Haven't heard of those, what was in those messages?

Sad business, overall. And I'm sure there are risks with most if not all airplanes.

edit. Oh, missed d@rk51d3s answer.

yup.. like this image sent to me by a Captain i used to fly with quite a lot :shifty: looks harmless enough... put it right on a fuel tank or one of the electrical motors responsible for Aileron or Elevator deflection - say that it jams in a full travel position... then what? you just roll or pitch uncontrollably.

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_JGyMlGQKTS...oZw/s320/1.jpg

unless you use the struck fuel tank scenario... a lightning strike severe enough as the one above makes contact with fuel vapor in a half empty wing and... KABOOM... you have about enough time to think "WTF" before your finished.

correct, the ram air turbines will manage electrical signal to emergency systems (standby instrumentation, and comms and flight controls generally) but lets say that the primary motor that drives the ailerons or elevators is struck - jammed into a specific position - then what? what if the fuel tank scenario plays out... electrical power means nothing at that point. the fuel tank scenario is rare, it has only happened a couple of times in history... but why couldnt it happen in this case?

Pilots live by a three step process that determines their course of action in a tense situation 1. Aviate First 2. Navigate Second 3. Communicate third.

Im sure your 100% right about the situation happening so fast they couldnt communicate, but the primary focus of any experienced pilot is going to be to fly the airplane first - communicate his plight second... the worse the situation - the more true this becomes. so even if they had a couple of minutes it would not surprise me if they made no transmissions.

Im in complete agreement here :nope:

This is an hour old:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worl...bus-crash.html

Golden Rivet,

as a rule of thumb, pilots and engineers calculate one lightning strike per 1000 flight hours. Another rule of thumb says that each airliner is hit at least 1-2 times per year.

That means each day, wordwide, probably dozens of planes get hit by lightning. Even parked planes get hit, with their tyres on the ground and being in close proximity to it. But when was the last time you heared that a parked plane went up due to lightning? And how many planes do fall out of the air because of it? A lightning strike usually does leave only cosmetical traces on an airplane. Many flights near the equator have to deal with thunderstorms that usually are several times as strong than what can be seen in europe, becasue they are a quite common thing in that region, especially over the ocean. If things like what you picture say were the rules inc ase of lightning stikres, then there must be several times as many air desasters as there actually are. therefore it would be interesting to see the exact circumstance of that lighting causing the damage in that picture. that polanes get struck by lightning is no unusual thing. And mostly, passangers do not even notice it.

The heavy winds and turbulences inside a heavy weather zone like the one the AF flight fas trying to sneak thourhg, can be easily underestimated, and they can shake an airframe so violently, that I find it much easier to imagine that structural damage occured due to such violent pushing and shaking. It can cause material (structure, surface) to break, and it can make hydraulic as well as electric wires breaking, too.

This does not mean that the plane was not hit by a lightning. But it means seen from a statistical perspective probably much more was happening to the airplane. I still see turbulences as the most likely cause for catastrophic damage appearing onboard the plane. tjhat storm front was more than a 1000 km wide and 18 km high, and the passage the weather satellites showed between two centres, had disappeared and united to one giant front at the time the AF flight was passing the area where before that passage was.

But all this is pub talking only. We simply do not know fopr sure what happened. The Brazilians say the Atlantic is 4-6 thousand meters deep where the Blackbox likely was buried, and there are strong currents as well. At 6 thousand meters it is even quersitonable that the radio signal of the box will reach the surface. And when it stops sending in a month or so, and has not been found until then, then it'S over. And even if it is being located, it is no certainty that diving robots will get it up.

Researchers will need plenty of luck to solve this puzzle. It is possible that they succeed, but I don't hold my breath.

Skybird,

Im not saying your wrong, and i do know that there are thousands of lightning hits per year. but would you argue that it only takes ONE critical lighting strike -out of all those thousands or millions - to make things go ca-ca?

I mean i have seen thousands of lightning strikes in my life time... but i have never been hit by one. does this mean i will never be killed by lightning? no. even though the statistics are in my favor - it could happen tomorrow.

you are absolutely right about the thunderstorm turbulence... the typical figure we go with when teaching it - is at least 6,000 foot per minute up drafts and down drafts - obviously a force that could tear an aircraft apart.

I do agree with you on the statistics of catastrophic structural failure induced by severe to extreme turbulence vs. lightning. but lets think of it this way...

...what if it was both?

in my experience - hard lighting strikes usually affects the aircraft's weather radar pretty badly, probably worse than any other system.

if the flight was operating at night, and their weather radar got fried, seeing and avoiding thunderstorms in the night gets to be an interesting game when that radar stops radaring.

at that point it wouldnt have taken much to stray right into a thunder head.

EDIT: i find it interesting in the article that it mentions the airline had received automated messages of errors and malfunctions in the flight control computers.
hmmm

As I said:

It probably is a chain of events, although in the above I did not say that eventually a heavy turbulence alone could also be sufficient to make a plane falling apart.

I do not see this as a "I am right and you are wrong" game, GR. It'S just that in the first wave of news, the lightning theory was so overly stressed by anchormen in the news that it became a bit annoying. I do not rule out lightning as a cause. But I think some other possible theories are more likely to be true. Lightning is just the most sensational explanation, because it offers effects made by ILM and is often used in movies to let the excitment of the audience reaching climax. .

Which in my novice opinion speaks for a physical push causing it, not an electric impulse. If a lightning fries the electronics aboard an airplane, I would expect them to be in a state where they do not cause errors, but cause nothing anymore, just smoking. The automatted message system also sent a message at the end that sudden decompression of the cabin took place - but not initially, when the trouble began, but at the end, after four minutes. Because of this time delay, this also speaks more for a failing of the structural integrity due to turbulences of the airframe, than for a ligthning, imo.

If you take your PC and shake it, it functions erratically and then gives up. If you grill it with 100.000 ampere, it doesn't do anything anymore.

I don't know of course, but that's what I'm thinking. And it might have been from a lightning strike, however unprobable that might be. At some point this happened to another airliner once - lightning struck the fuel tanks and caused an explosion. I've now also heard from the news that the parts of the wreckage are dispersed over a pretty wide area, which would favor a disintegration mid-air at high altitude.

Anything else makes it difficult to see how they were not able to send a mayday call. I know the "aviate, navigate, communicate" rule, but when you are outside radar coverage, over the middle of the ocean in the middle of the night, it must occur to you that reporting your position and status is like EXTREMELY important if you want to provide your passengers with any chance of survival. So if they didn't, either all electrical systems failed, which is somewhat improbable with the high redundancy in modern airplanes, or what happened must have been so disastrous to disable them at once. And that could only be an explosion or catastrophic depressurization.

Even a catastrophic loss of control due to a software or whatever failure with the airplane departing and entering a spin or whatever and the crew trying to recover, doesn't explain why they wouldn't send a radio call while the plane goes down from 11 km. Or they must have gone down like a comet to not make a call while their radio was still working.

That's news to me. OK, that would pretty much rule out a sudden explosion immediately after a lightning strike or something. Probably it was something that at first looked like a minor problem and they were trying to figure it out, so they didn't report yet, and then the airplane suddenly exploded / depressurized. Still doesn't rule out a lightning strike, though, except if they are required to report something like that at once. A strike could have caused a small fire in some place initially, eating up a few electrical systems, until reaching something vital or the fuel tank. A bit like what happened when the Shuttle Columbia lost more and more electrical systems that were burned away by the heat and then disintegrated.
I'll stop the speculations right now though. I'm no expert and will leave this to the aviation engineers (and the media...).

I'm betting on a combination of factors, including lightening and turbulance.

It's possible to make radio contact with someone on land that far out, isn't it? Seems like something pretty sudden happened for there to be no voice transmissions before the accident. Or comms were out.

RIP crew and passengers.

PD

Since there was a series of failure messages that was sent by the planes control systems shows something went wrong and when the plane failed, it happened so quick that the pilots never got off a mayday.

The plane was almost brand new and has a pretty good history flight wise. Qantas had a incident with the same model of plane when the auto pilot made the plane descend rapidly twice in quick succession, only the quick response of the flight crew crew saved it from crashing into the sea. They are still unsure why it happened the last I heard, and it may not be related to this case.

My thoughts are with the families of those who have lost there lives:cry:

One of the ACARS message concern a rapid icing of the plane wings, engine and flight probes, and the problem is the Flight control use the probes to maintain the aircraft flying.
So if the electrical faillure make the de-icing system off the plane was in big trouble like the Air Florida Flight 90 crash in 1982.

I hear ya man. Flying down to LA one time in the middle of the soup at about FL200 and a lightning strike knocked out all electronics. Reset the fuel flow meter to 0 for example, but of course had back up analog gauges for qty.

I've been hit while flying before, but it never really mattered. This time however, it did.

I think a bigger danger that usually comes with lightening is hail. That stuff will rip a plane to shreds in seconds.

-S

you know a funny thing... a couple of the worst icing conditions i ever ran into was down around Fresno and Phoenix etc... people dont expect it much down in the southwest, but its there.

Try Southern WA at 6K. Worst I ever ran into at 2 AM in the morning. I was watching the airspeed drop down to about 170 kts but though nothing of it, then a while later looked at it and it was approaching 120 kts. George was flying - the nickname for the autopilot and he is happy to correct for it! :D Grabbed a flashlight, pointed it on the wing and crud! We were a flying brick! Probably seconds from a death spiral. Hit the boots and it all came off but I tell you, that happened quick. Had to get out of the alt. fast. Requested FL40 and it was a bit better down there.

One thing I tell you, if you want to wake up fast from a nap, hit the prop de-ice in the middle of some good icing conditions. Ice slamming against the fuselage does a number on your napping state! :D Especially in the dark!

-S