The Wine Dark Sea
Those poor poor folks
RIO DE JANEIRO (Reuters) – Search planes scoured the waters of the Atlantic Ocean on Tuesday, looking for the remains of an Air France jetliner that disappeared in a storm with 228 people on board.
The Airbus A330 went missing on a flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris and French President Nicolas Sarkozy said there was little chance of finding any survivors.
France and Brazil sent military aircraft and ships to try to locate wreckage between Brazil and West Africa.
Brazilian carrier TAM said the crew of one of its planes saw “bright spots” on the surface of the ocean. But Brazil’s air force said a merchant ship in the area found no signs of burning debris from the Air France jet.
Aside from some automated reports saying there were electrical failures and perhaps one saying there was a loss of pressure, there was nothing.
Horrible.
UPDATE: Some wreckage may have been found
(CNN) — Wreckage has been found in the Atlantic Ocean that could have come from a missing Air France jet that disappeared Monday with 228 passengers and crew on board, Brazilian aviation officials said Tuesday.
Americans Anne and Michael Harris, who lived in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, were aboard the flight.
Floating objects and seats were found 720 kilometers (447 miles) from the island of Fernando de Noronha, said Brazilian Air Force spokesman Jorge Amaral.
The search will continue but there is not enough material to officially say this is the wreckage from Flight 447, Maral said.
Life | tree hugging sister | 
June 2, 2009 9:02 am
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Horrifying.
My prayers are with the families, who sadly, may never know what became of their loved ones.
Damn.
Fox is reporting possible debris found. No link yet.
Say a prayer for these poor folks, and their families.
I’d like to be wrong but the plane has been missing long enough to expect the worst.
This is every traveler’s worst fear come true.
Mid-air explosion and crash.A tragedy.
I suspect a bomb.Electrical failure due to lightning is very rare.I wonder if the radios the
crew uses would also fail in the event of total
electrical failure in the cockpit? Airbuses must
have a battery back-up in the event of a failure.
No May Day was broadcast by the pilot,so the plane
exploded,maybe.
I wouldn’t fly in an Airbus anyway,they seem too much like a Fiat.
Well, it could be a variety of things, Greg. I am leaning away from terrorism at this juncture because no one has claimed credit. what’s the point of terrorism if you’re not going to scream “look at what I did!!!”?
In an emergency the priority for the crew is to try and get the plane under control; that has to take precedence over trying to make a mayday call. If there was a catastrophic electrical failure, perhaps caused by say multiple lightening strikes, plus extreme turbulence plus perhaps some unknown structural weakness it’s possible the plane broke apart before the crew were able to get a distress call off. Highly unlikely on any given flight? Of course. But unfortunately bound to happen eventually.
Frankly my prayer is that it happened so fast and they lost pressure and blacked out before they really knew what hit them.
The same thing applies to me. I have this huge phobia and the belief that flying will be the end of me. When I
heard the news, I was so scared for those people. I hope that they will come out alive even though the news are
not so hopeful,I guess there’s nothing to do but wait.
Big planes don’t have battery backup as far as I know but they do have APP/APU auxillary power plant/unit that runs all the electrical and utility hydraulics in the event of an emergency or they have a RAT ram air turbine they can deploy. The Airbus is all electronic so if there was a short it could cause all kinds of problems. If I remember right it was an Airbus that crashed right after 911 that was in the vortex of a 747. The pilots overcorrected so much they snapped the rudder off, composite rudder. So there is the possibility that in severe turbulence maybe something similar happened. Who knows? The bomb thing looks like a possibility though, scary. Nobody has taken responsibility for such a thing have they?
I would imagine there are back-up/redundant APUs, right? It would have to be one hell of a jolt, one would hope, to knock them out.
I really really doubt the bomb thing, though, because if that were the case it seems to me there would not have been those messages from the onboard computers talking about electrical failures.