AirFrance jet missing

[eldorob]

Just heard on the the news - An Air France jet took off from Paris on it's way to Brazil. Should have landed an hour ago, they can't locate it or contact it.

[whynotme]

the 7am news just confirmed air france flight 447 an a330 should have landed several hours ago and with no may day and having dropped off the radar last night at 10;30 est just off the coast of brazil. (would have run out of fuel as well by now.)

216 passengers and 12 crew. air france says there is no hope of finding anyone alive and it must have been an instant catastrofic accident.

they are doing a 20km grid search so results may take awhile.

[Hunter]

Its been an unbelievable 3-5 year streak of air safety. Very very few major crashes.... You ever see those maps with all the planes in the air on CNN at any one time :eek:

Scary shit just bam going down...I guess returning from a mongering vacation glow from rio is a good way to end it :D

(unless your going there and you crash :eek:)

[Airassaultp]

Its a tragic story to hear especially when us Mongerers travel to diffrent destinations which is why we have to live today like if there is no tommorrow

[Jimbo44]

I hate even thinking about it. The flight was en route back to Paris, and we all know that there had to be at least a dozen or so mongers on that jet!

[leeway99]

I hate even thinking about it. The flight was en route back to Paris, and we all know that there had to be at least a dozen or so mongers on that jet!

And working girls headed to France to work.

[Gladiator]

This could turn out to be always a mystery if they don’t find the black box, which wouldn’t be too difficult in the middle of the ocean. They haven’t even located the plane yet…

Some news websites are speculating with lightning among some possible causes, but apparently lightning on its own is extremely unlikely to bring a plane down.

This is an impressive clip of a plane struck by lightning:

YouTube - Boeing 747 Gets Hit By Lightning

[whatever]

This is an impressive clip of a plane struck by lightning:

This is another reason to carry spare underwear in a carry on bag.

[knotty]

Possible Debris From Missing Jet Found

Pilots Report Seeing Fire in Ocean Along Plane's Route

By MARCO SIBAJA
,
AP


BRASILIA, Brazil (June 2) – Brazil's Air Force says it has found airplane seats and other debris floating in the Atlantic Ocean along the path that a missing Air France jet was flying.
Air Force spokesman Jorge Amaral says the seats were spotted by search planes early Tuesday morning but that authorities cannot immediately confirm they were from the plane.

Also spotted were small white pieces of debris, material that may be metallic and signs of oil and kerosene, which is used as jet fuel.
The debris was found about 390 miles (650 kilometers) northeast of the Brazilian archipelago of Fernando de Noronha.
The plane disappeared with 228 people aboard.

Was Flight 447 downed by wind and hail from towering thunderheads? By lightning? Or by a catastrophic combination of factors?
Investigators were mulling several theories as to why the plane disappeared over the Atlantic Ocean, while Brazilian and French military aircraft scoured a vast swath of ocean between Brazil and the African coast for the Airbus A330.
The flight left Rio de Janeiro on Sunday night en route to Paris — only to vanish after issuing an automated message that the electrical system had failed.
Brazil's largest airline, TAM, released a statement late Monday saying that pilots flying one of its commercial flights from Paris to Rio spotted what they thought was fire in the ocean along the Air France jet's route.
Air Force spokesman Col. Jorge Amaral told the Agencia Brasil official news service that authorities were investigating the report.
"There is information that the pilot of a TAM aircraft saw several orange points on the ocean while flying over the region," he said.
Two Brazilian air force jets were conducting night searches over the Atlantic early Tuesday. Six Brazilian aircraft, including two helicopters, were involved in the search, authorities said. The first of three Brazilian ships was expected to arrive in the remote area Wednesday.
Authorities have asked any commercial vessels in the area to aid in the search and France sought U.S. satellite help to find the wreckage. A French search plane took off from a military base in Senegal on Monday, to be joined by two more and a naval vessel.
With nothing more to go on than the last point where Flight 447 made contact — about 745 miles (1,200 kilometers) northeast of the Brazilian coastal city of Natal — search teams faced an immense area of open ocean, with depths as much as 15,000 feet (4,570 meters).

If there are no survivors, as feared, it would be the world's worst aviation disaster since 2001.
On board the flight were 61 French citizens, 58 Brazilians, 26 Germans, nine Chinese and nine Italians. A lesser number of citizens from 27 other countries also were on the passenger list, including two Americans.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy said he told family members of passengers that prospects of finding survivors are "very small."
Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva expressed hope that survivors could be found.
Air France was helping Brazilian relatives of the passengers at the airport in Rio. Bernardo Ciriaco, a civil servant, said he arrived at the airport in a panic because he knew his brother Gustavo was on one of two Air France flights heading to Paris on Sunday night.
About two hours later, he received a phone call from Gustavo, telling him he had landed safely in Europe.
Gustavo told him that he had been bumped to the flight that is missing but had insisted that he be allowed on the booked earlier flight and arrived safely.
"Our family is so relieved," Ciriaco said

http://news.aol.com/article/air-france-plane-missing/505817?icid=main|main|dl1|link3|http%3A%2F%2Fnews.aol.com%2Farticle%2Fair-france-plane-missing%2F505817

[Donny Boy]

That is some scary stuff. On my return from DR in Oct we hit some very bad turbulence on the decent to JFK, strong enough to throw someone out the seat. Once we landed my respect for pilots tripled its a tuff job

[prtyr2]

I was flying TO brazil that same night and we hit turbulence but nothing too bad.
Of course I was flying in from MIA and was further west.

[3somefan]

Turbulence can get pretty bad! I still remember like it was yesterday my maiden voyage to the DR. I was taking a prop-plane from Puerto Rico to the DR and we hit bad turbulence and then went right through a storm. At one point we lost power and dropped what seemed to be at least a couple hundred feet! Women were screaming!! The pilot later accidentally thought he was just talking to the flight tower but had the PA system on when he said, "I can't see the runway, I still can't see the runway, OH SHIT!" Then we touched down. I must admit, I was pretty shaken up.

That is crazy though when something like that story above about the guy getting bumped but insisted on going on the earlier flight and made it home instead of being on the plane that crashed. Makes you wonder a little.

[3somefan]

UPDATE

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/brazil_plane

Brazil confirms Air France jet crashed in ocean!

By FEDERICO ESCHER and ALAN CLENDENNING, Associated Press Writers Federico Escher And Alan Clendenning, Associated Press Writers – 13 mins ago

FERNANDO DE NORONHA, Brazil – Brazilian military planes found a 3-mile (5-kilometer) path of wreckage in the Atlantic Ocean, confirming that an Air France jet carrying 228 people crashed in the sea, Defense Minister Nelson Jobim said Tuesday. Jobim told reporters in Rio de Janeiro that the discovery "confirms that the plane went down in that area," hundreds of miles (kilometers) from the Brazilian archipelago of Fernando de Noronha.

"There isn't the slightest doubt that the debris is from the Air France plane," Jobim said.

He said the strip of wreckage included metallic and nonmetallic pieces, but did not describe them in detail. No bodies were spotted in the crash of the Airbus A330 in which all aboard are believed to have died.

The discovery came just hours after authorities announced they had found an airplane seat, an orange buoy and signs of fuel in a part of the Atlantic Ocean where ocean depths range from less than 1,610 meters (one mile) to more than 4,800 meters (three miles).

Jobim said recovery of the plane's cockpit voice and data recorders and other wreckage could be difficult because much of the wreckage sank.

"It's going to be very hard to search for it because it could be at a depth of 2,000 meters or 3,000 meters (1.2 miles to 1.8 miles) in that area of the ocean," Jobim said.

The initial discovery of wreckage announced before Jobim spoke came about 36 hours after the jet went missing as it flew from Rio de Janeiro toward Paris.

A Brazilian air force spokesman said the two spots where debris was located suggested the pilots may have tried to turn the plane around to return to Fernando de Noronha.

"The locations where the objects were found are toward the right of the point where the last signal of the plane was emitted," said the spokesman, Col. Jorge Amaral. "That suggests that it might have tried to make a turn, maybe to return to Fernando de Noronha, but that is just a hypothesis."

Amaral said some of the debris was white and small, but did not describe it in more detail.

Jobim made the announcement after two commercial ships that joined the search late Tuesday morning reached sites where the debris was found, a Navy spokeswoman said.

"Once they come across the objects, they will be analyzed to determine if they are parts of the plane or just junk," she said.

A U.S. Navy P-3C Orion surveillance plane and 21 crew members arrived in Brazil on Tuesday morning from El Salvador and was to begin overflying the zone in the afternoon, U.S. officials said in a statement. The plane can fly low over the ocean for about 12 hours at a time and has radar and sonar designed to track submarines underwater.

The French dispatched a research ship equipped with unmanned submarines to the debris site. The subs can explore depths of up to 19,600 feet (6,000 meters). The U.S. was considering contributing unmanned underwater vehicles in the search as well, according to a defense source who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak on the record.

The 4-year-old plane was last heard from at 0214 GMT Monday (10:14 p.m. EDT Sunday) about four hours after it left Rio.

If no survivors are found, it would be the world's worst civil aviation disaster since the November 2001 crash of an American Airlines jetliner in the New York City borough of Queens that killed 265 people.

Investigators on both sides of the ocean are trying to determine what brought the plane down, with few clues to go on. Potential causes include violently shifting winds and hail from towering thunderheads, lightning or some combination of other factors.

The crew made no distress call before the crash, but the plane's system sent an automatic message just before it disappeared, reporting lost cabin pressure and electrical failure. The plane's cockpit and "black box" recorders could be thousands of feet (meters) below the surface.

French Prime Minister Francois Fillon said that if the debris is confirmed to be part of Flight 447, "This will allow us to better determine the search zone."

"We are in a race against the clock in extremely difficult weather conditions and in a zone where depths reach up to 7,000 meters (22,966 feet)," he told lawmakers in the lower house of French parliament Tuesday. Black box recorders can emit signals for up to 30 days.

The chance of finding survivors now "is very, very small, even nonexistent," said Jean-Louis Borloo, the French minister overseeing transportation.

The Airbus A330-200 was cruising normally at 35,000 feet (10,670 meters) and 522 mph (840 kph) just before it disappeared.

But just north of the equator, a line of towering thunderstorms loomed. Bands of extremely turbulent weather stretched across the Atlantic toward Africa.

Borloo called the A330 "one of the most reliable planes in the world" and said lightning alone, even from a fierce tropical storm, probably couldn't have brought down the plane.

"There really had to be a succession of extraordinary events to be able to explain this situation," Borloo said on RTL radio Tuesday.

France's junior minister for transport, Dominique Bussereau, said the plane sent "a kind of outburst" of automated messages just before it disappeared, "which means something serious happened, as eventually the circuits switched off."

French military spokesman Christophe Prazuck said France has three military patrol aircraft flying over the central Atlantic, but could shift its search operations closer to the site of the Brazilian discovery. He said an AWACS radar plane also had been dispatched and should join the operation on Wednesday.

French police were studying passenger lists and maintenance records, and preparing to take DNA from passengers' relatives to help identify any bodies.

French Defense Minister Herve Morin said "we have no signs so far" of terrorism, but all hypotheses must be studied.

Alain Bouillard, who led the probe into the crash of the Concorde in July 2000, was put in charge of France's accident investigation team.

President Barack Obama told French television stations the United States is ready to do everything necessary to find out what happened.

On board the flight were 61 French citizens, 58 Brazilians, 26 Germans, nine Chinese and nine Italians. A lesser number of citizens from 27 other countries also were on the passenger list.

Two Americans living in Rio de Janeiro were on board. Michael Harris, 60, a geologist, and his wife Anne, 54, were headed to Europe for work and vacation. They lived previously in Lafayette, Louisiana.

Among the passengers were three young Irish doctors, returning from a two-week vacation in Brazil. Aisling Butler's father John paid tribute to his 26-year-old daughter, from Roscrea, County Tipperary.

"She was a truly wonderful, exciting girl. She never flunked an exam in her life — nailed every one of them — and took it all in her stride," he said.

[Hunter]

Intersting. The debris wasn't Air Frances.

Maybe there is an island like "Lost" in the Atlantic.

And someone flipped the switch on the island for the magnetic force to take the flight down. ;) It was Ben :rolleyes:

[yayow]

The Bermuda triangle theory again, all though this would have been further south, I believe. It's not good for the families who at the very least had some closure, now things are up in the air again......:rolleyes::confused:, or not.

[JD426]

This could be really bad, noone has mentioned the possibility that this debris was posibly PLANTED.
What are the odds that there is debis like this in the same area and its NOT from the missing Air France plane.
And IF it IS planted, who do you think would do something like that, and where is the MISSING plane? The conclusion one can draw is NOT good, and sadly even worse than 200 + missing souls.

[Hunter]

This could be really bad, noone has mentioned the possibility that this debris was posibly PLANTED.
What are the odds that there is debis like this in the same area and its NOT from the missing Air France plane.
And IF it IS planted, who do you think would do something like that, and where is the MISSING plane? The conclusion one can draw is NOT good, and sadly even worse than 200 + missing souls.

It was sea trash you conspiracy kook :p:p:D

[3somefan]

Looks like two bodies were found with a briefcase that had a ticket for the flight in it!

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/brazil_plane

RECIFE, Brazil – Searchers found two bodies and a briefcase containing a ticket for Air France Flight 447 in the Atlantic Ocean close to where the jetliner is believed to have crashed, a Brazil military official said Saturday.

The French agency investigating the disaster, meanwhile, said the airspeed instruments on Flight 447 were not replaced as the maker recommended before the plane crashed in turbulent weather nearly a week ago.

The French accident investigation agency, BEA, found the doomed plane received inconsistent airspeed readings by different instruments as it struggled in a massive thunderstorm on its flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris with 228 people aboard.

Airbus had recommended to all its airline customers that they replace speed-measuring instruments known as Pitot tubes on the A330, the model used for Flight 447, said Paul-Louis Arslanian, the head of the agency.

"They hadn't yet been replaced" on the plane that crashed, said Alain Bouillard, head of the French investigation. Air France declined immediate comment.

Arslanian of the BEA cautioned that it is too early to draw conclusions about the role of Pitot tubes in the crash, saying that "it does not mean that without replacing the Pitots that the A330 was dangerous."

He told a news conference at the agency's headquarters, near Paris that the crash of Flight 447 also does not mean similar plane models are unsafe, adding that he told family members not to worry about flying.

Airbus had made the recommendation for "a number of reasons," he said.

The two male bodies were recovered Saturday morning about 70 kilometers (45 miles) south of where Air Flight 447 emitted its last signals — roughly 400 miles (640 kilometers) northeast of the Fernando de Noronha islands off Brazil's northern coast.

Brazilian Air force spokesman Col. Jorge Amaral said an Air France ticket was found inside a leather briefcase.

"It was confirmed with Air France that the ticket number corresponds to a passenger on the flight," he said.

Brazilian authorities refused to comment on how the discovery of the bodies may affect the search for crucial black box flight recorders that could tell investigators why the jet crashed.

The investigation is increasingly focused on whether external instruments may have iced over, confusing speed sensors and leading computers to set the plane's speed too fast or slow — a potentially deadly mistake in severe turbulence.

Pitot tubes, protruding from the wing or fuselage of a plane, feed airspeed sensors and are heated to prevent icing. A blocked or malfunctioning Pitot tube could cause an airspeed sensor to work incorrectly and cause the computer controlling the plane to accelerate or decelerate in a potentially dangerous fashion.

Air France has already replaced the Pitots on another Airbus model, the 320, after its pilots reported similar problems with the instrument, according to an Air France air safety report filed by pilots in January and obtained by The Associated Press.

The report followed an incident in which an Air France flight from Tokyo to Paris reported problems with its airspeed indicators similar to those believed to have been encountered by Flight 447. In that case, the Pitot tubes were found to have been blocked by ice.

"Following similar problems frequently encountered on the A320 fleet, preventative actions have already been decided and applied," the safety report says. The Pitots on all Air France's A320s were retrofitted with new Pitots "less susceptible to these weather conditions."

The same report says Air France decided to increase the inspection frequency for its A330 and A340 jets' Pitot tubes, but that it had been waiting for a recommendation from Airbus before installing new Pitots.

As they try to locate the wreckage, investigators are relying on 24 messages the plane sent automatically during the last minutes of the flight.

The signals show the plane's autopilot was not on, officials said, but it was not clear if the autopilot had been switched off by the pilots or had stopped working because it received conflicting airspeed readings.

The flight disappeared nearly four hours after takeoff, killing all on board. It was Air France's deadliest plane crash and the world's worst commercial air accident since 2001.

The head of France's weather forecasting agency, Alain Ratier, said weather conditions at the time of the flight were not exceptional for the time of the year and region, which is known for violent stormy weather.

On Thursday, European plane maker Airbus sent an advisory to all operators of the A330 reminding them of how to handle the plane in conditions similar to those experienced by Flight 447.

Peter Goelz, a former managing director of the National Transportation Safety Board, said that advisory and the Air France memo about replacing flight-speed instruments "certainly raises questions about whether the Pitot tubes, which are critical to the pilot's understanding of what's going on, were operating effectively."

Arslanian said it is vital to locate a small beacon called a "pinger" that should be attached to the cockpit voice and data recorders, now presumed to be deep in the Atlantic.

"We have no guarantee that the pinger is attached to the recorders," he said.

Holding up a pinger in the palm of his hand, he said: "This is what we are looking for in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean."

Currents could have scattered debris far along the ocean floor, he said.

President Barack Obama said at a news conference with French President Nicolas Sarkozy Saturday that the United States had authorized all of the U.S. government's resources to help investigate the crash.

Arslanian said U.S. forces have lent the inquiry acoustic systems, which will be fitted to two naval vessels. That is in addition to France's Emeraude submarine and the high-tech equipment being send to the region by French marine research institute Ifremer.

France's submarine, to arrive next week, will try to detect signals from the black boxes, said military spokesman Christophe Prazuck.

[Gladiator]

Some new developments in the investigation...

http://news.sky.com/skynews/Home/World-News/Terror-Names-Linked-To-Doomed-Flight-AF-447-Two-Passengers-Shared-Names-Of-Radical-Muslims/Article/200906215300405?lpos=World_News_Carousel_Region_2&lid=ARTICLE_15300405_Terror_Names_Linked_To_Doomed_Flight_AF_447%3A_Two_Passengers_Shared_Names_Of_Radical_Muslims


If they don't find the black box, which they probably won't, this will always be an unsolved mistery.