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Jun 1, 2009 01:15 PM | 33
Airline officials say that an electrical storm may have been to blame for the disappearance of Paris-bound Air France Flight 447 between Natal, Brazil, and Africa last night. The flight, which was carrying 228 people, last had contact with air traffic controllers at about 10:33 P.M. local time. The plane sent an automatic message about 15 minutes later noting that there was a "fault in an electronic circuit," reports the London Times.
"The most likely thing is that the plane was hit by lightning," Air France's director of communications, Francois Brouse said, the Times reports. "The plane was in a stormy area with strong turbulence," he said. Search crews have been dispatched to look for wreckage by air and water, but the plane remains missing. "It's certainly no longer in the air now," said Pierre-Henri Gourgeon, the airline's CEO. "It would have run out of fuel."
But could lightning be enough to bring down an Airbus 330-200? ScientificAmerican.com asked a senior engineer at a company that creates lightning-safe systems about planes and lightning a few years ago. He explains that although lightning strikes each of the U.S.'s commercial jets at least once a year, pilots and passengers shouldn't normally experience anything more than a bright flash and loud noise. And even though aluminum aircraft bodies are good conductors of electricity, lightning usually stays on the outside—but if it finds a way in, he notes, it can destroy electronics and ignite fuel.
Read more about what happens when lightning strikes an airplane here.
Image of an Airbus 330-200 (the same type of plane that has been reported missing) Quatar Airways flight courtesy of malpo90 via Flickr
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lightning
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33 Comments
Add CommentThe news says: "Finding the plane would be very difficult because the search zone was immense".
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this-- Don't they have a GPS tracking system, showing exactly where the plane went down?
Erm, how anyone loses a jetliner with the comnav systems on board... something is not right here.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisA number of years ago I was on a flight between DC and Atlanta when there was a bright flash and a loud noise outside the plane. Shortly afterward the pilot came on and said "Don't worry we weren't hit by lightnining. It was just a static discharge from the plane to the clouds." That seemed to soothe most of the passengers. The fact that we were still flying is what soothed me.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhat puzzles me is the lack of an online tracking system. With today's technology this is simple and quite straight forward. To have to find remains of such a craft with hundreds of passengers in thousands of square miles of ocean is almost impossible. The lack of such tracking equipment is, at least, irresponsible.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisCheck Aeroseek. There are plenty of flight trackers out there. You just have to look for them. Duh.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisRemember the A300 that went down just after 9/11? That was a case where the vertical stab was knocked off, probably due to the pilot following his "instinct" when he encountered wake turbulence from the 747 taking off ahead of him. But the same kind of stress could have been encountered by 447 at fl350 if the top of the anvil was at fl500. Loss of the stab would have made the rest of the process leading to inflight disintegration occur in the range of a small handful of seconds. No tracking equipment is going to be functional once the wire looms are torn apart. Also, earlier stories made it seem as if the flight "disappeared from radar" I suspect the aircraft was long off any scopes that might have been following it outbound into the atlantic.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI remember looking at some photos from the 11-01 crash site. The metal tabs at the bottom of the stab were still attached to the fittings on the fuse by their bolts. Projecting from the tabs were whiskers of the carbon fibers imbedded in the composite skins of the stab. There have been other cases where a few A300 stabs have been inspected after being stressed inadvertently, and removed from service, rather than be repaired. My feeling is the A300 stab is a little too stiff for it's own good, compared to an aluminum built-up structure. There's little elastic repsonse available to a gust load, all the stress goes straight to the joint with the fuselage.
But yeah, as long as an aircraft is in range of sending a report to the maintenence center (via satellite as well, I believe) the report should send a periodic GPS update.
Of late, there's been entirely too much butt covering between the operators and the manufacturers. The idea is to share the data to avoid similar/identical "problems" in the future.
Okay folks, put away the tinfoil hats...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI have flown all over the world in aircraft that are basically flying gas cans and been none the worse for the wear from lightening strikes. Same for the little tiny LearJet. Go back to basics and look up the Faraday cage. ALTHOUGH (and that's a big although), the AirBus is a fly by wire system, so there is some validity to the possibility. I am not 100% familiar with all the systems on that aircraft (besides, I vastly prefer Boeing aircraft).
As for is "disappearing" over the Atlantic, that is perfectly reasonable. While on trans oceanic flights, aircraft are not really under any particular surveillance. Instead they are on NATTRACKS and talking on HF every 30-45 minutes. These airlines are strapped for cash now a days, and it's expensive to put in a GDSS type tracking system on them, so it's more a one way system (the airplane knows where it is, but ground control only has a vague idea).
If anyone wants to talk aviation, I am available, just google my username.
It's irresponsible that aircraft flying routes with incomplete radar coverage don't carry a unit that reports GPS position via satellite phone. Even if the plane broke up mid-air, you'd get a fairly precise last known position.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThere may be survivors in the water at this time, but we don't know where they may be because airlines did not implement this feature.
I think too that composite, too much dependence on fly-by-wire technology, and inadequate protection from 'superbolts' may all be possible factors - the jury is out until they find the plane.
I am partial to the idea that the Airbus 300 has a rudder problem. They didn't really fix the carbon-fiber vertical stabilizer (rudder) after the Queens crash in 2001. All they did was warn pilots to avoid over-correcting with the rudder in extreme turbulence because the darn thing is prone to fall off.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBut extreme turbulence can't always be avoided. The good news is that the tail section is usually the last thing to enter the water so there may be big enough pieces found eventually to explain what happened.
The other problem is that the skin of aluminum airplanes works to keep lightning out, but carbon fiber airplanes have to have metal filaments embedded in the composite fuselage in lieu of an all-metal design. Filaments, however, will never do as good a job protecting against current as an all-metal skin.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWith debris in two locations 60 km apart, starting from 10 km altitude, I suspect sudden catastrophic failure of the fuselage, rather than loss of the stabilizer alone. I'm not certain, but i believe the stabilizer would have not left a significant amount of debris on the surface. Can it float? If not, the possibilities are, in order of likelihood: terrorist device, lightning, stabilizer failure, air turbulence, meteorite impact.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI have a question, it's a fly by wire so it's electricity I would think that run the controls, sooo if they had an electrical problem could they have lost control due the lack of same?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI wish Boeing would rebound and take back more of the international market. It is clear to me that USA still has unsurpassed quality and pride of workmanship.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe sad fact is that we could, but we don't. We have the technology to fully implement GPS in all planes and Air Traffic Control, but some estimate it would cost $20 billion to implement in the US alone, so they choose to use the radar/radio based system in place now where planes are not tracked over the ocean because there is no radar coverage and pilots are responsible for initiating radio contact when in range of land. For AF447, the pilots said, upon leaving Brazilian control, that they would enter Senegalese control in about 50 minutes, at which point radar contact could be reestablished. When that came and passed and Brazil control could tell AF447 did not contact Senegal, they first learned of the loss of communication despite the plane likely having been lost for a while.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIn a website in Finland they explain the AF447 accident by images and references to ICAE (international commision of atmosheric electricity) studies on 'bluejet' lightnings that may have caused the accident 03-04 UTC 1st June ( ref http://www.ilkkalilja.fi/?page_id=3 )
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBASICALLY SOMETHING WILL HAPPEN AS ALWAYS. THINGS WILL BE COVERED UP BY THE BIG BROTHER. DO YOU ALL KNOW THAT PILOTS BETWEEN THEM ARE SPEAKING ABOUT A MISSILE HITTING THE PLANE. YOU SEE IN THOSE WATERS A NAVAL EXERCISE WAS IN PLACE. HELLO WAKE UP ALL
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBASICALLY SOMETHING WILL HAPPEN AS ALWAYS. THINGS WILL BE COVERED UP BY THE BIG BROTHER. DO YOU ALL KNOW THAT PILOTS IN EUROPE BETWEEN THEM ARE SPEAKING ABOUT A MISSILE HITTING THE PLANE. YOU SEE IN THOSE WATERS A NAVAL EXERCISE WAS IN PLACE. HELLO WAKE UP ALL
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWith all of today's modern technology why can't the flight data be sent via an up link to a satillite instead of onboard via a black box? With such technology you could have GPS location data for the location of the last transmission.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisLarrianLeQuella and I tend to agree.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI hypothesize that the aircraft suffered structural failure due to the turbulence encountered. The aircraft may have been pitched into an unusual attitude and the crew couldn't recover it, or they tried and the airframe failed.
An A330 should shrug off most concievable lightning strikes with minor damage. As far as GPS goes, it becomes unreliable in heavy thunderstorms due to the interference.
(I spent over 20 years in the airlines, servicing all sizes of aircraft from regional turboprops to Concorde.)
You also need to consider the magnitude of the problem facing the searchers. An airplane in this situation is probably going to come down in sections, not as a whole airframe. The debris field is going to be immense and scattered. Factor in currents and drift and you have a major problem to solve.
One last thought, why cant GPS coordinates be incoded into the airplanes transposer signal?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisEvery time I hear about the frantic search for the "Black Boxes" I just get this feeling of low-tech 1960's crap that we are so much better than now. Did anyone ever think that maybe the data being recorded onto some magnetic tape that might just get smashed up and all wet and destroyed and take days to find could be simply transmitted to some satellite and stored somewhere besides the aircraft????? That seems so incredibly simple I am sure there is somthing preventing us from accomplishing it. But what could it be??
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThey are wire recorders that can take far more abuse than you can easily imagine.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThere is one more possibility that an unknown meteriod may have hit the plane.This is more sensible conclusion in view of fireball detected at Poland .It might be possible that the Space Junk of man made dead satellite or their used vehicle parts may have hit the plane .The theory of electric storm is not accepted because charge is always collected at the sharp edges or the outer surface of a closed hollow metallic body.Electric storm do come for fraction of a second and it gives enough time to
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisthe pilot to mandle the emergency. Dr Ram S Shrivastava Space Scientist(at present in Detroit USA)contact 12488881047
I do not agree with the theory of electric storm attacking the plane. Because the discharge of million volts of light is only for fraction of a second and this charge is always colleceted at the sharp edges and outer surface od a hollow metallic structure.Meanwhile the pilot is left enough time to control the plane.There are chances of Space debri or meteroid hitting the plane,as an unpredicted fire ball was seen in Portgal on the same day.This is to note that there are millions of space debies of unused satellites and their launch vehicla roaming around the earth and most of them are not detected by near earth object radars.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI was on a plane from Miami, Florida to Guayaquil, Equador on the same make and model of plane, when the captain announced a "fail in the hydraulic system,"and turned around saying emergency landing protocol required to return to point of origin. As we were two hours in flight and almost over the pacific, I can't help but think that there maybe be a problem in the plane's design. I never realized how lucky I was to live through that until now.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAIrplanes have mechanical failures occasionally. They are man-made machines. That's why they have redundant systems. SoulPrincess86, a single hydraulic system failure is not as devastating to ariworthiness as you imagine. It takes a lot more than that to bring down a modern airliner.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI disagree with Dr. Shivastava above. The chances of "space debris" having anything to do with this is about non-existant. The sky is a ridiculously huge place and the chances of that happening are beyond remote, almost mathematically impossible. Besides, at least two other aircraft were in the area and only one (Lufthansa) reported anything unusual - and that was spots of "orange light on the water" in the approximate position where the plane is now known to have gone down. Undoubtedly fuel burning on the water at the impact point.
Mr. Timbkai, go put your tinfoil hat back on and stop shouting (All caps is shouting on the Web, Sir).There are no reports or discussion in the aviation media or in the "aviation grapevine" of any "missiles tests" or "missile firings" anywhere near this area. Believe me, if it were true, it would already be in the pages of Aviation Week's website (commonly known as "Aviation Leak.")
I spent many years in the airline industry, so I have knowledge of what I speak. This is a tragic crash that very likely will be found to have been caused by structural failure in extreme weather or structural failure due to an attempt to recover from a turbulence-induced upset at altitude.
You seem to be the voice of knowledge and I would appreciate your comments on my comments. Why not transmit flight data and voice recorder data to elsewhere streaming full time and forget the black box stuff???
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisGuys - GPS tells YOU where YOU are. If you don't communicate that to others, they will never know!!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisPeterT
Lightning bringing down a modern airliner is not likely as they designed to withstand this.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAs of this date it appears that there was an at flight level large explosion, an aircraft in the area reports seeing a bright white flash of light followed by falling burning debris. Air France had a phoned in bomb threat the day before about a Brazil to France flight.
having been a vehicle test technicianfor 18 years i have seen many sensor probs and glitches.If the wind speed sensor was freezing up it would read slower air speed than actual.the computer or the pilot would see this and increase speed.the computer might accelerate till destruction of plane began.most likly the pilot would realize the air speed wasnt correct by the vibration frequencies caused by overspeed condition.as long as he was confident in his gut feeling the the airspeed readout was wrong.lightning may glitch any syastem due to the EMP which cannot be totally block by any means.this should only be a glitch depending on the power of the EMP.As far as a way to find wreckage in the ocean crashes they should have a stand alone flight recorder which is automatically ejected when the plane breaks up or contacts water.It should also float.you say thecurrent will move it. well that is fine it should have a strobe, an eperb, and a GPS tracking system. the GPS should active upon ejection.it has tracking capabilities which can be tracked back to the point of ejection. It sounds to easy, but sometimes things are over thought causing the simple to be overlooked. It would not cost much to make at all. I know i have figured stuff like this out for my entire life. A flight tracking system would be full of problems, it would take manpower 24/7, it would get jumbold data now and then from sunspots, lightning, excesive incoming data due to the number of flights in the air at the same time, it would be to hard to work these bugs out. the simple ejection box would be easy and instant, no waiting for the info from whoever has it. this is a live locator which can be tracked by almost anyone. just gab the box note the location and the hit track back. bingo the crash sight. the cloud cover might affect gps positon but it would be better than the entire atlantic ocean. I have used gps for many years for work and hunting. only when i am in a deep thin valley or real real servere snow or hurricane type rains has it tottally lost signal, and this was only for afew minutes at worst case. now remember this is at ground level. it has always worked when i have turned it on in an airplane to see where we were at in flight as long as i hold it close to the window. this is a Garmin GPSIII which i bought in 1997.to be evan cheaper just tape this unit to an eperb with a strobe and floatation device.put it inside the plane where it will fall out if the plane comes apart and have it activate when it is released from the plane.john weathers II, fenton, mi.,usa
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI would like to comment on your piece Could lightning have brought down Air France Flight 447? . I see absolutely no reason why lightning, in its globular form (i.e. ball lightning), should not have done so. As suggested by Tim Vasquez (www.weathergraphics.com/tim/af447/) lighting might also have brought down other planes for whose destruction completely satisfactory explanations have never been found. The examples quoted by Vasquez were Northwest Flight 703 in 1963 and Pulkovo Aviation Flight 612 in 2006. The aircraft involved were of different designs and made in the jurisdictions of three different countries but, in all cases, thunderstorms were implicated.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDuring thunderstorms, pilots seem willing to accept that St Elmo's fire will sometimes appear on cockpit windows. What is much less routinely accepted is that St. Elmo's fire is quite capable of transforming itself into ball lightning and this form of lightning can pass through glass even when metal foils completely cover the glass. The first point was made in my most basic paper on ball lightning (in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of 1994) very small currents (easily carried by the air) being required to stabilize the balls. The second point was referred to in my other Royal Society paper (published in 2002). Nearly all the best books on ball lightning state categorically that ball lightning and St. Elmo's fire are quite different phenomena. This is not so.
Many people have witnessed the transformation of St. Elmo's fire into ball lightning. However, most physicists seem unprepared to accept that there is anything wrong with the over-simplified models which lead them, so confidently, to dismiss much of the well supported empirical evidence. The basic problem is that, for well understood thermodynamic reasons, we can possess no quantitative model for the processes which produce interfaces between air plasmas and normal air. The practical problem is that we are still unable to prepare natural air plasmas in the laboratory so that little can be quantified.
Once a lightning ball has penetrated the nominal Faraday cage structure of an aircraft, it can feed off the chemical energy in the air. Usually, ball lightning does no harm once inside an aircraft but almost any book on ball lightning published in the last 50 years contains evidence that this hope is not always justified. I do not know to what extent the electronic components of a modern aircraft are protected from ball lightning damage. I suspect that, since we cannot currently specify the relevant properties of any such ball, it could easily be that the shielding of any aircraft's electronic controls is inadequate. If key circuits happened to be effected, it seems quite possible that large and dangerous mechanical forces could result.
the airfrance jet was flying at high altitude through th south atlantic magnetic anomally was it possible that its electrical systems were affected by increased solar radiation as are satellites in this area?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWith all the theoratical & scientific hypothesis being arrived at to identify the cause of the calamity, it still remains a mystery as to how the natures fury coupled with the lightening, magnetism, radiations & turbulence make sure that we humans are still not worthy to be Airworthy. Nature has evolved a way to keep reminding us that just Black Boxes are not the solutions to analyse the pyrotechniques of the power of the stratosphere.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBabloo Bagaddeo.