Air France jet missing off Brazil coast

Well I'm no expert but the NTSB (report here) who investigated found the cause to be unnecessary and excessive use of the rudder and agreed with Airbus, however the rudder system's sensitivity was also held partly to blame. It take it you won't be going anywhere in a 787 then ;-)

Tim.

I know it's long but it is a great read on the composite tails used on airplanes.

Ground the Airbus? by William John Cox

So, in summary an 'expert' says there's a possible design flaw in an aircraft?

They had weather radar. An intelligent pilot doesn’t fly though thunderstorms.

Problem with those composites is that they just snap – at least metal will bend first.

Radio reporting that a French submarine has picked up signals from the black box, so hopefully the cause will be known soon.
Probably a combination of multiple things going wrong rather than one catastrophic failure.

That's an interesting article although I'm not sure how balanced it is, it fails to make any mention of the fact that the new Boeing 787 will be almost entirely made of composites. There are also reference there to people saying they've never heard of a plane losing the rudder in flight but in fact Concorde lost pieces of its rudder on several occasions.

If the vertical stabiliser did fail on the Air France plane (and it's looking likely) I think there will be some worried faces at Airbus, who are definitely not above dirty tricks (re. the Paris air crash and their subsequent blaming of the pilot).

Tim (who flies on an Airbus twice a week )

Ha- the only thing we know is that the tail fin was found on the water not attached to the rest of the fuselage. AFAIK is is not known that the tail fin first fell off then the rest plummeted. Speculation...

Let me guess - the guy who wrote that report above is from the US?

A quick bit of Googling:

and

Seemingly a guy of many talents...

i flew back from santiago de chile to frankfurt via madrid on june 12th with iberia and in an airbus and i tell ya i was a wreck. luckily i hadn't read too much about the crash before i left. much of bolivian news focused more on the swine flu. while in airport though, i picked up "vanity fair" and in there they had an article about the guy who landed in the Hudson (and subsequently also about the Canadian pilot who had to glide his passenger jet over the Atlantic to land on the Azores) and commented that this was only possible due to superiority of the Airbus (and fly-by-wire technology, as I found out).

I don't even know why that crash in the Husdon was mentioned at all in the original article, it's not at all relevant as a birdstrike can happen to any plane and, as you point out, it may well have been the plane that saved the day.

By the way, this is a fantastic video of a birdstrike on a Thomson jet on take-off and subsequent emergency landing together with the conversations between the pilot and air traffic control http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9KhZwsYtNDE

Tim.

This is what pilots call "a hard landing". That is why you should never sit up front!!
Let them fly through thunderstorms when they are flying alone.

the original article was about the hudson river crash and the side bar was on the other incident. the common theme was how such passenger jets could indeed glide for longer periods of time. they actually wrote that most do before landing, that the engines get turned off but passengers could never tell.

False alarm apparently:

Official: No black box signals from Flight 447

I wonder what sounds they heard. Very intriguing.

The point of the article I posted above is not to slam Airbus. It's to bring awareness to the fact that maybe (Be it Airbus or Boeing(787)) composite materials in vertical stabilizers need a closer look. They may work fine in the lab but maybe when they are out in the field with weather, maintenance, temperature changes over time, etc.. they don't hold up that well? Realize that before the reported problems with the composite tails the only maintenance inspection was a visual one and now they've determined through the removal of the tails that layers below the surface can start to degrade. What I find interesting in the report is the progressively intrusive nature of each addition tail inspection criteria sent out by Airbus.

As far as Pilots intentionally flying into a thunderstorm. It depends. Sometimes over the ocean you get boxed in trying to navigate around weather and must choose the lesser of two evils. Remember that airplanes do not have satellite weather radar. They use a forward looking radar and sometimes cannot see embedded thunderstorms. The weather radar pictures they do have were printed for them about an hour before takeoff, which in the case of a oceanic flight could mean they are several hours old when the airplane actually reaches the area of the weather system.

The information released to date about the Air France passenger injuries, broken bones, and the lack of water in the lungs point towards an in-flight breakup. This has been reported by numerous media outlets.

As far as the rudder/vertical stabilizer coming off in flight, we will have to wait for further information.

One last point about AA 587. They blamed the pilot for overloading/controlling the rudder, thereby causing the vertical stabilizer to exceed its design limitations. Question - did the pilot intentionally (I mean this in the sense that he was attempting to maintain control of the airplane, not crash it) over-control the rudders or was the turbulence (Wake Turbulence) so severe that it flung his body around in the seat causing his legs/feet to over-control the rudder? Remember that this occurred around 240 KIAS which only requires the rudder to move about 1.5 inches to reach the rudder stop(Maximum rudder deflection). The data recorder can only tell us that it reached its stop limit and then reversed to the other side limit, not why. Cause and effect? The voice recorder sheds no light on this question. Lastly, if the rudder was/is that sensitive on this Airbus model why didn't the computerized system limit the amount of control inputs to the rudder?

It's relevant when considering the odds of coming out alive whence boarding an Airbus, I guess. That he managed to land it, feathers and beaks and all.

Well I think that was why Airbus took part blame for the accident because the system shouldn't have been so sensitive. As I mentioned somewhere above I think, there is a system on the Airbus that crashed to limit rudder travel at high speed and that was one of the systems that reported a failure during the last moments of the flight.

Tim.