Hot: Air France Jet Missing (AF 447)

Re: Hot: Air France Jet Missing

Polar742 said:
Another consideration for the timing of messages: Just because they were sent at different times, does not mean they occurred at different times.

If the ACARS sent one, then lost connections, the second may have been in Queue awaiting for a connection to transmit the message. I'm not sure if the messages will have a time stamp from the maintenance computer when the malfunction was encountered.

However, if the aircraft was having problems communicating on HF, they were probably out of VHF range and the ACARS would be using either HF (which was not terribly reliable if you can't transmit voice over it) or SATCOM, either way, it was probably searching for a connection.

Then again, one might have happened and led to a downline cause of the other....

The more you look at it, the more questions arise, and I have a very high doubt that many, if any at all, will be answered.
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Great point. This leads to the question of whether the time stamp on the receiving party's end would reflect the moment when the event occurred or the moment when the message was transmitted. In other words, if the event occurred at 12:00:01 and there was a five-second transmission delay, would the time stamp received on the ground read 12:00:01 or 12:00:06?
 
Re: Hot: Air France Jet Missing

wheelsup said:
Isn't it crazy that in the day and age of always on internet, GPS tracking embedded in mobile phones, etc. a 250 seat wide body aircraft gets swallowed up whole and can't be found?

Doesn't it broadcast an ELT even if under water? You'd think they'd find at least some debris on the surface.
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I guess they said they've got it narrowed down to a 10 nm radius from what they say in the article Doug posted.
 
Re: Hot: Air France Jet Missing

Center_Mid said:
Great point. This leads to the question of whether the time stamp on the receiving party's end would reflect the moment when the event occurred or the moment when the message was transmitted. In other words, if the event occurred at 12:00:01 and there was a five-second transmission delay, would the time stamp received on the ground read 12:00:01 or 12:00:06?
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ACARS reads the time it was received.

However the message could contain a timestamp of when the malfunction was detected, which is far more valuable than time of transmission.
 
Re: Hot: Air France Jet Missing

Damn this is not what i wanted to hear....:(

Is there still no news of finding any debris or wreckage?
 
Re: Hot: Air France Jet Missing

naive question here: if the plane had been outfitted with ADS-B, would it have been able to be tracked over the ocean with a better degree of accuracy? I kinda figured that the ADS-B system being proposed has transmission and interrogation capabilities......although i guess it wouldn't transmit to a satellite?
 
Re: Hot: Air France Jet Missing

Well it looks like Air France is pretty much saying they think the plane is lost along with everyone on it.:( Who knows at this point.
 
Re: Hot: Air France Jet Missing

fender_jag said:
(Sorry for my naivete). Is there a point on transoceanic flights where you must continue to your destination should you encounter a problem? There's a guy in my crashpad who was explaining that to me, and I want to make sure I understand it.
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i think that depends on the ETOPS rating of the Crew/AC , maybe doug can tell us more about it .
according to the prog chart posted on this thread two pages ago , it is apparent that there was a line of TS at the ITCZ , and thats no joke , these storms start every afternoon (during summer season) and they are anywhere 15degrees north or south of the equator they form a line thats impossible to cross , and they go as high as FL800 .
flights from north to south africa are never done during the evenings , they're always done during the day .
god bless their souls
 
Re: Hot: Air France Jet Missing

Just a sad story-it's been a bad year all around the world for aviation-to say the least.
 
Re: Hot: Air France Jet Missing

Man, that just really sucks. I LOVE crossing the pond late at night, it's one helluva view...but on occassion, I will have that though "if we go down out here...we are screwed". I promptly try and forget about said possiblity, but it's always in the back of my mind.

And storms to FL80? Forget that...I don't think so.
 
Re: Hot: Air France Jet Missing

granlistillo said:
RF doesn't penetrate the water, and has huge attenuation after a couple of feet. Not gonna work at all on the bottom. The CVR FDR should have sonar pingers designed to ping for a month. They would be hard to hear from the surface any more than 4k meters. Hopefully there are subs going to the area, that can get under the thermocline to hear the signals better.
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Yeah the FDR ELT deal, that's what I was thinking off, I remember that somewhere in new hire systems.
 
Re: Hot: Air France Jet Missing

cencal83406 said:
Whenever it says embedded - that's a red flag.... you won't be able to see the T-Storm you're flying into (even at night).... and your radar return of such a storm may be lying to you since there is potentially a lot of rain in the return in front of it.
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No, at that latitude I'd scan the 30k and above level. Anything higher than that is convective, the other stuff is not a big deal. Also, don't forget that an 80k topped storm at that latitude has about the same energy as a 30k storm over Kansas. There is so much moisture out there, that they often get pretty high. Nothing in that forecast would give me pause or even make me think to add more gas. It's just "ops normal" for the region.

ACARs aircraft are constantly sending various "fault" messages. May be significant, or may be totally nothing. Looking at ACARs playbacks, you'd be amazed at how many get sent. The crews rarely know about any of them, just go into the mx database to look for trends. Usually it's just some transient thing that's not significant. There is no way to construe that report to mean anything at this stage. Insufficient data to make any calls right now. About the only thing you can say for sure is that the aircraft type has a good records, the company has a good record, and the reports on the crew (if accurate) look good as well.
 
Re: Hot: Air France Jet Missing

seagull said:
No, at that latitude I'd scan the 30k and above level. Anything higher than that is convective, the other stuff is not a big deal. Also, don't forget that an 80k topped storm at that latitude has about the same energy as a 30k storm over Kansas. There is so much moisture out there, that they often get pretty high. Nothing in that forecast would give me pause or even make me think to add more gas. It's just "ops normal" for the region.
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Interesting, is that because storms that show up level 3/4 at lower levels out there aren't really of that intensity because of all the moisture there, so you scan higher?
 
Re: Hot: Air France Jet Missing

wheelsup said:
Interesting, is that because storms that show up level 3/4 at lower levels out there aren't really of that intensity because of all the moisture there, so you scan higher?
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If it isn't above about 25k it is more likely low level rain, not convective. You adjust that altitude as appropriate, lower in the winter in CONUS (not talking FL either, it's more like the tropics!), higher in the tropics, based on the availability of moisture. If you are down in the goo, the best chance is to tilt up high enough to point the beam out of the low level stuff. If you do the math, you'll see that you can't get enough tilt at low altitude to know whether it's convective or not if the wx is closer than 15-20 miles or so.
 
Re: Hot: Air France Jet Missing

Is there a GPS tracker on Airlines? We have them on all the US tankers for flight following, not sure what the cost is to the Government.
 
Re: Hot: Air France Jet Missing

"ADIRU 1"

:confused::confused:
Can someone explain this term to me? (from several pages ago) And why its failure could cause so many random and erroneous messages/failures?
 
Re: Hot: Air France Jet Missing

Tangodelta29 said:
So that's some sort of navigational unit?
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Yeah it sounds like it takes in "air data" from the airplane (ie P/S TAS etc) and has an Inertial Ref Unit (something fancy with Ring Laser Gyros and the like) that requires (or perchance through a GPS) a starting set of "gate coordinates" ie where the a/c is parked, then, based, on accelerations in the x/y/z planes calculates with great precision where exactly the aircraft is.
 
Re: Hot: Air France Jet Missing

This story has a very strange vibe to it. The lack of any substantive info is quite odd given the amount of time that has passed. Granted we are dealing with a french airline and the french government which might explain the tightlipped nature of things and we are talking about a jet over the ocean but I find there to be something rather disquieting about the quiet here.

Latest from reuters http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE55062720090601
 
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