AF 447 - This is going to be a long one!

I am in a state of minor confusion right now. I don’t know what to think or feel. On one hand there are feelings of ecstasy, excitement and happiness and on the other end there is shock, sympathy and devastation. But after numerous attempts to write about this topic yesterday, I am finally going for it now, hereby taking the side of the shock and sympathy.

I have been constantly following the news since last evening, and I was shocked to hear that an Air France Airbus 330 flight, AF447, flying from Rio-De-Janerio to Paris, carrying 228 people on board including 12 crewmembers, 1 infant and 5 children, went missing. Now I know that I am related to this news in a slightly more important way than usual people, but when I shared this news with some of my friends online, they were least bothered about it. I mean they were like, “Oh, yeah.. okay…” and one of them even made fun of it by saying that the airplane was lost in the “Bermuda Airangle”. Well I have nothing against them, but it could strike anyone, anytime and anywhere, and people should really start to know what’s going on around them. If you don’t know what happened, you might as well Google it and get some information before you read this post.

Like I mentioned earlier, I am related to this incident/accident [I don’t know what to call it yet since they found no dead body, but death is inevitable in this case] in a slightly different way. While the whole missing theory was being shouted over and over on the news and internet, I was thinking of what might have happened. I am not an airline pilot yet, but I will try to speak about it from whatever little I know about airplanes and weather. Firstly, I am so glad that it did not happen in India. And I say that because the French government handled the situation pretty well at that time by setting up a different cell for the relatives of all the people aboard the flight and took care of them and made them as comfortable as possible.

I was watching news when they said that the flight had been missing for over 4 hours, and that the SAR [ Search and Rescue] operations had begun. Military planes from France, Brazil, and even Britain began searching for the airplane. News officials said, the plane must have been struck by lightning. Now first of all, this plane is said to have been flying well over 40,000 feet above mean sea level, and this is the height above the Earth’s Tropopause [All the weather phenomena occurs in the Troposphere which is of the order 40,000 feet to 45,000 feet depending on the time of the year.] and rarely any adverse weather occurs there. And also, airplanes are designed to withstand forces of lightning in their structural design and it is not easy to knock out a huge Airbus 330 just like that. So I would like to dismiss the lightning theory there itself. But yes, at high altitudes there is CAT [Clear Air Turbulence] and it cannot be detected by weather radars installed on the airplane.

Then there were reports that the airplane transmitted a short circuit message 4 hours and 14 minutes after it had taken off from Rio, just before disappearing. They were predicting that the aircraft must have undergone electrical malfunction. So for all of you who do not know, an airliner would never run an airplane these days without a backup system. And A330 is a modern generation aircraft fitted with several electrical systems. In a case of complete failure, there is a last backup system called the RAM rise system which runs purely on air pressure and keeps the instruments working.

The route of the flight was over the Atlantic Ocean, and it is difficult to have ATC facilities there, besides there is no low level air traffic over an ocean so there are radar services provided to airplanes for flying these kinds of routes. These are like imaginary rings extending at a high altitude level which provide radar services to the pilot. Also, the vertical and lateral flight profile of the plane is tracked automatically and fed to the nearest ATC operators so that they can track the flight. The plane is reported to have been flying smoothly before the electric malfunction. So I believe that there was no engine failure or so. I earlier mentioned that there are rings of radars at high altitudes to track the airplanes, and the radar has tracked this plane diving abruptly and then going missing somewhere over the Atlantic. Now anything with wings, even a paper airplane that we make, cannot just sink below this way. If it has wings, there will be aerodynamic forces acting on it which will make the airplane glide. Even without an engine. If this plane sank abruptly, it probably would have undergone an explosion. Or even more accountable would be a structural loss, say a wing or an elevator. Although the A330 is a new airplane, this particular aircraft [which was just 4 years old: in service since April 2005] had last been serviced in April 2008. It could have been a technical malfunction too.

The French government has been ruling out possibilities of terrorism. I ask, why not terrorism? There could be a bomb on board too! How can you just rule such possibilities out?
Another interesting thing I observed is that, the route of this flight passes through the Inter Tropical Convergence Zone [ITCZ], where the tropics meet and the winds change drastically. This area is known for violent thunderstorms and really strong winds. So maybe the plane came under one of the thunder clouds, and got pushed down drastically in what we call a down draught.

Now, if any of you follow the Air Crash Investigates on Discovery, then there is an episode about loss of cabin pressure. If you guys don’t know about it, read this [Helios Flight ZU522, 14th August 2005]. The same could have happened in the case of this flight too! Of course followed by other malfunctions too. Maybe everyone was unconscious and that is why the ATC must not have received any signal from the Pilots! I am just trying to analyze the situation from my point of view. I could be wrong. But I am wondering what went wrong!

Nothing can be investigated till the Black Box of the aircraft is found, which in this case, will be somewhere on the bed of the ocean, approximately 300 meters under water. And it must be in a pretty good condition since it is designed to withstand very heavy forces. The latest I heard was that another pilot of another airline spotted “Orange Spots” over the Atlantic, just after the plane had disappeared. The French Air Force team is being said to have sighted wreckage 650km (390 miles) north-east of Brazil's Fernando do Noronha island. I hope they find the Black Box soon.
The purpose of this post was to tell all my readers to not fear or dread airplane journeys. The rate of an air accident is 1 as compared to 10,000 accidents on road. And anyway, whatever has to happen, will happen. That does not mean you stop traveling by air. I know many people who stopped air travel, especially in US and Canada, after the 9/11 story and I have been trying to convince them too.

I offer serious and heartfelt condolences to all the people who are even remotely connected to this incident. I am really feeling devastated. May the souls of all the people who lost their lives, rest in peace. For them, this was probably the journey back home to their loved ones, maybe for some it was a trip to Paris, for someone it was visiting friends and relatives, and some of them were just at work. I have been shedding tears on and off, looking at the worried friends and relatives at the Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris.