Air France Plane Lost

[Oddball]

http://news.uk.msn.com/world/article.aspx?cp-documentid=147697775

[Rooster Cruiser]

 

[leiafee]

Terribly sad.

I just can't fathom out how a major carrier with an almost new aircraft can lose a airliner to what looks at first glance like weather, in this day and age.  It's frightening.

I really hope the accident report when it eventually gets put together has some insight.

[G-man]

almost new aircraft

According to Air France the aircraft had flown 18,870 hours. Its crew included three pilots, including a 58-year-old captain who had logged 11,000 hours in flight, and nine cabin crew members, Air France said in a statement. Some 1,700 of the captain's hours were on two Airbus models. Of the two co-pilots -- ages 37 and 32 -- one had 3,000 hours of flying experience and the other 6,600 hours.

[Oddball]

heard during the night at work they have found wreckage 

[Frank N. O.]

My condolences. I heard there were people from no less than 35 different countries, including my own, aboard. I hope they will be able to find out what happened, and if something can be done to avoid this a second time.

Frank

[leiafee]

According to Air France the aircraft had flown 18,870 hours.

I was basing the "nearly new" on this news story which stated it "had been in operation since April 2005." 

Four years seems pretty new as aeroplanes go...

I hadn't seem the hours tally, not sure what's "normal" for airliners.  4700ish hours a year seems to my ignorance like a big number!

[Mike]

I don't think 18,000hrs and 4 years old is all that much for an airliner. We have a L3 that has that much time on the airframe....
Look at how many 727's and MD80's are still flying.

[Ragwing]

There are 8,760 hours per year.
18,870 hours in 4 years averages 11 hours per day.

Half time is not bad usage on their investment.
I occasionally look at the airlines usage and some airliners average over 16 hours per day.

[Oddball]

Heard that the CVR and FDR are in 12,000 feet of water. what's the chances they are recoverable? and if they are recovered will the investigators get any data off them?

[Ragwing]

Heard that the CVR and FDR are in 12,000 feet of water. what's the chances they are recoverable? and if they are recovered will the investigators get any data off them?

They may be between 9,000 and 12,000 feet.

I expect the CVR and FDR boxes to be in good shape.
The aircraft would have taken a lot of the inertia force and the depth will not damage them.

These are newer boxes that are solid state with a lot more information.  Not like the recorders from the 60's.

The pingers are designed to send a signal for about a month.
The problem is that it can be really hard to hear the pingers because of the aircraft, mud and other debris that can absorb the sound.
How long they can survive 12,000 feet is another issue.

So, lets assume we find the wreckage and send down minisubs.  Minisubs can easily take this depth.
The tricky part may be how to disassemble the wreckage to get to the boxes.
It is way too deep for divers and the manipulator arms on minisubs are limited.

[Baradium]

They probobly won't ever know for sure what happened without the recorders.  Even with the recorders they might not.   It'll be very difficult to find them, and they are running out of time on the pingers.  There's always a chance they will turn up, but every day it's less likely.


It looks like no one has posted the list of error messages that the MX system spat out.  I've been discussing it at length in other areas.   This is an ACARS type system.  Basically, it's a digital system to send text.  The messages are not sent highspeed, it takes a bit of time for each message to go through.

Here are the messages.  Read the top half first, but start at the BOTTOM of that top half and read up.  Then read from the bottom of the bottom half up.    The LAV stuff was from the day prior and is unrelated to the flight.  If you have trouble understanding, I can clarify what some stuff means.  The really long line of numbers is two letters then YYMMDDTTTT  So YEAR MONTH DAY and TIME in that order.






You may note that the time stamp from the first related event to the last one was about 4 minutes.

EDIT:  Apparently that Lav stuff was still the prior day, but it was during the beginning of the flight.  The message indicates a wastewater drain fault.  This is a message that is for mx purposes only and shouldn't have been displayed to the crew.  The 2 lav messages are time stamped around 3 hours prior to the rest of the messages.

[Rooster Cruiser]

Very disturbing.  Please understand that this next quote is speculation only... I do not endorse the opinions expressed.  However, the rudder travel limit message at 0210Z makes me wonder if perhaps they lost the rudder and/or vertical stabilizer at this point.  That would explain why the vertical stabilizer was found 30 miles from the rest of the debris field, according to this missive.

If this actually happened, it was most likely a result of whatever fault that caused the autopilot to kick offline and the Fly By Wire computers to revert to alternate logic.  I doubt it was the cause, as it appears to have been the last of the messages at 0210Z.

Ragwing, can you add anything to this discussion?

An interesting take on the A320.

 

A Brazilian Naval unit reportedly found the complete vertical fin/rudder assembly of the doomed aircraft floating some 30 miles from the main debris field. The search for the flight recorders goes on, but given the failure history of the vertical fins on A300-series aircraft, an analysis of its structure at the point of failure will likely yield the primary cause factor in the breakup of the aircraft, with the flight recorder data (if found) providing only secondary contributing phenomena.

 

The fin-failure-leading-to-breakup sequence is strongly suggested in the attached (below) narrative report by George Larson, Editor emeritus of Smithsonian Air & Space Magazine.

 

It's regrettable that these aircraft are permitted to continue in routine flight operations with this known structural defect. It appears that safety finishes last within Airbus Industries, behind national pride and economics.  Hopefully, this accident will force the issue to be addressed, requiring at a minimum restricted operations of selected platforms, and grounding of some high-time aircraft until a re-engineered (strengthened) vertical fin/rudder attachment structure can be incorporated.

 

 

 

--------------------------(George Larson's Report)---------------------

 

This is an account of a discussion I had recently with a maintenance professional

who salvages airliner airframes for a living. He has been at it for a while, dba BMI

Salvage at Opa Locka Airport in Florida. In the process of stripping parts, he sees

things few others are able to see.  His observations confirm prior assessments of

Airbus structural deficiencies within our flight test and aero structures communities

by those who have seen the closely held reports of A3XX-series vertical fin failures.

 

His observations:
 
"I  have scrapped just about every type of transport aircraft from A-310,
A-320, B-747, 727, 737, 707, DC-3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, MD-80, L-188, L1011
and various Martin, Convair and KC-97 aircraft.

Over a hundred of them.

Airbus products are the flimsiest and most poorly designed as far as
airframe structure is concerned by an almost obsession to utilize composite
materials.

I have one A310 vertical fin on the premises from a demonstration I just

performed.  It was pathetic to see the composite structure shatter as it did,

something a Boeing product will not do.

The vertical fin along with the composite hinges on rudder and elevators is
the worst example of structural use of composites I have ever seen and I am
not surprised by the current pictures of rescue crews recovering the

complete Vertical fin and rudder assembly at some distance from the crash

site.
 
The Airbus line has a history of both multiple rudder losses and a vertical
fin and rudder separation from the airframe as was the case in NY with AA.


As an old non-radar equipped DC4 pilot who flew through many a thunderstorm
in Africa along the equator, I am quite familiar with their ferocity.  It is not

difficult to understand how such a storm might have stressed an aircraft

structure to failure at its weakest point, and especially so in the presence of

instrumentation problems.
 
I replied with this:
 
"I'm watching very carefully the orchestration of the inquiry by French
officials and Airbus. I think I can smell a concerted effort to steer
discussion away from structural issues and onto sensors, etc.  Now Air
France, at the behest of their pilots' union, is replacing all the air data
sensors on the Airbus fleet, which creates a distraction and shifts the

media's focus away from the real problem.


It's difficult to delve into the structural issue without wading into the
Boeing vs. Airbus swamp, where any observation is instantly tainted by its

origin. Americans noting any Airbus structural issues (A380 early failure
of wing in static test; loss of vertical surfaces in Canadian fleet prior to
AA A300, e.g.) will be attacked by the other side as partisan, biased, etc. "


His follow-up:
 
One gets a really unique insight into structural issues when one has
first-hand experience in the dismantling process.
 
I am an A&P, FEJ and an ATP with 7000 flight hours and I was absolutely
stunned, flabbergasted when I realized that the majority of internal
airframe structural supports on the A 310 which appear to be aluminum are
actually rolled composite material with aluminum rod ends. They shattered.
 
Three years ago we had a storm come through, with gusts up to 60-70 kts.,

catching several A320s tied down on the line, out in the open.

 

The A320 elevators and rudder hinges whose actuators had been

removed shattered and the rudder and elevators came off.
 
Upon closer inspection I realized that not only were the rear spars
composite but so were the hinges.  While Boeing also uses composite

material in its airfoil structures, the actual attach fittings for the elevators,

rudder, vertical and horizontal stabilizers are all of machined aluminum."

[Ragwing]

Rooster,

When AA went down in New York, we grabbed every picture we could find and kept looking for the failure mode and point.

I saw undocumented repairs, and I had a lot of questions.
The NTSB report that the copilot did it by stomping the rudder peddles back and forth was totally unexpected.
I would have expected the airbus computer to have taken the excessive movement out of their hands (or feet).

I did not see any part except from the available pictures..... I had a hard time with the NTSB report.
----------------------
It is conceivable the vertical fin floated very far during the breakup, I would have expected some flaps, slats or elevators to be nearby.

The A3xx composite vertical fins have a history of failure.  Flying through a thunderhead would have applied a lot of side loading to this large structure and it is conceivable that it failed first.

An aircraft can fly without a tail, it is just not in trim.  Survival of the aircraft depends on what else fails and propagates.

[Rooster Cruiser]

I had a hard time with the NTSB report.

Yes, so did I.  I always thought rudders were supposed to withstand any forces imposed on them by the flight crew... especially in low-speed flight regime.  That report on the AA accident in NYC always smelled of a cover-up.   

It doesn't look like they're gonna find the CVR and FDR before they lose battery power.  If that is the case, we'll probably never know for sure.  However, I am beginning to have some serious doubts about the Airbus family of planes.   

RC