AF447, Say a Prayer

ATCtower Epic Member

For those of you who have not heard yet, Air France flight 442, an Airbus A330-200 (Aircraft reg. F-GZCP) dropped off radar over the Atlantic Ocean about 0600 GMT enroute from GIG (Rio de Janerio) to CDG (Paris). 216 pax and 12 crew on board.

For more info check this out: AF447, Say A Prayer

Weather at time of disappearance reported by SBFN: METAR SBFN 011100Z 04010KT 9999 SCT017 FEW020TCU 28/23 Q1013

Recife Center would likely have been the contact at the aircraft's most recent position.

Say a prayer for the souls on board.

thatguynamedzach RADAR is where its AT! The Emerald City

I'm prayin for them bro...sad to hear...God Bless..

Pete Trusted Member

MTCTIGUY Trusted Member The 'Boro

I said a little prayer too. It's so unfortunate that this has happened. The aircraft has a pretty decent safety record overall though. It will be interesting to find out what happened.

caminito Newcomer

Even if this is a long shot, as it is very strange that:

- whatever the problem was, it does not desintegrate the aircraft, as it was able to sent (automatic?) messages for 4 minutes

- if so, how can be explained that the position of the aircraft could not be determined by triangulation ? or why there were no signal coming from a GPS or similar ??

could it be possible that the aircraft was kidnapped by aviation knowledgeable people, forced the crew to send the "automatic" message and then continued in silence to land somewhere in the
enormous Amazonas region or in Africa

Again: this is a very long shot!

scott523 Junior Member Philadelphia (Upper Darby), PA, USA

May God be with them...

@ caminito, Welcome to Stuckmic! Those 4 minutes probably meant they were in distress and to receive an automated messsage to that extent would probably mean it was in danger of crashing. GPS, as far as I know, doesn't relay its position to other locations, so I'm pretty sure it's only for the pilot's benefit. Brazil ATC only has its last known location but even that, searching for the plane is now proving to be a challenge. And if it was hi-jacked, it probably would've been found already.

I wonder how big was the storm that prompted them to not go around. Anyways it's way too early to find out the 'W5H'.

Admin I'm Kind of a Big Deal Houston

blakeh Trusted Member SLN

Bad news guys!

Plane was found. Pray for survivors.

Brazil confirms Air France jet crashed in ocean - Yahoo! News

luna75 I am THE Pocket Ninja farmingdale ny

UPDATE ON AOL

Brazil Confirms Air France Jet CrashedAirplane Seat Among Items Spotted in Atlantic Ocean
By FEDERICO ESCHER and ALAN CLENDENNING, AP

RIO DE JANEIRO (June 2) ? 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.
He said the strip of wreckage included metallic and nonmetallic pieces, but did not describe them in detail. v of the Airbus in which all aboard are believed to have died.

A three-mile path of wreckage found in the Atlantic Ocean Tuesday confirms that an Air France jet carrying 228 people crashed in the sea, Brazil's defense minister said. Nelson Jobim said that discovery of the debris "confirms that the plane went down in that area." No bodies were spotted at the crash site.

The discovery came just hours after authorities announced they had found an airplane an airplane seat, an orange buoy and signs of fuel in a part of the Atlantic Ocean with depths of up to three miles (4,800 meters).
Jobim said recovery of the of the plane's cockpit voice and data recorders could be difficult because of the depth of the ocean where the debris was found.
"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 (6,500 to 9,800 fee) in that area of the ocean," Jobim said.

A U.S. Navy P-3C Orion surveillance plane and 21 crew members arrived in Brazil 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.
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 Airbus A330 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.

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. No trouble was reported as the plane left radar contact, beyond Brazil's Fernando de Noronha archipelago.

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.

briefly Newcomer

Regards 'technical messages' received from AF447:
I understand that Air France received several of these at 04:14 CET in Paris and that these messages also contain the geographical cooordinates of the plane.
If this is true, why did the French start searching from Senegal some time later when Air France would have known already the approximate location of the event (which was much closer to Brazil) ? Can anyone explain this to me ?