After a month of speculation and kibitzing by the civil authorities and the media, we still have very few answers on why Air France Flight 447 crashed in the ocean en route from Rio de Janeiro to Paris on June 1, not longer after leaving Brazilian air space.
Here's an update based on new information from the French air-accident report agency.
From that update via Reuters, here is a section that caught my attention:
"'The plane was not destroyed while it was in flight. It seems to have hit the surface of the water in the direction of flight and with a strong vertical acceleration,'" said Alain Bouillard, who is leading the investigation on behalf of France's BEA air accident board.
"Bouillard said control of the flight was supposed to have passed from air traffic controllers in Brazil to their counterparts in Senegal, but that never happened.
He said the pilots of flight AF 447 had tried three times to connect to a data system in the Senegalese capital Dakar, but had failed, apparently because Dakar had never received the flight plan.
"This is not normal," he said, adding that investigators were also trying to find out why it took six hours after the plane disappeared before an emergency was declared.
[UPDATE: Meanwhile, from the story now running on the New York Times Web site:
"Mr. Brouillard said there had been a “dysfunction” in communication between air traffic controllers in Brazil and Senegal in coordinating the handling of the flight. The report released Thursday makes clear that controllers were slow to realize the plane had been lost. Two hours and 45 minutes after Flight 447 sent its last automated message describing problems on board, controllers were still asking the crew of a different Air France flight to try and contact Flight 447 on their radios."]
Again, I ask: Who? What? When? Where? Why?
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2 comments:
Okay, here's my theory (non NTSB-certified): pitot tubes malfunction due to one thing or another (taped over by ground staff? Has happened before)
Crew gets false readings on altitude, airspeed, readings off the chart, on the chart, whatever. Flying through heavy turbulence, night, heavy clouds. Crew becomes disoriented as readings continue to be all over the place.
Too busy with various cockpit warnings to summon any kind of ATC, which is probably half asleep anyway.
Attitude indicator, airspeed, altitude all begin giving bizarre readings, crew starts trying to compensate, alerts start sounding, crew gets terminally confused, plane is now in corkscrew dive in heavy clouds but there is no indication of this on instruments.
Dive is unrescuable, takes only about three minutes to plunge from 37,000 feet to water. Crew is too busy to have contacted anyone.
Black boxes will not be found in 12,000 feet of water.
Why don't black boxes float?
My theory -- er -- might not hold water, but I think it's quite plausible.
Too bad we might never know.
Bouillard said control of the flight was supposed to have passed from air traffic controllers in Brazil to their counterparts in Senegal, but that never happened.
Hello, Sharkey, wake up. AF447 crashed before leaving Brazilian controlled airspace, do you know it? That is why the control of the flight was not passed.
At 1 h 35 min 26 s, the ATLANTICO controller coordinated flight AF447with the DAKAR controller. The DAKAR OCEANIC Regional Control Centre created the flight plan and activated it. The result of this was to generate a virtual flight following the planned trajectory in the DAKAR FIR between TASIL and POMAT. There was no radio contact between AF447 and DAKAR, nor any ADS-C connection. The flight remained virtual. AF447 didn’t reach TASIL, TASIL is on the boundary between the ATLANTICO and DAKAR Oceanic FIRs.
Bouillard said the pilots of flight AF 447 had tried three times to connect to a data system in the Senegalese capital Dakar, but had failed. How he knows? How he knows they failed? Was CVR recovered? There is not a single world about this in BEA preliminary report.
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