AF447, Say a Prayer

luna75 I am THE Pocket Ninja farmingdale ny

now my next question here, im no physics expert but how in the hell can a330 just break up in midair? now we all know that the most a/c nowadays are built using high strength composite materials, lightweight metal alloys etc...what are the breaking/stresspoint for the physical materials used to build the a330? and what physical forces have to be present to cause the plane to breakup? for example, whats the measured psi placed on the fuselage or joints before frame instability and structural failure sets in? or what would it take for structure failure to occur? same thing for the avionics, whats the amount of voltage or amps it would take to completely blow out all circuits and backs up?

and are there any manual, non electronic backups available for the pilot in case all avionics fail?

if anyone wonders why im asking so many technical questions, im just trying wrap my head around why this had to happen, i feel horrible for these people and i hope they didnt suffer long....my heart goes out to their families

flyers29 Rookie

Also not a physics expert, but stuff like this has happened before--just look at the AA A300 that crashed in Queens in 2001, or the EgyptAir 767 that crashed after the captain tried to pull the plane out of a sharp nose dive. Plus if there was rapid decompression that also could have contributed.

Rosstafari Daaaang. /X

In flight breakups aren't entirely uncommon; all it takes is an airplane being put beyond its performance capability. You'll hear about it most often in some general aviation pilot trying to be a hotshot in his trainer -- anything that's preceded by "Watch this!" is never a good sign. There's a reason that they don't barrel roll Cessnas at air shows...

Anyway, you put enough stress on the airframe and it will break apart under the load. There are different ways that it can be done -- exceeding load limit factor as above (in other words, too many G's at too high an airspeed), flutter (like what happened to the Tacoma Narrows bridge)... other reasons too that I don't understand well enough to write about and not sound like I'm making stuff up.

Of course, if it's anything like the above-mentioned TWA Flight 800, it may not have been an airframe failure at all. Few airliners will reach a flight load that would cause a catastrophic in-flight breakup, just because you'd have to be very purposeful in an attempt to reach it.

Anyway, that's part of the reason that they piece together plane wreckage after crashes, to figure stuff like that out... although I wouldn't count of them being able to recover enough wreckage from such a remote crash site to do that very effectively this time.