Air France jet vanishes

+++++ for telling it like it is. What floors me is how they are insisting it did not break up and crashed in such and such a way without having the main wreckage, nor the flight recorders. I am thinking this was a planned press briefing to mask the idea that time has run out on the pingers.

 

CNN made a big " Breaking News" thing with the French announcing their "findings" that the airplane dove into the ocean. I cannot imagine the NTSB doing something as irresponsible as this with no positive evidence of any kind on which to base their " findings".
Switches

 

If that were the case, it would seem that the aircraft might have been falling in a flat spin, with little or no forward velocity, like the BOAC 707 that crashed near Mt. Fuji when a violent (and unseen) horizontal "rotor" caused the vertical fin to snap off, taking one of the horizontals with it. In that accident, it was believed that most of the passengers were alive (though probably unconscious) right up until the violent impact with the ground.

 

Aeronews.net has a article that is saying the French might want to ground the whole fleet...

http://www.aero-news.net/index.cfm?ContentBlockID=69b61f25-ac9b-4228-a440-01138b1276b2&

Interesting...

 

the discussion in the Silver section is going in a similar way. no one believes it was intact, as the early evidence points to an in flight break up.

i posted the following in response to the plane spinning in flat, and intact as the French are claiming :

 

The only thing is look at the large section that was found. It is the galleys of the plane. You can see the modules with the meals still inside and closed. (They have a latch that is manually put over each module.) If there was that much compression and objects thrown about, this would not be the case and the meal galley would be almost if not all empty; but they are not. Leads me to believe that the large section broke off and fell before the plane hit or else it would be in tiny pieces when the plane hit as a whole.

 

An airplane with swept wings and dihedral CANNOT flat spin---with a vertical stabilizer or not. The advancing wing will roll the airplane on its back due to assymetrical lift and the dynamics of the dihedral. This would then be followed by a snap roll and disintegration. This happened to a Boeing 707-227 but the test pilot was able to arrest it before total dismemberment. To say that this AF447 DOVE a great distance and then miraculously impacted belly first in a flat spin is absolutely ridiculous. If this charade continues Air France and the French will have to eat a lot of CROW with little or no white wine. But then they are betting that the FDR won't be found.
Switches

 

Did I mention the part about me not liking Airbus aircraft?

Taz
Terry Phillips

 

interesting
http://www.pprune.org/tech-log/378260-spin-jet-transport.html



Carol

 

Very unprofessional. Making statements like this while claiming they have not had access to the Brazilian coroners reports (which the Brazilians dispute) and not explaining a 50 mile debris field is just plain stupid. Who do they think they're kidding. Say nothing until you have a solid theory. Clearly, the French version of the NTSB works differently from the US and Canadian ones.

I read the translated 'report' at http://ow.ly/gnVx and found it quite surprising that the basis of their conclusion (this far) is based on some crushed beverage carts and toilet doors.

I'm glad I don't fly commercially much anymore, especially on Airbus equipment. What I've been reading is very disturbing.

 

great post, i forgot about the snap roll. i did sort of remember that config would roll inverted, and could not "spin" all the way down. the Engineers i work with in R&D are really hammering the French and Airbus over this mess, and many of them are from Europe and France in particular. i am taking that ACARS printout to work to let them pass it around.

 

I failed to mention that the BOAC 707 did in fact crash inverted, and as the craft fell both outer wings and the aft fuselage had broken off. The 4 engines had broken off as soon as the airplane fell over on its back.

 

The Braniff 707-227 went into a snap roll when directional control was lost while a student pilot was trying to learn engine out techniques. In the first roll the airplane separated one engine, in the second roll with the test pilot at the controls two more engines left in the recovery. With one j75 left and running at 100% the pilot ordered everyone back to the tail end and put the airplane down in the rock-strewn shore of the Skagit River, loosing his life. The other three survived but with serious injuries. As the result of this accident full time hydraulic rudder boost was designed for all 707's instead of that which kicked in after 15 deg. of displacement.
Back to the AF447 report, I have read it and the assumptions are baseless. The straight down dive and belly landing at the end are in the same stupid category as the magic bullet that killed JFK and zig zagged around in the car afterwards. The French must think that the public is 100% ignorant to release such a ridiculous and factless statement.

 

Bob, wasn't that the reason that the 707s all got extended vertical fins and (for a time) ventral fins as well? And I think it was adjustments to the yaw damper that later made the ventral fins superfluous.

 

You're correct. The ventral fin was supposed to put lateral area in the free air flow under the fuselage at high alpha and low speeds. The vertical fin extension put more area above to be more effective in engine out situations, low speeds, and to help with the good ol' Dutch Roll problem. Now I guess that the new computers and better yaw dampers take care of it. I recall that Boeing was facing a plethora of aerodynamic phenomena and systems challenges in the early phases of the 707 operation. I have been asked by the PD groups at Renton and Everett to give some lunchtime chats and presentations about the early days. What is just simple memories and to me common knowledge has now become history with many facts that are unknown by the new engineers who are some times flabbergasted by what we did to design, graphically express, and build a big tin bird 60 years ago. No high speed computers or drafting systems driven by CATIA. There were Marchand calculators, crawling around on your hands and knees to draw on white lacquered aluminum to layout the full sized loft and then the full sized parts of the first airplane. Plaster master models for compound parts of the fuselage. After the first parts were put together there were many all day all night sessions to chase down and correct errors. First flights were indescribable.
All that is long gone and the new guys are appalled at the labor intensive process. So I have fun talking about it. Not many old guys from the 707 days are left now.
Switches

 

Bob- Engineers like you are why the KC-135 series of aircraft and the 1962 vintage B-52H are still viable and effective aircraft over 50 years after they were designed. In the olden days, you made sure the pieces you were engineering were not going to be a problem using engineering rules of thumb, a slide rule, past stress testing, experience, and basic solid engineering mathematics. Now computer models allow engineers to get much closer to ideal structures, but they have nowhere near the engineering margins you and your predecessors ensured were in your designs. Progress? Who knows?

Incidentally, on the F-111 you could not have made the rudder tall enough, and that is why we had two ventral fins to try and keep the aircraft pointy end first at high AOA.

Taz
Terry Phillips

 

........and they are going to do their damn best to sweep this under the rug because of the "just sufficient engineering" in the name of low cost producibility. Sadly that is what this all boils down to. It's all about how can we design this light enough, cheaply enough, easy enough to put together by low cost/unskilled labor and sell it for good profit while still giving the airline customer a good in-service profit margin. Welcome to your "new" airplane.

I'm not just talking about Airbus either, I'm talking about ALL the builders big and small, world wide.
I'm on the inside and I see the "new" culture. I am ashamed and embarrassed at what I have seen.

I'll take a "beater" 767 or 747 any day, tough as hell and built with the right attitude, SAFETY first.
You won't see the vertical fin separate from a 777 in turbulence or through pilot input, PERIOD.
Although it is embarrassing for Boeing to delay the first flight of the 787 at risk to their own reputation, they are doing it for the right reasons, at ALL costs, safety and soundness of the aircraft.

Sorry for the rant but I have been sitting here keeping my mouth shut because of the lack of hard evidence. After seeing the direction this investigation is going I can no longer stay quiet.

 

Well said, Spasso.
Switches

 

Taz, you have a PM

 

Taz, I was on the proposal team for the F-111, ne' TFX, and we were told by the Air Force guys that our airplane was the hands down winner. You know how that worked out and I always had a dislike for everything government after that. We called the airplane the LBJ. It would have been a better machine if we had built it but then that's just my opinion...that of the loser. It's good to know someone who flew it. Gotta thank you for your service.
Switches

 

I remember reading that the Boeing airplane was the better design but lost out due to politics. When I worked at Grumman, some of the engineers who had spent time at Fairchild Republic told me that McDonnell-Douglas' winning F-15 design was really Republic's, and others told me that Rockwell's winning Shuttle orbiter design was really Grumman's! And we all know which company really designed the F-18. It's ridiculous when the government can take one company's design and award production to someone else.

 

Jim, Bob- Source selection for the F-111 was done while LBJ was in a position of power. F-111 was to be built in the General Dynamics/USAF factory in Ft Worth. Boeing had a tandem design with ejection seats much more in line with USAF thinking, GD had side by side seating and a capsule separated by a 30,000 lb solid rocket. The Whiz Kids were involved as well, and this was going to be an aircraft for both USAF and USN, designed to use the Phoenix fire control system (F-111B) eventually fitted to the F-14. Source selection was all about politics, at the SecDef level and involved the possible buy of 1000+ very expensive aircraft. Hard to have a realistic source selection given all those factors.

Regardless, the F-111 ended up being the best long range interdiction aircraft in the world by a large margin. Air-to-air or interceptor? No way. When it was replaced by the F-15E (if you can replace 500+ aircraft with less than 200), the F-15E range was only ~60% that of an F-111, conformal tanks notwithstanding. Amazing what you can do with 34,000 lbs of internal JP-8 fuel and a very low drag, high wing loading design.

Taz
Terry Phillips

 

Surprise, surprise....African ATC still sucks. (Not to take anything away from the Brazilians).

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8132997.stm

 

Considering that the eventual F-111B looked like the terrible carrier plane that it was, how do you think Boeing's equivalent would have done as a carrier plane? Who knows, the F-14 may never have come to exist.....

 

Gentleman,
I just received the Interim Report from BEA ( Bureau d'Enquetes et d'Antlyses) on AF 447, F-GZCP. Lots of rehash info.
Gary Bobileff