Air France Idiocy: What To Ignore In The Press
The newspapers are doing a terrible, horrible job with Air France Flight 447. The most hilarious passage yet comes from today's New York Post: "Perhaps no one will ever know how passengers reacted in those fatal 14 minutes—whether they screamed, grabbed for the oxygen masks or sat in silent prayer." Or maybe they had a sing-a-long to Beatles songs! Or maybe they all joined in covens to worship Satan! Ludicrous. But the lunacy is everywhere. From Reuters: "extreme turbulence or decompression during stormy weather might have caused the disaster." Yes, or not!
Decompression, by the way, isn't like it is in the movies, with the snakes getting sucked out of the planes. And turbulence doesn't destroy airplanes.
Sometimes reporters write things that don't even make any sense! Here is Time, recounting an incident on Qantas Flight 72 last year:
The plane abruptly entered a smooth 650-ft. dive (which the crew sensed was not being caused by turbulence) [ED NOTE: HUH? THEY SENSED THAT?] that sent dozens of people smashing into the airplane's luggage bins and ceiling…. After seemingly an eternity – in reality, the nosedive lasted 20 very long seconds – the flight crew wrested control of the plane from its wayward computer….
Ha, WRESTED! I think that means they hit the OFF BUTTON, but nice job making the autopilot sound like the HAL-9000.
Anyway, if you read that, it actually ceases to make sense! What actually happened on that flight were two separate instances, one of which briefly achieved not-quite zero g, the other which involved positive g. Unusual? Yes! Good? Not really! Deathly? Not if everyone was wearing a seatbelt. Poorly-written? GOD YES.
Speaking of zero-g, here is a video of someone barfing in a small plane during a brief negative-g roll! WARNING: GROSS BUT HILARIOUS.
Anyway! Then there is lots of hilarious stuff like in the media like "Equatorial region known for massive storms"!!! You know what else is known for massive storms? Everywhere else on the planet where there is a troposphere.
Here is from Captain Tom Bunn, now-retired United Airlines pilot:
The press wrote about the dreaded ITCZ — the Intertropical Convergence Zone. Look, gang. I used to fly trips from JFK to Rio once a week. I did that for years. I crossed the ITCZ hundreds and hundreds of times, and yet, I noticed nothing unusual — ever!
I looked at the weather maps for this flight. Nothing unusual. Other planes were on the route. Nothing to report. At least, nothing from professional pilots. But the professional press has lots to report. Good luck when reading their stuff.
Patrick Smith, who writes Salon's Ask the Pilot has a piece up today.
http://www.salon.com/tech/col/smith/2009/06/02/askthepilot322/
"And storms in the ITCZ, for all their potential menace, tend to be isolated and easy to out-maneuver."
Smith is great and his book (a collection) is a fast fun read. Also: http://www.airsafe.com/events/last_15.htm GAh!
Yeah, it's good! I'm surprised to see him weighing in so early, which is against his normal mode. But he's not wrong!
I'd slightly disagree that turbulence cannot cause a massive failure such as being suggested here–i.e., a sequence of damage that happens real fast and results in the airframe breaking apart. Which is what the physical evidence thus far hints at, given the debris field.
Whew. But still, something would have to cause it. . .such as a pilot plotting a course, or the plane's autopilot taking the aircraft, into a ridiculously hostile atmosphere.
Crashes often happen due to elevator or rudder failures caused by mechanical fuckups, collisions, or weather; or pilot goofs re same. This one is weird.
As for Sarah's post to Salon above–other pilots were flying similar routes that night. So, query: WTF, Air France?
Um, yeah: in 1966! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BOAC_Flight_911
And that's about it. (The few examples of wake turbulence is something else entirely.)
Certainly not suggesting it's anything close to common. And wake turbulence is not an issue here, or they'd be all over the other airliner involved.
Smith knows so much more than this lowly flyer, and I agree with his points. But atmospheric conditions can figure in causing planes to crash–Delta 191, Dallas; FedEx Cargojet, Narita; UA 232, Denver, if I recall correctly.
Only they don't normally break apart mid-air.
Are you like my friend who obsesses over every plane crash and listens to the cockpit recordings of dying pilots over and over again?
It's like when you're in Art School and you discover the girl across the lunch table is reading "Killer Clown" and you just know you have much much more in common.
And, just as quickly, the current speculation is that the plane was intact when it hit the water, given the 12 mile oil slick (I suppose the assumption being that fuel would be more aerosol had the plane broken up at altitude, which would not produce a cohesive slick).
I love how, in less than 24 hours, we go from high-altitude disintegration to intact slamming into the ocean.
It took 4 years to assess what happened to that Swiss Air flight off of Nova Scotia years ago. And that thing happened relatively close to land. This is gonna take a ton of time, which leaves weeks and months and years of media speculation. Especially in the eerie absence of communications and data.
It's Sabre damnit. Haven't I told you? Damn pilot checked in for the flight using the F6 key rather than the F12 key, and Sabre hates that! It probably shorted first class on chicken entrees too. Yikes, it's too early for this monkey-business. Apologies all around.
"Captain Bunn do you think we are going to make it???"
There's just way too much speculative fiction around these days passing itself off as "journalism". That ABC special the other night, for example, was bananas.
At least we're all finally having a frank and honest discussion of why enormous metal things fall out of the sky, and the fucking horror of being in one of the enormous falling metal things.
I just watched that video again.
It might pay to remember the November 12, 2001 crash of an American Airlines Airbus A300-600 in Queens. The NTSB final report indicates that the rudder and entire vertical stabilizer broke off due to "unnecessary and excessive" rudder inputs by the First Officer. Subsequent x-ray examination of a carbon fiber portion of the vertical stabilizer showed voids in the construction in the area where the stabilizer attached to the fuselage, which weakened the structure at its attachment points.
As long as we're speculating, lets throw that information into the mix.