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Air France Jet and 228 missing over Atlantic.

Prayers sent out, that's an awfully lot of souls, I hope it has a good outcome.
 
Latest I heard ... they were at 35,000 that's 7 miles ... thats one hell of a drop.

Also heard that these aircraft are fly by wire only. No hope of a manual backup system to fly the aircraft ... loose the electrics, loose the flight controls, yer done.
 
and then add the fact that they only had minuites to get into the rafts before hypothermia kicked in. I dont hold much hope :frown:
 
Sounds like we're talking a catastrophic failure, whether electrical, structural, or whatever, but they seem to be ruling out a bomb.

It is very worrying, as the chances of locating wreckage in the deepest parts of the ocean are pretty remote, so we may never know.
 
The Bus is a very safe aircraft. Know a few guys who fly em. At this point, everything is purely speculation until "If" the black boxes are recovered. The ocean in that area can run as much as 14,000 feet in depth. If the pingers are going off and they can be detected then maybe they can locate and recover them by DSRV's? Deep Sea Recovery of wreckage has been made before but not sure from water at this depth.

The redundancy in the systems on the Bus are excellent regardless of their largely electric nature with FBW/FCS. The aircraft's systems and materials are stress tested against most types of elements including lightning strikes and keep vital systems online. The amount of safety systems built into the FBW/FCS system on the Bus are incredible. Many limiters for pitch, bank, and yaw and speed with or without the Autopilot/FMGC running. It is known that the ACARS on the plane sent out a final message of electrical failure and rapid decompression with no MAY DAY radio call.. To me that would certainly indicate there was a sudden event severe enough to cause a catastrohpic failure that brought the plane down. The structure of an Airbus is pretty damn solid. So whatever happened had to be very extreme if it was weather related/severe convection inside those storms they were flying through. That raises another question. Why in hell were they trying to punch through that mess or did they have accurate weather data both from flight planning or in flight radar to show what was ahead? In the end, I hope some solid answers come about in the investigation in hopes something like this can be prevented in the future. :engel016:
 
From what I've read (take it with a grain of salt, you know the news media....) the wreckage is in 20,000 feet of water. The pressure at that depth is something like 8,000 PSI. If this calculation is correct, then I'd bet the flight data recorders imploded from the pressure. We may never really know what happened here.
 
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