Spiegel International has published a story on the tragic event of Air France Flight 447. It explains a lot about flight 447 in Layman’s terms for those of us who aren’t technically adept in the field of aviation. How accurate is the article? We will not know exactly what happened to flight 447 until the data recorders are found and analyzed. A new search for the data recorders is set to begin soon.
There is also a very active discussion about this article taking place on reddit.com. Feel free to join the discussion there; some people are making some very good points and asking very good questions.
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{ 9 comments… read them below or add one }
well that does provide some insight as to what was going through Capt Dubois mind moments before the crash. May he and the AFF 447 passengers and crew rest in peace.
That does not actually provide anything, considering the amount of rude inaccuracies in the text with regard to the second interim report. Some times it feels like the journalists ( or whoever writes such articles ) do not read official reports at all.
Apparently, there seems to be a lot of mistakes in the article….extremly hard to figure out what actually happened.
Der Speigel must have put their fashion editor on this assignment.
For example this:
It’s only by means of a trick that the captain can even reach Paris without going under the legally required minimum reserves of kerosene that must still be in the plane’s tanks upon arrival in the French capital. A loophole allows him to enter Bordeaux — which lies several hundred kilometers closer than Paris — as the fictitious destination for his fuel calculations.
is nonsense.
There is no “trick” here. It is a re-release flight plan, which is very common for long trans-oceanic flights. No loophole, no safety impact. At All.
BTW, I’m an airline pilot.
I dont’ agree with the situations depicted in this illustration. Totally wrong in my opinion.
To understand better what I think better to be the possible cause of the disaster you have to “study” the cases of Flight 123 (Jal 747) and flight 232 (United DC-10).
And what exactly do you believe have JAL123 and UA232 in common with AF447?
They both suffered complete hydraulic failure. Air France didn’t. They both had survivors (albeit only I think 4 or 5 on JAL). Air France didn’t.
They both crashed on land. Air France didn’t.
And so on.
Why exactly did you bring those two up as examples? From your comment I decipher that you believe AF447 suffered loss of all hydraulics? As there is no evidence of such a thing whatsoever, what makes you come to that particular conclusion?
There's no evidence also that all hydraulic systems were fully functional during the last minuts.
Call it an "intuition", but I think that this plane suffered from a major and complete hydraulic failure and system failure: the consequence was it was completely unmanageable till it crashed in the water.
The main element supporting my assertion is the fact that the rudder was found pratically intact and in a different location from the rest of the plane. I think this is a clear evidence that this part de-tached first, then the idraulic failure and then the system failure and crash.
THIS is my theory.
this reply is not intended to play the blame but as a usaf pilot and engineer,,. pilot error.the weather rader onairplanes today are very good and should
not have flown into those storms. now the purpose of my reply. iwas a member of columbia’s lamont geological laboratory that located located our nuclear sub “thresher” in the 1960’s. refer tot tom clancy’s “the hunt for red october.this part of the ocean has
more electronic surveilance equipment than any other partof the ocean.the most sophistcated known to man.i was also part of the teams that put them on the ocean floor.the russians also have extens
coverage in
this part of the ocean has more electronic surveilance .it is almost a certainty that the us navy knows where the airplane is located.highly classified.the french govt should lean on the us for humanitarian reasons also the russians. the three axis seismomentors alone would have detected an object a fraction of the size of that fuselage..a side note……the under water moutain ranges are very fragile and it would not take much of a landslide to cover the plane in which case it will never be found
think about it
This seems VERY similar to the crash of Birgenair flight 301 in 1996.