Ocean Debris Not From Air France Flight

[dgriffin]

Ocean Debris Is Not From Air France Flight 447



PARIS, June 5 -- The first pieces of debris picked up along the path of an Air France jetliner that went down in the Atlantic with 228 people aboard turned out not to have come from the ill-fated aircraft, French officials said Friday.

The officials, responding to reports from Brazilian search teams, warned against jumping to conclusions as investigators here and in Brazil try to figure out what caused the plane to fall suddenly from the stormy sky early Monday on a flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris.

Dominique Bussereau, the French junior minister for transportation, emphasized in radio interviews that the investigation is just beginning. So far, he said, Brazilian and French authorities know very little about what happened aboard the Airbus 330-200 as it crashed while bucking through a violent thunderstorm off Brazil's northeastern tip.

"The main goal is to put our hands on what are called the black boxes, the flight recorders," he said.

The Brazilian military said earlier that its helicopters had picked up debris in the vast search zone and that it was believed to have come from the jetliner. But officials said later that an examination determined it was not from Air France Flight 447.

France's Investigation and Analysis Bureau, which is leading the inquiry, announced Friday that the only thing it knew for sure was that a rough storm was brewing where the plane disappeared and that, in a series of automatic messages just before it disappeared, the plane's speed sensors seemed to be sending out "incoherent" data.

That led to speculation by experts in Paris that the pilots could have been receiving inaccurate information on their instruments in the cockpit, perhaps leading to inadequate or excessive speed as the plane moved through turbulence. But the investigation bureau cautioned against reading too much into its announcement, saying too little is known about what happened during the moments before the crash.


It's beginning to sound like "officials" haven't the slightest idea what the hell happened. They're starting to look dumb.

[clarencebunsen]

Why do you have trouble believing that the plane was flying too fast/slow and a bomb blew up during a thunderstorm taking it down so fast that the crew didn't have time to send a Mayday while the automated systems sent out 15 minutes of inchoherent problem reports?

But, don't read too much into the announcement.

[dgriffin]

On evenings when not much else is happening on the radio spectrum, I'll sometimes listen to Gander Radio (or "Shanwick" [Shannon-Prestwick] in Ireland) for voice traffic on transatlantic air crossings. (Between 4.5 and 5.1 MHz, upper sideband.) Or the APARS digital messages (cited in the Air France crash) coming from planes, the most interesting of which I ever decoded was, "please have 3 box toilet tissue ready New York."

Communications between ATC and planes over the North Atlantic is constant and unremarkable as pilots report positions on a regular basis (but the airplane is also doing that automatically , so you wonder if the first officer is just playing John Wayne while his or her ass hangs out over the middle of the North Atlantic.) Traffic control consists mostly of altitude changes to avoid weather and cocktail-disturbing turbulence.

I've never listened on the frequencies for South Atlantic crossings, but I assume they carry similar chatter. So I can't imagine why the South Atlantic ATC never heard from the Air France Flight while the plane was burping out its digital messages of doom. But I've read that these messages were never read by airline personnel until HOURS after the Arrival Time came and went.

A lot about this disaster is not making sense. I'll go out on a limb and start wondering about a hijack gone bad.

Here's an fun site regarding ocean air crossings:
www.flywestwind.com/WTC/Pprograms/international.htm