK airspace as a result of volcanic ash drifting across the United Kingdom from Icelands recent volcanic activity.
The European air safety body, Eurocontrol, said the cloud of ash had reached 55,000ft and was expected to move through northern UK & Scotland by 1300BST today.
The Jakarta Effect
The restrictions were necessary because volcanic ash can damage aircraft engines and other instruments.
On June 24th, 1982 a British Airways 747, Speedbird 9, was on its way over Jakarta in Indonesia when Capt. Eric Moody made the following address to the 247 passengers on board;
“Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. This is your captain speaking. We have a small problem. All four engines have stopped. We are all doing our damnedest to get them going again. I trust you are not in too much distress.”
After unknowingly flying through a plume of volcanic ash, all four engines shut down one by one.
Another side effect of flying through the ash for BA Speedbird 9 was that the windscreen of the aircraft was effectively sandblasted and they could only see through a small unaffected strip at the bottom of the window. It also blocked the pitot tubes which resulted in a 50 knot difference on the left and right airspeed indicators.
As they decended below FL29 (29,000 feet), they started trying to restart the engines, as per their training and their understanding of the 4 Rolls Royce engines standard operating procedures; Not expecting that the engines would restart. They continued to decend through 14,000 feet and ast they did they were able to get engine #4 restarted. followed by engine #3. About 2 minutes into the sequence, engines #1 and #2 came back on-ilne.
Jakarta ATC cleared them for a visual landing, as there was no way the flight could continue to its destination. They landed safely only using instruments and the 2-inch strip of clear glass to land the jumbo.
There was a nearly identical incident on 15th December 1989 when KLM Flight 867, a B747-400 travelling between Amsterdam to Anchorage, Alaska, flew throught a plume of volcanic ash from the erupting Mount Redoubt, again. causing all four engines to fail.
The effect of volcanic ash contaminating an engine is called “The Jakarta Effect” after the problems BA Flight 9 / Speedbird 9 had over Jakarta back in 1982.
Below is a video from Air Crash Investigation which shows the problems of BA Flight 9 in 1982.
So if you can’t travel today then there is an actual reason and its down to “The Jakarta Effect”.
The findings of the official Air France Investigation report that Air France Flight AF 447 did not break up in mid air, instead, hit the water intact. The French Air Accident Investigation bureau (BEA) said that the aircraft appears to have hit the water in flying position with strong vertical acceleration.
The airbus hit the water belly first but with an almost vertical descent. Hitting the water very very fast, items at the front of the aircraft were pushed to the back. It is unknown if the pilots were in control of the aircraft before it crashed. At that speed, the G-Forces would have the pilots pushed back in their seats and would possibly be unable to move their arms etc.
The black box and flight data recorders still have not been found and it is now over 30 days since flight AF447 crashed – they will continue searching for 10 more days. Honeywell, who make the black boxes, say that they have a 100% recovery record for FDRs. I think it is highly unlikely that these will now be found, unless they are entangled in a large piece of fuselage. What wasn’t addressed in the press release was (a) the multiple error messages and (b) how much of the fuselage of the airbus has been recovered.
Until they are found we will not know for definite what caused the crash.
Another Airbus aircraft has crashed, this time a Yemeni airliner crashed in the Indian Ocean. The Yemenia Airbus 310 flight IY626 was flying from the Yemeni capital Sanaa – however the flight originated in France.
The only survivor (this far) was a five-year-old child.
Apparently EU officials did question Yemenia’s safety record and proposed a world blacklist of those carriers which they deemed to be unsafe. It is usually not the aircraft which is the problem but more often than not, poor maintenance or poor (substitute) parts which have been found in many crashes, which can contribute towards air disasters. These are 2 very different aircraft and 2 companies with very different records – so you cannot really draw anything into them having the same manufacturer. There are also rumours that France banned this airline in 2007.
The Airbus that crashed on June 1st and this Airbus both crashed at similar Longitudes, both flying at night, both around the equator, and were both Airbus flying in windy weather – but apart from that there are no details about whether or not a mayday message was issued. One official did say thatthe control tower had received notification the plane was on vectors for approach, a few miles out, and then lost contact with it.
After the Air France Airbus crash on June 1, NTSB accident investigators have been probing two recent failures of airspeed and altitude sensors and pitot tubes aboard Airbus A330s. The failures occurred on flights between the United States and Brazil in May and between Hong Kong and Japan in June. Both aircraft landed safely and there were no injuries or damage, however it is an unusual occurrance.
This latest crash comes near the point where a hijacked Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 767 crashed near a beach on the Comoros islands in 1996, killing 125 of 175 passengers and crew. Many of those who died had inflated their life jackets inside the aircraft – the crash was filmed on camera, as holiday makers lay enjoying the sun.
Over 3 days after the event, progress is still quite slow. Many news agencies are even reporting that Air France received bomb threats in the days leading up to the event.
So far a large debris field has been found, but the largest section found to date is only 7 metres in length. The investigators are pescimistic about finding the black boxes which are reported to be between 9,800 – 12,000 feet below the surface.
There are still a lot of conflicting theories on what happened. On this site I have seen lots of people searching for “Flight 447 UFO” – this is ridiculous … strange people out there!
It could take 1-2 weeks before they collect enough wreckage to run metalurgical tests to check for explosive traces or the distinctive bending of the metal which is caused when a bomb explodes.
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The French navy has located the immediate area around the flight recorders from Air France flight AF447 which crashed in the Atlantic last year. They are now within a 3 nautical mile area of the black boxes, which is 200 nautical miles north-west of the Brazilian archipelago of Sao Pedro and Sao Paulo.
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