Any updates on the Airbus lost in the Atlantic?

Read this in Portuguese on Globo.com today.....the chassis that the recording module mounts to (or something that looks eerily similar) has been located laying on the sea bed, but as there is no module.........there is no further info for now.........

Given where this assembly is mounted internally in the aircraft though, it seems odd to me that the module would detach from the chassis "post impact".........or that it would by laying there all alone on the sea bed. But I am no aviation crash reconstruction expert.

Scroll down for pics........

http://g1.globo.com/mundo/noticia/2011/04/chassis-de-uma-das-caixas-pretas-do-voo-447-e-achado-mas-sem-os-dados.html

 

Very odd that they only found a piece of it. Hopefully the memory module isn't too far away...

 

Looks like it's upside down to me.

 

Looks like they found the missing memory module!

 

Yes, apparently one of them. It seems amazing that they did find it after all the initial reports about the difficulties faced. They still need the other black box to get complete data, and of course for the data from both to be recoverable.

 

http://www.flightglobal.com/articles/2011/05/01/356138/pictures-crashed-af447-flight-data-recorder-found-and-retrieved.html

 

Completely amazing recovery. Hopefully, it'll fill in the missing blanks. That said, it would still be useful to retrieve the voice recorder and to actually hear the flight deck.

CW

 

Seeing this piece of equipment separated from its mounting in the tail section of the airplane indicates to me that there was a violent disassembly of the structure there. This equipment simply cannot be bumped from its installation, there had to have been some serious forces involved to separate it. On Boeing equipment the FDR is mounted in a substantial rack integrated into the basic structure in the overhead of the 48 Section below the vertical fin and I cannot imagine it being ripped away and completely separated from the airplane. Now I hope that the tapes are readable.

 

It does look like it would take about a million Gs to knock it apart like that.

My understanding (from a show on History Channel) is that the newer FDRs are solid state and don't use tape.

 

OK let me start this post by saying that speculating from a single grainy picture on the internet is just dumb... But having said that, I'll do it anyway! Did anybody notice the bottom two bolts look sheared but the top two holes look like they were not bolted down at the time of the crash? The upper left (in the pic) bolt hole and grounding strap look pristine...

See the first line of this post... but I'm already wondering if some maintenance guy skipped two bolts. (not that it matters in the end)

 

Looks like they have found the CVR and recovered it.

http://www.flightglobal.com/articles/2011/05/03/356145/af447-recovery-team-retrieves-cockpit-voice-recorder.html

 

Seems just a little incredible that they found both units, in the middle of the Atlantic, thousands of feet down, just laying out in the open not covered by or attached to anything else.

 

They have found both modules:

http://www.voanews.com/english/news/americas/Second-Black-Box-Found-From-Air-France-447-121149184.html

 

The challenge will be to see if there is any recoverable data left on there after sitting at X thousand feet down for that long...

I read that those conditions exceeded, by a huge factor, their design requirements. The pressure diff is enormous.

Sounds like it will be at least a couple weeks before a possible Voila' moment... shoot, may be at least that long until they even get to Francais.

 

The wreckage seems to be confined to a relatively small area, witness the ability to find these relatively small parts that they were looking for pretty quickly. Also Airbus has said, based on the injuries to the passengers, that the aircraft came down in a relatively flat attitude. This is also corroborated by the high vertical g's required to damage some of the hardware the way it was damaged. Also the wreckage was found almost right below where it was last reported to be based on the automatic reporting system. Finally the wreckage wasn't "chewed up" as might be if it had a high speed impact going down nose first. If you look at the damage to TWA-800, it was pretty much shattered into small pieces from the high speed impact. This aircraft has good sized areas that are intact, but saw high vertical accelerations. Airbus has said all along that this thing pancaked in, and that appears to be true.

Question is, could this thing have encountered a "deep stall" event and pretty much gone in flat on its belly? Classic deep stall occurs when the elevators are blanked by the wings and commonly attributed to T tail aircraft, but under certain cg and elevator trim settings can occur in more conventional aircraft. Could the loss of airspeed indication have resulted in a high altitude stall that they were unable to recover from? All of this is speculation, but that's one scenario that I'm thinking could have happened. Once you are stalled and falling, you won't have power because the engine inlets will separate and the engines will probably surge, so you couldn't power your way out of it.

Hopefully we will get some answers from the data recorders

 

So the aircraft might have been in a flat spin right down to the water?

 

It may not have spun, it just could have stalled and mushed all the way to the water. OTOH it could have fallen off and spun. Don't know. Supposedly deep stall is a pretty stable situation. It doesn't necessarily fall off into a spin like a normal stall. With swept wings deep stall tends to be more stable than with straight wings. Maybe somebody more involved with stability and control can chime in.

In the New York Airbus crash (the one that was percipitated by the tail falling off), the aircraft spun pretty violently. In that case the spin was violent enough to cause (one or both I don't recall) engines to come off the aircraft, and at least one engine was found a good distance from the main crash site. In this case the engines are in the wreckage, so if it spun maybe it wasn't violent.

 

In the case of the BOAC 707 that was destroyed by a mountain wave near Mount Fuji, a tornadic-strength side gust caused the vertical tail to fail sideways, and it took out one of the horizontals. The aircraft flipped over forwards so violently that all four engines were wrenched loose. It lost forward speed rapidly and fell to earth in an inverted flat spin, losing parts as it went. Amazingly there was no fire after impact.

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/08/magazine/mag-08Plane-t.html?_r=2&ref=magazine&pagewanted=all

 

Great article.... lots of good info.

I really like Peter Goelz's comments.

A video of the retrieval can be found here: near the bottom of the page.

http://www.jettimes.com/air-france-af-447-crash-black-box-flight-data-recorder-found-2/

 

A good assemblage of the recent updates of recovery, data and pictures. Starting on February 4th 2011 with running updates to May 12th, 2011. Enlightening information.

The Aviation Herald,
http://avherald.com/h?article=41a81ef1/0053&opt=512

 

From the dispersal of the debris (or the lack of dispersal) seen on the ocean bottom it appears to me that the impact with the water is what dismembered the aircraft. If it had come apart in flight, the debris would have been distributed over miles instead of aprox. 900 feet. The damage to the structures shown is severe and evidence of a hard impact. I don't see how a swept wing aircraft could flat spin even without a vertical stabilizer except in a deep stabile stall.

 

In the NYT article, the pitot tubes are said to be the most likely root cause of the crash. The particular type of tube used on this aircraft was known to have icing problems and was in fact slated for replacement. If the pitot tubes clog, incorrect (lower than actual) airspeed is indicated to the autopilot, which then applies power to compensate. This results in a higher than optimum airspeed which moves the center of lift rearward on the wing, resulting in a nosedown attitude, further increasing speed. By the time the flight crew realized that there was a problem, the aircraft would have been descending at a high rate of speed and would have been very difficult to control. Autopsies and analysis of items recovered from the surface indicate very high G compression forces as would have resulted from slamming belly first onto the surface of the water.

I am not a pilot, so those of you who are more knowledgeable about these things can say whether this scenario has validity.

 

That has been the prevailing theory behind the crash for some time now, as I recall. I think the only way to prove or disprove it and establish what really happened may be from the CVR analysis. Or, maybe only when the CVR and FDR are over-lapped and analyzed. But, I'm sure the professionals will report back soon.

CW

 

The 707 design was weak and had cracking around the areas that support the horizontal stab according to the NTSB who found 4 more aircraft with cracks in the horizontal Stab mountings. Boeing redesigned the area though the NTSB thought it wouldn't have made much difference to the Mt Fuji accident.

Solofast, I thought the F/O broke the tail off the A300 in New York?