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mudra · 06-11-2009, 09:00 PM

A Past Flight May Offer Clues to Air France 447
From: TIME

We'll never know what it was like to be aboard Air France Flight 447 as it plunged into the Atlantic Ocean on May 31, apparently killing all 228 aboard. For now, the closest we may get is listening to the passengers on a similar Airbus 330 jet whose flight computer put it into an uncommanded dive over northwestern Australia last October.

Qantas Flight 72 had been airborne for three hours, flying uneventfully on autopilot from Singapore to Perth, Australia. But as the in-flight dinner service wrapped up, the aircraft's flight-control computer went crazy. The plane abruptly entered a smooth 650-ft. dive (which the crew sensed was not being caused by turbulence) that sent dozens of people smashing into the airplane's luggage bins and ceiling. More than 100 of the 300 people on board were hurt, with broken bones, neck and spinal injuries, and severe lacerations splattering blood throughout the cabin.

"It was horrendous, absolutely gruesome, terrible," passenger Jim Ford told Australian radio. "The worst experience of my life." Passenger Nigel Court said he was terrified to watch people not wearing seat belts — including his wife — fly upward. "She crashed headfirst into the roof above us," he told a reporter. "People were screaming," said Henry Bishop of Oxford, England. A Sri Lankan couple said they were thrown to the ceiling when their seat belts failed. "We saw our own deaths," said Sam Samaratunga, who was traveling with his wife Rani to their son's wedding. "We decided to die together and embraced each other."

Following an investigation of the A330's uncommanded dive, Australian aviation officials, assisted by U.S. and French authorities, blamed a pair of simultaneous failures for the near disaster. The plane has three air data inertial reference units (ADIRUs), which are designed to help the plane's flight-control computer fly the plane safely. The system is intended to eliminate the possibility of electronic error: the flight computer, which is always monitoring the trio, can disregard one ADIRU if it begins relaying information that conflicts with the other two.

But that's not what happened when one of them went awry on Oct. 7 and began sending erroneous data spikes on the plane's angle of attack (AOA) — the angle between its wings and the air flowing over them — to the flight-control computer. "For some reason, the damn computer disregarded the healthy channels," says Hans Weber, an aviation expert who heads Tecop International, an aviation-consulting firm in San Diego. "Instead, it acted upon the information from the rogue channel." The computer, responding to the faulty data, put the plane into a dive.

In its preliminary investigative report, released on March 6, the Australian Transport Safety Bureau said Airbus had initially said it didn't know of any other similar events. But when the same thing happened again, involving a different aircraft, on Dec. 27, Airbus combed its computerized flight files and found data fingerprints suggesting similar ADIRU problems had occurred on a total of four flights. One of the earlier instances, in fact, included a September 2006 event on the same plane that entered the uncommanded dive in October (the other three flights had continued safely on). The same VCR-sized ADIRU was to blame in both those cases, although it had supposedly undergone a needed realignment following the 2006 event. All three planes carried the same brand and model of ADIRU, as do 397 of the 900 330s and 340s in the Airbus fleet.

It is not yet known whether Air France 447, an A330, carried the troublesome variety of ADIRU. But if it did, and if the Air France plane plummeted into an uncommanded dive while traveling through a downdraft generated by storms — a common occurrence over the region of the Atlantic Ocean where the plane went down — it could have been doomed as it entered a steep dive and likely broke up.

read more:
http://www.time.com/time/world/artic...rss-topstories

How many of these events do they need to actually handle these faulty things !!!!

kindness
mudra

06-11-2009, 09:00 PM	#111
mudra Avalon Spiritual Mother Join Date: Sep 2008 Location: belgium Posts: 4,919	Re: Air France airbus goes down A Past Flight May Offer Clues to Air France 447 From: TIME We'll never know what it was like to be aboard Air France Flight 447 as it plunged into the Atlantic Ocean on May 31, apparently killing all 228 aboard. For now, the closest we may get is listening to the passengers on a similar Airbus 330 jet whose flight computer put it into an uncommanded dive over northwestern Australia last October. Qantas Flight 72 had been airborne for three hours, flying uneventfully on autopilot from Singapore to Perth, Australia. But as the in-flight dinner service wrapped up, the aircraft's flight-control computer went crazy. The plane abruptly entered a smooth 650-ft. dive (which the crew sensed was not being caused by turbulence) that sent dozens of people smashing into the airplane's luggage bins and ceiling. More than 100 of the 300 people on board were hurt, with broken bones, neck and spinal injuries, and severe lacerations splattering blood throughout the cabin. "It was horrendous, absolutely gruesome, terrible," passenger Jim Ford told Australian radio. "The worst experience of my life." Passenger Nigel Court said he was terrified to watch people not wearing seat belts — including his wife — fly upward. "She crashed headfirst into the roof above us," he told a reporter. "People were screaming," said Henry Bishop of Oxford, England. A Sri Lankan couple said they were thrown to the ceiling when their seat belts failed. "We saw our own deaths," said Sam Samaratunga, who was traveling with his wife Rani to their son's wedding. "We decided to die together and embraced each other." Following an investigation of the A330's uncommanded dive, Australian aviation officials, assisted by U.S. and French authorities, blamed a pair of simultaneous failures for the near disaster. The plane has three air data inertial reference units (ADIRUs), which are designed to help the plane's flight-control computer fly the plane safely. The system is intended to eliminate the possibility of electronic error: the flight computer, which is always monitoring the trio, can disregard one ADIRU if it begins relaying information that conflicts with the other two. But that's not what happened when one of them went awry on Oct. 7 and began sending erroneous data spikes on the plane's angle of attack (AOA) — the angle between its wings and the air flowing over them — to the flight-control computer. "For some reason, the damn computer disregarded the healthy channels," says Hans Weber, an aviation expert who heads Tecop International, an aviation-consulting firm in San Diego. "Instead, it acted upon the information from the rogue channel." The computer, responding to the faulty data, put the plane into a dive. In its preliminary investigative report, released on March 6, the Australian Transport Safety Bureau said Airbus had initially said it didn't know of any other similar events. But when the same thing happened again, involving a different aircraft, on Dec. 27, Airbus combed its computerized flight files and found data fingerprints suggesting similar ADIRU problems had occurred on a total of four flights. One of the earlier instances, in fact, included a September 2006 event on the same plane that entered the uncommanded dive in October (the other three flights had continued safely on). The same VCR-sized ADIRU was to blame in both those cases, although it had supposedly undergone a needed realignment following the 2006 event. All three planes carried the same brand and model of ADIRU, as do 397 of the 900 330s and 340s in the Airbus fleet. It is not yet known whether Air France 447, an A330, carried the troublesome variety of ADIRU. But if it did, and if the Air France plane plummeted into an uncommanded dive while traveling through a downdraft generated by storms — a common occurrence over the region of the Atlantic Ocean where the plane went down — it could have been doomed as it entered a steep dive and likely broke up. read more: http://www.time.com/time/world/artic...rss-topstories How many of these events do they need to actually handle these faulty things !!!! kindness mudra Last edited by mudra; 06-11-2009 at 09:04 PM.