Air France 447
 

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8076848.stm

story will evolve over next few hours

- AF447 seems to be A332 (per timetable)

"Air traffic control lost contact with the Airbus A330 at 6am GMT after it took off from Rio de Janeiro bound for Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris.

It was due to land in the French capital at 9.10am GMT.

Airport authorities have set up a 'crisis cell' at Charles de Gaulle.

The people on board the jet are 216 passengers and 12 crew."

Not looking good..............:(

CNN reporting a/c involved is F-GZCP

Sky UK reporting that AF have "lost all hope" of finding the plane (source: french radio).

Brazilian air force and army is out looking.

EDIT: Crisis centre is setup at CDG.

216 pax + 12 crew.

french government say that the plane would have run out of fuel by now, so its pretty much gone. (transport ministry).

search has begun along the route.

terrorism has not been ruled out.

edit2:

reuters reporting that at 1:30GMT it disappeared off Brazil radar.

edit3:

from airliners.net :"In Brazil the news say that there is little hope. The plane got caught in heavy turbulence near Fernando de Noronha island."

Does not sound good at all.

Reports surfacing that the pilots were talking to company or ATC about severe turbulence shortly before communication was cut off. It seems that weather (turbulence, t-storms) are being raised as potential first clues.

Whatever the case, this is scary stuff. Such a seemingly instantaneous accident like this is a rather rare thing...

AF: Plane sent message that plane had electrical short circuit after severe turbulence.

Sky UK and pilot they are interviewing are suggesting thunderstorm/lightning strike.

This ACARS transmission would appear to confirm the registration of the aircraft involved.

ACARS mode: 2 Aircraft reg: F-GZCP [Airbus A332]
Message label: _ Block id: 0 Msg no: S72A
Flight id: AF0447 [GIG-CDG] [Air France]
----------------------------------------------------------[ 01/06/2009 00:53 ]-

from airliners.net again: "Last report says the plane was in the middle of a thunderstorm and an automated message was sent indicating an electrical failure."

Spanish airforce is searching around Africa

what is it with AF of late..

Weird how they say that Air Frace has "Much the same" safety record as Qantas...

Air France having a press conference as we speak, watching it live on sky uk. translator is...bad:p

Apparently the crew was very experienced on the A330.
Doing everything possible.
Plane entered a storm zone.
Air France seem keen to rule out terrorism.
Received some automated messages regarding weather.
Seem fairly sure it is around 400nm off Brazil (I think thats what they said, I only caught the last bit of that response).

EDIT: 15 minutes after they lost contact, they received the automatic messages re: turbulence.

Hi All,

Rhys, You may want to correct an earlier post.
You Stated this I don't think they are looking around Africa for it.
It is South America, unless they moved Rio in the last few hours.

Stuart

Not really good news after reading various forums.

Just one question, with all the technology these days, will the authorities head to those that have SBS-1 and the likes as part of the investigation if the aircraft has been lost?

How would they get this information?

my thoughts go to the families.

Not a good day for aviation indeed.

Cheers

Adam

Actually Stuart

Plane Missing Over Atlantic - Stuff

http://gc.kls2.com/cgi-bin/gcmap?PATH=rio-cdg

Approx FLight route from Great Circle Mapper

RIP to all involved. I was boarding a flight in Berlin when the story came through everyone devastated watching the Plasma screen as we were boarding. Lets hope they can find the black boxes to find the cause and make sure it dont happen again!

Sad news and my condolances to the families involved.

Time will tell if they are able to revover the Flight Data Recorder and Cockpit Voice Recorder and find out what caused this accident. Lets hope they can and work out why we lost so many people so suddenly.

G'day mate what sort of technology are you talking about? SBS-1 would be no help whatsoever. The plane was well and truly out of radar range. Had been 4 hours since it left Rio last point of contact.

How would they get this information? They cant really. Latest is looking to US satellites for help but its needle in a hay stack unfortunatley.

Cheers

Maybe they're referring to the 340 that ran off the runway in Canada and comparing it to the 744 that did the same in Thailand. (Different outcome on the conditions of the aircraft of course) :p

Air France is a pretty reputable airline mate.

In terms of crashes/accidents they got away really luckily with Toronto but then again so did Qantas at Bangkok with no fatalities. The concorde accident which some idiots of the media are comparing is in no way comparable and as most would know was the DC10 component on runway sucked into engines that caused it.

I flew with Air France long haul and short haul from Asia/Europe and within Europe and cant complement enough on their safety.

didn't hint that they weren't reputable...but, in the past 5 years they've had 1 near fatal accident at YYZ and now this hull loss, not to mention the fact that one of their A332's was u/s at Bangalore for a week less than 3 months ago...and the same 77W had engine issues twice and landed at the same airport in Lajes.

I don't think President Sarkozy agrees with you...

Sky News did report last night that the Spanish airforce were searching around the islands off Africa, as the usual route according to the report was for the plan to track up the Atlantic and then over Morocco, Portugal and Spain before heading to Paris. The thinking was that although the plan may have lost radar off the coast of Brazil, there are radar black spots over the Atlantic and it could have made it further towards Paris before it 'disappeared'. Rhys' comments are correct based on these media reports.

Heres the thing.

If it was out of vhf range at time of reporting severe turbulence and if over water and oceanic im assuming then only HF radio wouldve been available to use. For those who dont know High Frequency is the form of radio used for oceanic crossings and we have Brisbane Flight Service Station (FSS) here, theres Nadi FSS I believe and Oakland for West Coast USA.

So when a flight is in 'Oceanic' it cannot be seen on a radar as primary radar targets cant be seen and the FSS controller relies on the pilots broadcasting their level, mach speed, estimates for passing positions to know a.) where they are and b.) to ensure planes dont pass over a point at same flight level for example.

So the fact that reports have said that it was lost off radar could potentially be quite misleading as in fact if it was on HF frequency and oceanic, it would have been miles before it was transferred from Brazilian controller with radar.

As I said though potentially because facts arent totally known yet.

It didnt crash over Rio so what he has posted is correct, aircraft do route other dierctions to catch favourable winds.

Yes VHF radio is line of sight capable only , and without retransmission is usable up to around 250 miles distance , however , in this instance , it's possible that the aircraft was CPDLC ( Controller Pilot Data Link Communication ) equipped , and as such HF radio would have been a secondary mode of radio communication , and certainly not the sole method available .

Everythings possible mate.

Until the facts are known its just pure speculation. All im saying is HF is commonly used on oceanic crossings like this one.

Some places are seeming to focus on the fact that Brazilian ATC system isnt one of the better ones in the world as evidenced by Gol 738 mid air with a biz jet in 2005 and so CPDLC might not even be a factor here- I'm not exactly sure what facilities they have on east coast of Brazil however.

Latest info from avherald and ill quote poignant excerpts

Air France plane carrying 228 people disappears in storm over the Atlantic
http://www.smh.com.au/world/air-fran...0601-bsua.html

Apparently people sent SMS in the middle of Atlantic just before the plane disappeared.

Obviously there is no way one can get mobile reception in the middle of the ocean but are the inflight phones capable of sending SMS?

a left field question, don't bother answering

wondering if any way similar to the QF incident where the Qantas A330-300 had a sudden losses of altitude due to automatic corrections made to the aircraft by a failed inertial reference system??

Banjo

I think you'll find that all Brazilian airspace is controlled by the military.

My thoughts exactly Andrew.

If an airline can't track it's aircraft via GPS/ACARS at all times I have to say I'm a little worried. The aircraft sends a constant signal of its location to ground stations (apart from Radar or CPDLC) right? It sends this data along with engine trend data and the like I'm sure? What about the ELT?

That being the case, if the aircraft has gone down, surely they can get a pretty idea of its location, even if it did deviate off track?

Just thinking out loud, very sad. Hope it's not another A330 internal systems issue like some people have suggested. With these types of over water accidents it's usually a long and protracted investigation that requires much time to establish exactly what happened. Let's hope the recorders are found intact. Although that would be unlikely.

CNN suggested an issue as the aircraft crossed the inter tropical convergence zone (ITZ). Aircraft cross this area everyday and I haven't heard of such severe turbulence to bring down an aircraft from it's cruising altitude. Other aircraft in the area would have surely been subjected to similar conditions if this was true.

Latest from the ever reliable and even weighted Herald sun says that the search area is around the Fernando de Noronda Islands, about 220
nautical miles off Natal, North East Brazil. Search called off until daylight. The US are joining in the search:

Herald Sun article



You will see that there is a 1.8km strip on the island, servicing main land services.
http://static.panoramio.com/photos/o...l/19023469.jpg
Picture removed and changed to link - please try not to post photos wider than about 600px directly into threads. -mod

Obviously a serious failure if the a/c could not this landfall. (Not sure if this is a suitable alternate for the type)

They most certainly are.

I can't find any evidence on the Air France website (it's crap) of the in flight communication tools, but on QF, EK you can send SMS ($1.50US iirc on QF).

Apparently the texts being referenced were sent prior to the aircraft's departure.

Also reports now surfacing that the crew of a TAM flight observed "points of orange light" in the Atlantic near the location in question.

ACARS uses VHF so it has the same limitations as VHF voice transmissions.

Dave et al,

ACARS (aswell as SELCAL) can be coupled to SATCOM when out of VHF coverage but not sure what happened in this case.

Further to my post, it has been reported that the last radar contact for this flight was on Fernando de Noronda radar.

Debris has reportedly been sighted by a French freighter around the area that it is said to have dissapeared in.

From News.com

With such "quoted" severe messages having been relayed from the aircraft, is it possible that the flight recorders have continued to operate normally under such conditions?

Of course they need to be recovered first.

A very sad day for aviation.

Kind regards,

Geoff

The pingers on the CVR and FDR will ping for about 30 days.They will certainly be looking to locate them ASAP.