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Surely if it went down in the Atlantic it set of a ULB? Such a strange story.

sorry, ULB?

Underwater Locator Beacon, i actually meant ELT but what diff.

Thing hits water, beacon starts sending data to the Search and Rescue Satellite system Sarsat. So given there are no reports a signal has been received it either didn't crash into water or it was destroyed mid-air.

Very odd story.

Yeah really strange, do you think its possibly a bomb , Flushy?

I expect the Met to issue an "oops we did it again" statement later today.

Impossible for lightning to explode the plane?

from PPRuNe:

"Today morning, Air France informed that around 50Nm after TASIL position, the flight informed (my remark: not sure if via SATCOM, ACARS message or both) electrical problems and pressurisation problems as well."

They were also saying it's position is unknown to a vast degree that its going to take a long time to find it.

Looks like something very severe most probably weather related, been looking at the weather charts for the area and they were pretty severe.

There has long been a concern about Airbus and the tail reactions to sudden movements (new york crash) and if the thing has gone through the top of a CB it could have been taken out by heavy turbulence.

What a weird thing, to just "disappear" in such a way, in this day & age of advanced comms.

A tragedy, RIP all those on board.

Huge traffic on PPRuNe. Well worth reading for the next few days, the Media will get their stuff from there.

Was it a big plane?

How many passengers do they get on an AF447?

It was an Airbus A330-200, AF447 was the flight number. Over 200 on board.

Airbus A330-20, with a manifest of 228.

The amazing thng is that it has just totally disappeared, they don't exactly know when, & have no real idea where it came down. Modern Civil Airliners don't just "disappear".

Isn't it really unusual as well for a plane to go down mid-flight?  I'm not the best flyer, but am usually ok once we're cruising.

Statistically, yes, very unusual. Take-offs & landings are the risk areas.

Watch "Aircrash Investigation" Claire. There's quite a few go down mid flight on that.

It's actually a very good program for people who don't like flying. My sister who doesn't like flying at all finds it comforting that whenever there's a crash it's thoroughly investigated and it always leads to steps to improve safety in future.

There's always a reason for the crash as well and it's very rarely a single reason. Always a sequence of events leading up to the crash. It's a fascinating program to watch.

It'll be interesting to see what the investigators come up with on this one. Obviously it's impossible if they don't locate something but it's amazing the lengths they go to to find a plane in the middle of the ocean.

why is it that women generally find flying scary?

It's probably equal percentages but blokes just won't admit it.

They are worried they left the oven on at home.

Extremely rare.

PPRuNe went down earlier Tikay! First time i have ever seen the server overloaded.

Guessed so - could not get on it for a while, & it was loading mega-slow. It'll be all the Red-Top Journos getting their copy. PPRuNe struggled after the BA "short-landing" (frozen fuel) at Heathrow, too.

A stunning website. But a very sad day.

I don't find flying 'scary', I'm just much more comfortable once we're up in the air.  Of the people I do know who are actually afraid of flying (i.e. will go to any lengths possible not to get on a plane), 2 are men and 1 is a woman.

MR T and Denis Bergkamp?

Desmond forgot to push the buttons

I used to have no problem at all flying. For some reason I just cant relax now though on most flights, no problem on big planes but on the Ryanair/Easyjet type planes I just sit there thinking somethings not right, constantly looking at the staff to see i they look worried about anything.

I hope it doesnt get any worse, cus I use them a fair bit!

lol I do that too.  Worst flight I've been on semi-recently was coming back from Vegas last year.  Non-stop turbulence for 3 hours or so.  No chance of sleeping, bumpiness was making me air sick and I obv couldn't leave my seat.  Cabin crew had to sit with their belts on most of the time too out of my line of sight so I couldn't get any reads on them!

A good tell is  if they look hot n  sweaty and look like they've been crying whilst getting out there mobiles ,,,

I'd be looking worried

Gravity is usually involved.

The thing is how do you get the tell, when everyone who has seen it, is unfortunately no longer with us.

I personally cannot get enough of Air Crash Investigation (ACI), the vids are all on youtube.

In this instance, I think they're still trying to decipher what the brazilians meant by 'disappeared off radar", it does not mean that it was blipping on their screen one minute and then not the next, it can mean that it just didn't show up when they expected it, the area it went down in is not covered by conventional radar anyway.

Very strange no Mayday, and no locator beacon. Could be a bomb, or electrical failure leading to fire and instant explosion.

My fav, Aloha Airlines.

lol @ passenger noting huge tear in fuselage and wondering whether to inform crew

wtf @ tear strip engineering not taking into account pressure wave caused by plump stewardess...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZZHCm59gy4

fascinating/informative/well made

It was not in range of any radar station. You rarely get a mayday call in any rapid instance as the pilots are too busy aviating.

Read a few things on PPRuNe that make sense, the best 2 being lightning strike on the composite fuselage causing sparking inside a fuel tank.

The other being loss of cabin pressure somehow, over a storm forcing them to descend into a storm.

The East Midland's crash in '89 was similar. Pilot announces "I have shut the right engine off because it's faulty"

Passengers wonder why he's switched off the wrong engine.

They sure let him know.

Surely something must be floating out there?  Are is it now just an underwater search?

Morbid as it sounds, things like this fascinate me...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TxiBHNeTG7o

Yeah I saw a couple of incidents like that, a passenger/cabin crew member telling the pilots about the wrong engine would have saved them. The pilots smelled smoke through the aircon which normally came from the right engine, so they shut it down, even though a modification made it come from both.
With modern anti-hijack cockpit doors I don't think you'd get much joy by banging away at it to let them know the problem.

There's a whole chapter in Malcolm Gladwell's latest book Outliers which is about this kind of thing. Tale of a Korean plane which crashed simply because everyone in the cockpit apart from the captain noticed something was wrong, but because it is such a deferential culture, not one of them felt it appropriate to question the captain's judgement.

So the plane crashed and they all died.

just heard on news that Brazilian air force may have found some wreckage

Total bitch to find the sunken wreckage now, that's one big ocean and the weather was bad so it could have drifted a long way. As far as I know they only have a limited time (30 days?) on the voice recorder/ flight data recorder box transponders.

I heard late last night that the search area is as big as europe?

 those in the know how is this possible? would it be down to the cargo that floats?

   An incredible number of things on an airliner are buoyant.Every seat cushion(Squab) is a bouyancy aid,an aircraft has a huge amount of insulation inside the fuselage which may cause large section of skin to float nevermind alot of baggage and unfortunately human bodies.Combine strong changable winds with ocean currents  and debris will be spread far and wide in a relatively small time frame.

Well, yes. Once you're out of Radar from the Brazillian coast you've got a thousand plus miles of Atlantic ocean that isn't monitored. The US military are unlikely to monitor past their territorial waters which I assume are at about the 200 mile mark. I am assuming that it was hit by lightning during turbulence, which has screwed up the electronics to some degree and then coupled with heavy turbulence, caused it to crash into the Atlantic. Practically impossible to pinpoint the location.

Please note the use of assume. Just my own opinion on the matter.

There's always aliens.

http://news.sky.com/skynews/Home/World-News/Air-France-Plane-Disaster-Officials-Say-No-Debris-Has-Been-Found-In-Atlantic-Despite-Earlier-Report/Article/200906115296406

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/8087573.stm

"""On Saturday, Air France said that in May 2008 it had begun noticing "incidents of loss of airspeed information during cruise flight" on its A330s and A340s jets - although only a "small number" of incidents had been reported."""


Would you have flown in a plane if the pilot announced pre-take off that the type of plane you were in had  uncorrected "incidents of loss of airspeed information during cruise flight"??

Would you fly on a 777 that hadn't yet had the following modifications?

""On 11 March 2009, the National Transportation Safety Board issued urgent safety recommendation SB-09-11 calling for the redesign of the fuel/oil heat exchangers used on Rolls-Royce RB 211 Trent 800 Series engines. A build-up of ice from water naturally occuring in the fuel had caused a restriction of the flow of fuel to the engines of G-YMMM. Rolls-Royce have already started on redesigning the component, with an in-service date of March 2010 at the latest. All affected engines will be fitted with the redesigned component within six months of its certification.""

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Airways_Flight_38#NTSB_Urgent_Safety_Recommendation.2C_11_March_2009

http://www.flightglobal.com/articles/2009/03/12/323794/rolls-royce-trent-800-fix-only-part-of-broader-icing.html

(http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/data?pid=avimage&iid=iUeKppiw0O98)

Yes and Yes.

The RR engine problem is avoided now be a simple procedure carried out by the flight crew in flight.Air travel can be scary to some as it's so unnatural but statistcally it's very safe and heavily regulated,people should really be more concerned about the huge numbers of un-MOTed cars on the road which pose a much larger risk to the average Joe on the street.

I love flying and get really excited yet the odd thing is I cannot stand heights, my knees really buckle.  I think the difference is, I can take heights if I am in an enclosed space except in a car or bus going up a mountain.

Looks live they've found the first bodies and debris from the crash. Hopefully they're able to retrieve the in flight recordings.

Was reading about this in todays paper, the article was around the people who should have been on the plane but werent, and ones that were but shouldnt have been.

One woman was supposed to be on the flight but missed it and was originally thought to be lucky but by a twist of fate she was killed a few days later in a car accident !

Freaky !

http://blondepoker.com/forum/index.php?topic=42462.0 (http://blondepoker.com/forum/index.php?topic=42462.0)

www.business.comAir France jet 'broke up mid-air'
Last Updated: Thursday, 18 June 2009, 08:02 GMT

 Fractures in the legs, hips and arms of the Air France 447 victims strongly indicate the plane broke up in mid-air, experts said.
With more than 400 pieces of debris recovered from the ocean's surface, the top French investigator, Paul-Louis Arslanian, expressed optimism about eventually discovering what brought down the plane.
But he also called the search conditions - far from land in very deep water - "one of the worst situations ever known in an accident investigation".
French investigators are beginning to form "an image that is progressively less fuzzy", Mr Arslanian, who runs the French air accident investigation agency BEA said.
"We are in a situation that is a bit more favourable than the first days," Arslanian said. "We can say there is a little less uncertainty, so there is a little more optimism... (but) it is premature for the time being to say what happened."
A spokesman for Brazilian medical examiners told The Associated Press on Wednesday that fractures were found in post mortems on an undisclosed number of the 50 bodies recovered so far.
Former forensic expert at the US National Transportation Safety Board, Frank Ciacco, said: "Typically, if you see intact bodies and multiple fractures - arm, leg, hip fractures - it's a good indicator of a mid-flight break up. Especially if you're seeing large pieces of aircraft as well."
The pattern of fractures was first reported on Wednesday by Brazil's O Estado de Sao Paulo newspaper, which cited unnamed investigators. The paper also reported that some victims were found with little or no clothing, and had no signs of burns.
Search teams from Brazil, France, the US and other countries are methodically scanning the surface and depths of the Atlantic for signs of the Airbus A330 that crashed on May 31 after running into thunderstorms en route from Rio de Janeiro to Paris.
All 228 people aboard were killed.