Ice, a major killer in the air

The title is a little deceptive, as it's always on the ground that people die, as a result of a plane being unable to keep flying due to ice. But in my recent research on airline accidents, I've run across ice as a serious cause of airplane accidents. It turns out that there are at least three ways that ice can cause a plane to crash, all of them preventable, and mostly through designing--and correctly applying (that's the hardest part)--a mechanical solution to the problem.
1. Carb Ice: This is ice that builds up in the carburetor of a piston-powered small plane due to the cooling that air experiences as it passes through it. Just as water drips off the cooling coils of an air conditioner or freezer--becoming ice if things aren't working right--the wrong combination of humidity and altitude can easily cause a carburetor to ice up, starving the engine of air and causing it to lose power. Although this problem is easily prevented by applying heat to the air going into the carburetor, and all student pilots are rigourously drilled on the process, new pilots can become inattentive enough that carb ice continues to cause dozens of engineless landings a year, at least one or two of which, on average, are fatal.
This is not to be confused with the serious problem of water in the fuel entering and choking off a piston-driven engine, which also happened in the early days of aviation, resulting now in the highly pollutive regimen of drawing a sample of dyed aviation fuel from the low points of the fuel system and throwing it out on the tarmac after acertaining that it doesn't contain any water.
2. Rime Ice: This is ice that builds up on the leading edge of the wing, either from a plane sitting too long on the runway during an ice storm, or from flying through icing conditions in the air. Airline pilots are just as susceptible to rime ice as students pilots are--if not more so, as student pilots are warned to stay away from icing conditions, while airline pilots frequently fly through them anyway. But when they do, the results can be extremely deadly, resulting in a loss of lift that usually kills everyone on board--unless it happens on takeoff, especially if the plane comes down in a river, as did USAir Flight 405. Two methods have been developed to combat the buildup of rime ice: De-icer that is sprayed on the wings of planes awaiting takeoff in an ice storm, and either heaters or expanding rubber boots in the the wing that keep ice from being able to build up. In one case, that of American Eagle Flight 4184 (which was twice ordered to fly a holding pattern in icy conditions), the entire wing of that type had to be redesigned to avoid rime ice from coming loose and damaging the control surfaces on the tail.
3. Engine ice: This is the most insidious way that ice kills, and almost exclusively happens with airliners, because in order to get ice in the engine one either has to be flying a plane whose wings tend to shed huge slabs of rime ice into the rear-mounted engines, or flying a plane through a hailstorm, where the hail going into the engines is so heavy that they flame out, or even suffer catastrophic turbine failure. This can only happen, in the case of hail, when a pilot takes his plane into the heart of a thunderstorm, as did the pilot of Garuda Flight GA421.
Why, you wonder, would a pilot do this? Well, hopefully this will never happen again, given the dozens who have died so far, but in the early days of weather radar in airliners there was an unfortunate phenomenon in which the weather radar could only pick up rain--not hail--so on the radar what appeared to be a clear path through the thunderhead was in fact its most dangerous part, as any pilot who ever tried taking that "path through the storm" soon found out, when all his engines failed and his plane fell out of the sky. The most tragic example of this would be Southern Airways Flight 242, in which the powerless plane, minutes before crashing into a petrol station in a small town, glided right over an airport without realizing it (because neither pilot ever bothered to check their flight charts, and the passenger on board who knew about the airport didn't realize that the pilot was trying to make for a much more distant air base that he was familiar with).
This is not to be confused with a jet engine running rough due to flying through high-altitude ice crystals, which so far has't caused any crashes or fatalities, as there is plenty of time for the engines to recover as the plane falls below the ice layer.
One adage of aircraft accident investigations is that every crash makes flying safer. After the earliest pilots started getting killed by carb ice, carb heat was invented to prevent it from building up. After airliners started going down with rime ice, de-icing processes and procedures were invented to prevent it from building up--and redesigned after it did so anyway. And after the extensive investigations that were required to reconstruct the accidents in which engine ice killed (as it always did), weather radars were reprogrammed, and pilots trained, to keep planes from flying into the heart of a thunderstorm.
But there is one more way that ice can kill, although it's possible that it never will, because it's only caused a crash one time--and as a result of the extensive investigation into how it was able to happen, the system that allowed it to happen was redesigned. Here's how it went down: A Boeing 747 (British Airways Flight 38) crossing Siberia after departing Beijing developed frozen water vapor in its fuel tanks, which as long as the throttles were held steady was able to build up without being dislodged. As it came in to land in London, there was turbulence, so the pilot decided to allow the plane's computer to make the approach, as it was able to adust the power level more precisely than the pilot could. As a result, the autopilot demanded a surge of power which dislodged the ice and sent it crashing against the fuel heater at the end of the fuel line, clogging it and starving all four engines simutaneously, causing the plane to crash-land short of the runway--but, due to the extreme skill of the aircrew in making a landing that they had never trained for, without any fatalities.
What the investigators finally realized (and only after it happened again, but in a 747 that was still at altitude, so there was time to allow the ice to dissapate as it descended) was that tiny projections on the fuel line heater held the ice just short of where it could be melted; all that was required was redesigning the fuel line heater, which of course should have been made that way in the first place. And, since this has only ever happened in 747's--thus it was only their fuel systems that were redesigned--it's possible that any plane flying through extremely frigid and humid air may be the first of its type to experience it.

Air Safety Incident Website

 For those who follow my airline safety articles, here is an entire website devoted to the subject. Note how often computers are implicated in airline disasters and disorders. 

More on computers crashing planes

 I've continued to follow flight crash investigations, and I'm finding that flight computers are now always implicated in crashes--even in cases of mass murder by pilot, it's the flight computer that flies the aircraft into the ground--as if the suicidal pilot himself lacks the nerve to keep a hand on the controls all the way to impact. The response of the pilot when a computer starts to crash his plane is thus crucial; however, to date it doesn't appear that pilots are being trained to fight with their computers, and in one crash report after another I read of the confusion of the pilot as to why his control inputs aren't working. 

So definitely, pilot training needs to change. Flight simulators need to teach the problems of computer takeover, and, since I'm reviewing accident reports from years ago, this process may well have already been begun. But there's one more thing: when an engine begins to self-destruct, normal procedure is for the flight crew to try to re-start the engine. This is madness: they should be focused on finding the nearest safe place to land, engineless. All commercial aircraft should have backward-facing cameras with monitors in the cockpit that visually show each engine. Thus if an engine can be seen to be aflame, or flying apart, no attempt should be made to restart it. All attention should be focused on getting the plane down safely.

And, I suppose, given the inevitable continuation of takeover by computer, flight computers should be programmed to pull up the aircraft any time they are programmed to fly it into the ground--or at the least, unlock the cockpit door authomatically any time a terrain warning goes off.

Another life that wasn't wasted

 “Wally” Funk wanted to be an astronaut. But in the 1950's, when boys hoping to get a toy space helmet for Christmas were building imaginary spaceships out of cardboard boxes, girls weren't expected to have any such ambitions. It didn't matter that she was already a pilot, having taken her first lessons at the age of nine. Or that President Eisenhower himself had written her a letter congratulating her on her expert marksmanship; she was a girl, and girls couldn't march in the infantry, ride in the cavalry, OR fly o'er the enemy. And only military officers were being considered for the space program, so it just wasn't to be.

But Wally Funk had a secret weapon: longevity. Having been trained as a backup for the Mercury mission, and then turned away when there turned out to be seven men with the Right Stuff, she lived through the entire US space program, observing the Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, and Shuttle Missions from afar, while racking up an impressive series of “firsts”: first in her class at Stephens College (graduating at age 19), first female Flight Instructor at a US military base, first female Field Examiner for the FAA, first female Air Safety Investigator for the National Transportation Safety Board. And first place finisher, in a field of 80, of the Pacific Air Race. By the time the Shuttle program finally opened up to women, she was no doubt qualified in every way except one: she was now too old! She was turned down three times. And it's a good thing, by the way, that Christa McAuliffe, rather than Wally, got the nod to be the first civilian in space: she never made it, as the Challenger exploded shortly after takeoff, killing all aboard.

As for Wally, she lived on. And she kept flying, serving as the Chief Pilot for five different aviation schools. But she never gave up her dream. When the first Shuttle flight to be commanded by a woman took off, she was an honored guest at the launch. Finally, as the 21st century dawned, it looked as if civilian space travel might finally become a possibility. Wally took the money she'd inherited from her art collector parents, and royalties from her books, to make a down payment of the first Virgin Galactic space tourism flight. By this time she was in her seventies, and space tourism was still a decade off. But when the first flight finally took off with paying passengers, it was competitor Blue Orbit rather than Virgin Galactic. Their maiden flight set two records: 18-year old Oliver Daemen became the youngest person in space, and Wally, at 82, the oldest by half a decade (and it was a good thing for the record books that she was on that first flight, as the second, just a few months later, carried 90-year-old William Shatner). She had somehow managed to outlast the entire span of the male-only U.S. space program, AND to outlive the age restriction. In that way she was reminiscent of the first woman in space, who was sent along on an early robotic flight purely as a token, but kept on training long enough to see the Soviet space program open up to women, and became a fully qualified cosmonaut.

I was inspired to write this post when I noticed that, like Linus Pauling, Mary Wallace Funk got tired of not being allowed to study what she wanted to in high school, so dropped out and entered college at age 16. With all the progress they have made in so many other areas, in this way America have regressed: it's no longer possible for a frustrated genius to get into college without first ticking off the box of a secondary school education. At the very most, he or she can take limited college classes concurrently while completing secondary school, or complete it early by correspondence; just dropping out is no longer an option for bright young students like Linus and Wally.

I imagine there are a few exceptions in subsequent generations, but I suspect none from the 21st century.

Whatever Happened to Flight 370? And what can be done about it?

Back in 2009 when I started writing on air disasters, even a plane flying into the middle of the ocean could expect to be found within days, its black box recovered even from the bottom of the abyss. Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 has changed all that; three years after it disappeared from radar, no crash scene has ever been identified, nor will it probably ever be found using currently available technology. When whoever was at the controls of MH370 made its final turn into the Indian Ocean, it was with the intention that the plane never be seen again.

I have written on this air disaster before, both five days and nine months after it was first reported. I haven't had anything further to report, until now. While I stay with my original theory that MH370 was hijacked, I've let go of my secondary theory, that the USA was behind its disappearance; I've now run across a much more likely theory.

There is no question, now, that some sinister person was at the controls of MH370 at the time the transponder was turned off just after clearing Malaysian traffic control; the only question has been, who? The general consensus seems to focus on the pilot, based mainly on three lines of evidence:

1. The plane had to have been taken over by someone aboard. Since Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah was the last voice heard just before the plane went dark, under this scenario he took control of the plane, dismissed the copilot, locked the cockpit door (another unintended consequence of post-9/11 regulation is that a member of the flight crew can now hijack his own flight unimpeded), turned off all communication devices, flew the plane into radar dead zones along international borders, and turned left to fly southward across the Indian ocean until the plane's fuel was exhausted. Prime evidence for this scenario is that Zaharie had cleared his social calendar following the flight.

2. The Inmarsat satellite system picked up ACARS signals that, as interpreted, indicated that MH370 continued on a southern track until 8:19 am.

3. A piece of a Boeing 777 wing floated ashore Reunion Island in July 2015. A part number inside the piece was traced back to the airplane lost on March 8, 2014. Another identified piece of the aircraft was found on Pemba Island in June 2016.

Now, taken together, these three lines of evidence are extremely damning. There is now only one other scenario that fits the evidence, and it hugely fails Occam's Razor. It was proposed in a book I read recently by Jeff Wise. Its scenario is that the two Ukrainian nationals aboard MH370 were Russian agents disguised as scuba divers, who used their carry-on oxygen tanks to stay alive while commandeering the plane via its. The agent inside the electronics control center turned off oxygen to the cockpit and decompressed the plane, resulting in the deaths of the flight crew. He then not only reprogrammed the autopilot, but tampered with the ACARS signal in such a way as to send a false signal that the plane was headed south, when in fact it was headed northeast, toward the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakstan--which it reached after several hours, at the end of its fuel endurance, having evaded the military radars of several more countries along the way. To compound the difficulty of this scenario, the Russians would then have had to dispose of all the crew and passengers' bodies, and part out the plane so they could then dump pieces of it at an appropriate location in the Southern Indian Ocean--where submarines would have had to broadcast phony pings from the plane's black boxes. Jeff Wise didn't have a convincing reason why Russia would go to all this work, and all evidence that has come to light since his book came out has made his scenario less and less likely.

I'm going to go with the pilot-suicide theory, and note that the overwhelming majority of deaths attributed to pilot suicide--not even including the 9/11 flights--resulted from Muslim pilots flying their planes into the ocean. Now that it's so easy for a pilot to fly his plane into the sea, this is what I would recommend: Putting a device outside the cockpit by which cabin crew can communicate directly with authorities, and rolling back regulations that make the airline cockpit such an impenetrable fortress, so that non-suicidal crew members can not only report the attempted murder-suicide, but actually do something to thwart it. In the meantime, you may want to avoid flying with certain flag carriers.

Update 2019: The Atlantic wraps up the story with all the available evidence compiled to date, especially the flotsam being found wherever Gibson looks for it.

At the sound of the trumpet

"So the Spirit of the LORD took control of Gideon, who blew a trumpet, mustering the descendants of Abiezer to follow him into battle." --Judges 6:34 ISV

I don't follow World Net Daily news much anymore, having been burned a few too many times by their sensationalist approach to journalism. But I never dismiss any news out of hand due solely to the source, and this particular piece really caught my attention today.

In my coverage of mysterious air crashes, I keep running across the theory that a person could be pre-programmed to fly a plane into the ocean; it's about the least conspiratorial theory to account for several spectacular crashes in the past couple of decades. In this particular story, though--based on an eyewitness account now verified through the power of the internet--a trumpet was sounded to incited normally peaceable people to murderous violence.

“They were very hospitable and would invite you in,” she said. “But, if a distant signal was given – it sounded something like a trumpet – then they would instantly change, and would attempt to harm you. Yet if the signal sounded again, they would immediately switch back to normal.” 

It's the 100th anniversary of the beginning of the Armenian Genocide. What other lessons could we--should we--learn from this event?

This week also marked the passage of a man who passed on to me, as he received it from the lips of a man who experienced it, unpublished information on the Battle of Shiloh (which he still referred to as the Battle of Shiloh Church). He may have been the last living person who was only one link removed from a first-hand account of a Civil War battle and its aftermath, which goes to show that it can often take over 100 years for the history of a war, or even a battle, to finish being written.

Germanwings Flight 9525: The Religious Connection

Inasmuch as I have become a source for research on air disasters, I'm compelled to write about the most recent no-survivors air transport crash. As soon as I heard that the plane descended smoothly into the side of the Alps in clear weather, my only response was, "Islamic pilot." I listened over the next few days to hear the name of the pilot, but when it was finally released, along with the information that the pilot had been locked out of the cockpit (an ironic unintended consequence to post-911 security), the name was not Islamic after all. It appears that mental illness, not religious duty, led the copilot to commit mass suicide.

Indeed, there could be an element of mental illness in all recent mass suicide air disasters. Carrying a parachute could have saved a life in many of these cases, but banning passengers from using cell phones aloft has, in another unintended consequence, limited what can be learned from them.

Apparently the main reason for limiting the use of electronic equipment aboard a cruising airliner is due to their potential drain on the plane's wifi bandwidth--as if a simple cell phone or laptop would be capable of doing such a thing.

Getting back to copilot Andreas Lubitz:  It turns out that his outwardly happy life wasn't so happy after all: his girlfriend, whom he intended to marry, had broken off the relationship. This makes this tragedy another unintended consequence of the decriminalization of adultery: adulterers no longer face the death penalty--but, if they are pilots, their passengers face death all the same.

The Weather Channel Joins the Conspiracy

Checking the weather this morning of December 20, 2014, I saw an ad for a video clip called "Mystery of John F. Kennedy's Plane Crash Solved?" and, of course, watched it.

Incredibly, the video text itself made no claim whatsoever to have any new information on the 15-year-old crash. In other words, there was no news--just a lot of lies: JKF Jr. didn't have his instrument rating, therefore, 'when other planes remained grounded,' he took off in the growing haze to the doom of 'all three on board' after the advice of an unnamed onscreen expert to 'get more training before flying solo' "fell on deaf ears."

It's amazing how many boldface lies can make it into a single video minute. As a pilot, I know that flying on instruments is part of basic flight school. If you can't fly through haze without 'spiraling out of control,' you're never even going to get your private license. And the video shot of 'all the other planes that remained grounded?' Well, 'remaining grounded' is another way of saying 'parked at the airport,' and that's what the majority of private planes spend the majority of their time doing, regardless of the weather.

Now, it's true that JFK did not yet have his instrument rating--just as my adult daughter does not yet have a driver's license. Big deal; she has been driving for years, but has to clear so many legal hurdles to be able to 'drive solo,' the paperwork has yet to catch up with the reality of her being a capable, experienced driver.

Thus with JFK Jr. He had all of the training, most of the experience, and almost all of the paperwork needed to be a full-fledged instrument-rated pilot. No way was he still at the level where he would go into a spin at 2500 feet while on approach to a lighted runway; instrument-rated pilots have to be able to safely navigate within 100 feet of the ground without being able to see it. But he still used an instructor every time he flew in unfamiliar conditions.

So, the video hits all the talking points of the original cover-up, whilst ignoring the salient fact that rescuers were intentionally misdirected for an entire day:
1. JFK Jr. was not competent to make that flight (he was).
2. He was warned not to fly solo in hazy conditions (he never flew solo in hazy conditions).
3. The plane spiraled out of control (the plane's engine was turned off and it was flown into the sea).
4. There were three on board (the fourth person on board was removed by a covert dive team, seat and all).

Why, Weather Channel? Why?

The Sad Fate of Flight Three Seventy

I've written before about airplanes that fly into the sea, and the various reasons why this might happen. Which brings us to what may well be my final post on the fate of Flight Three Seventy.

I just ran across one theory, which doesn't seem like it would hold much water: The Electronic Fog. I quote:

The first indication the airliner may have been in trouble is when the co-pilot signed off from Malaysian air traffic control. He said �all right good night 370.� Normally he would say something like �Malaysian 370 contacting Viet Nam at 128.4 thank you goodnight.� Maybe the electronic fog had just attached itself to the aircraft so he cut the procedure short. They never contacted Viet Nam airspace and strange things started happening immediately after that last call. The fog can disable the radios. The Boeing 777 has a glass panel cockpit. All the panels could have turned off and turned blank. The pilots would have no idea of their exact heading because even the whisky compass would be spinning. They would have to rely on their mechanical backup instruments to maintain control. They are the altimeter, the airspeed indicator and the attitude indicator.

They made about a 120 degree turn to the left, apparently trying to aim for the nearest airport. It appears they went up higher trying to get above the fog and down lower trying to get below the fog but it did not detach. When the time came to the point where they should be able to identify the airport there was no visibility. They made some more turns and that would have disoriented them to the point where they are not sure of their heading anymore. Many pilots that have been in the electronic fog that crashed, went through a series of turns then became spatially disoriented and ended up entering what is known as a graveyard spiral which always ends up in death.

They may have been able to control the autopilot but the heading would have to be controlled by their input. After going through a series of turns they would be becoming disoriented so they did something similar to Flight 19. They just continued until they ran out of fuel. Also like Flight 19 they unfortunately aimed for a remote location over the ocean where they may never be found.

I think a better supported theory is that of Marc Dugain:

Dugain, a well-respected French author, argues that the Boeing 777 carrying 239 people crashed near Diego Garcia, a British island in the middle of the Indian Ocean used as a strategic air force and intelligence base by the US military, in the six-page article in Paris Match.

The US has always officially denied that flight MH370 came anywhere near Diego Garcia.

The latest theory into the disappearance of Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 on March 9, 2014 has all the ingredients of a spy thriller and has grabbed the French public’s attention. The former boss of Proteus Airlines travelled to the neighbouring Maldives where residents told local media on March 9th that they had seen an airliner fly in the direction of Diego Garcia. Their claims were promptly dismissed by the authorities.

“I saw a huge plane fly over us at low altitude,” a fisherman on Kudahuvadhoo island told Dugain. “I saw red and blue stripes on a white background” – the colours of Malaysia Airlines. Other witnesses confirmed the sighting.

Dugain speculates – adding to the numerous other existing hypotheses about what happened to flight MH370 – that a modern aircraft such as Malaysia Airlines' Boeing 777 could have been hijacked by a hacker. “In 2006, Boeing patented a remote control system using a computer placed inside or outside the aircraft,” he noted. This technology lead Dugain to the idea of a “soft” remote hijacking. But the writer also suggests that a fire could have led the crew to deactivate electrical devices, including transmission systems.

Whatever the initial reasons for leaving its flight path, Dugain suspects that the plane then headed to Diego Garcia, where a number of scenarios may have played out – including the US Air Force shooting it down for fear of a September 11-style attack. Dugain met the mayor of neighbouring Baarah island, who showed him pictures of a strange device found on a beach two weeks after the plane had disappeared and before the Maldives military seized it. Two aviation experts and a local military officer concluded that the object was a Boeing fire extinguisher. Dugain points out that for the extinguisher to have floated, it must have been empty, having been automatically triggered by a fire. He adds that precedent exists in which fires on board aircraft caused all passengers and crew to die of asphyxiation, while the plane’s automated systems extinguished the blaze and kept it in the air.

Okay, so we have no direct evidence of an Electronic Fog, but we do have indirect evidence of a fire on board a Boeing aircraft--along with eyewitness testimony of just such an aircraft, bearing the Malaysian livery, being where it did not belong. We know that Diego Garcia is a strategically important air base, in the center of a very strictly enforced restricted zone. By the way, the rumour that Philip Wood was imprisoned there was a cruel hoax, and easily refuted. But no one, apparently, has tried to refute the eyewitness testimony and fire extinguisher, both of which place the airliner within shoot-down range of the Naval Air Facility.

This is what apparently happened: The US shot down the plane when it looked like it was on a suicide run toward the most important US base within a thousand miles. Unsure of what they had hit, government forces didn't say anything at first, but worked to misdirect the search effort long enough to make sure they had cleaned up the crash scene. Then, realizing they could sweep the whole operation under the rug, they kept up the cover-up to this day.

You can count on official disinformation whenever there is a cover-up, and here we have it. Taking a page from the Soviet's Flight 007 playbook, a US submersible faked a sonar ping from the airliner's black box, leading search efforts to concentrate thousands of miles from where the plane was actually shot down. Everything that came out of the US role in the 'search effort' was misinformation from that point on.

This still doesn't address the question of why Flight 370 was misdirected, but the fact that the pilot had practiced simulator landings on Diego Garcia, combined with his Islamic world view, shows a man with the method, means, and motivation to set back the US War on Terror for years to come.

If he really was targeting NAF DG, there's no reason why he shouldn't have been shot down; since 9/11, it is official USG policy to shoot down a passenger jet in such a scenario.  But why admit that they did, when it turned out to be so easy to leave everything a big mystery?

UPDATE FEBRUARY 2019:
Well, the search has been called off--critically, without EVER searching in what this 60 Minutes investigation says is the most likely final resting place of the plane.

Legislators laze, pilots perish

It is with great sadness that I read of this plane crash in Oregon today. Apparently one of the wings just fell off, causing the plane to fall out of the sky, killing both occupants. This sort of thing never happened twenty or thirty years ago, when small planes were manufactured by companies like Cessna, Piper, and Taylor. These mass-produced planes were simple to fly and incredibly airworthy. But none of these companies are in business today. Why? Every time a plane crashed due to pilot error, the manufacturer was held liable for the damages. Small plane manufacturers were sued out of existence. The result was fairly predictable--since the demand for small aircraft continues unabated, pilots have to fly their own homemade planes--a situation that has set general aviation back 100 years. Homemade planes were notorious for crashing then--and they are now. The blood of these pilots is on the hands of America's legislators, who sat on their hands while general aviation was being sued out of existence.

Flight 447: The conclusion

In my post last year regarding the crash of Flight 447, I asked five burning questions. But I only answered four:

I'll answer Question Number Five now, as Question Number Four will take a while.

It's taken a while all right, but I'm now ready to answer Question Four, "Could it have been caused by bad weather?"

I actually brought up the issue in my opening post:

. . . or perhaps had actually flown into the ocean in bad weather.

None of these things happen now.

No, as it appears, this is precisely what did happen--but it shouldn't have. Let me break the incident down into a chain of events, and we can perhaps see why, despite all the advances in technology that the Air France Airbus A330 represented, engineers had not yet succeeded in designing out the Human Factor that inevitably plays a part in every flight incident. Or, to put it another way, they had succeeded a bit too well-and still, yet not enough.

1. The Airbus 330 was designed with a computer-controlled flight system, that will only hand control back to the pilot in case of an extreme emergency. A crucial aspect of this system is that the fuel setting is adjusted directly by the computer, without any input from the hand throttle. This is unlike the cruise control of an automobile or even the computer controls of other aircraft, in which the throttle can be seen or felt to physically move as speed is adjusted.

2. Pilots being trained to fly the Airbus were never trained on the scenario of computer flight control failure due to loss of speed input. In such a case, standard operating procedure would call for controlling air speed by pitch and power alone.

3. In the weeks leading up to June 1, 2009, several incidents were reported of 300-series Airbus aircraft losing speed input due to Pitot Tube blockage. Airbus ordered modifications, and as of June 1, Air France had not yet finished implementing them on its Airbus fleet--particularly not on the plane flown on Flight 447. This was an Equipment Failure waiting to happen.

4. At 5700 miles, the Rio de Janieiro to Paris route was the longest nonstop distance regularly flown by a twin-engine aircraft--and most of it was over the Atlantic. Flight rules prohibiting a plane from flying on its fuel reserves meant that going around the 250-mile wide Intertropical Front that had developed on June 1, 2009 could burn up enough fuel to require the pilot to land and refuel short of his destination--adding time and expense to the trip when he actually had enough fuel on board to make it. Knowing this would put pressure on a pilot to seek a way through, rather than around, the Front. Thus the Economic Factor enters the picture.

5. As Flight 447 approached the Front, a small storm between the plane and the Front could have blocked the pilot's weather radar from picking up the huge storm behind it. Changing the sensitivity setting on the radar could have overcome the problem, but it doesn't appear that this was done. The First Thing had gone wrong, and there was a Human Factor compounding it.

6. As Flight 447 entered the thunderstorm, it encountered turbulence. Standard procedure in such a situation is to cut power to slow the aircraft. At 35,000 feet, the air is so thin that only a slight power reduction is safe. Too much, and the wings will lose lift. Since the computer was flying the plane, the pilot dialed in a lower power setting; the hand throttle remained in its previous position. So far so good, but the Design Factor has now entered the picture, and it will take only a small Human Error to cause further complications. As it turns out, Airbus Pilots will be shown to have been generally inattentive to speed settings during flight incidents involving Pitot Tube failure. The Oversight Factor had just added to the complications, and the Flight Incident hadn't even quite begun.

7. The Air France pilots must have been aware that they were entering a major thunderstorm, but at over 500 miles an hour, they were entering it, controlled by the flight computer, at a rate of a mile every seven seconds. Downdrafts of up to 100 feet per second, coupled with instant icing by supercooled water, meant that at the very instant the Pitot Tubes froze over and loss of airspeed indication shut down the autopilot, the pilots would have had to scramble to gain control the aircraft. Flight 447 was now experiencing a Flight Incident caused by Severe Weather, and the Training Factor had just kicked in. Everything would go downhill from there.

8. The pilots then attempted to control the plane by pitch and power, but apparently forgot that the computer had already slowed the plane. The static tube had probably also frozen over at this point, leaving them with no altitude indicator short of ground-proximity radar. Training deficiencies, Design deficiencies, and inadequate Oversight now combined to take the aircraft into a stall--a maneuver in which a plane can lose half its altitude in just a few seconds. Pilots don't ever get to actually practice stalls on their expensive airplanes, especially not at night with no horizon visible. If the pilot was able to pull out of the stall in time, he apparently over-corrected, pulling the plane up into another stall, but this time too close to the surface to have room to recover. As the plane pulled out of this second stall, it ran out of airspace and hit the surface of the Atlantic. Indeed, Air France Flight 447 flew into the ocean in bad weather.

It all comes down to the human factor. An ex-fighter pilot, used to stick-and-rudder flying at a wide range of speeds and attitudes, probably could have flown the aircraft through the storm and safely out the other side, regardless of equipment failures. But a pair of air transport pilots, used to letting the computer fly the plane from just after takeoff to just before landing, weren't up to the job. When the Pitot Tubes failed, causing the flight control computers to fail, they were the last point of defense for Flight 447's 228 passengers and crew. And when they failed, everybody died.

UPDATE MARCH 11, 2014
I'm getting a lot of hits to this page, presumably from people looking for background information on the fate of Malaysian Airlines Flight  370. This is an even more curious case, as the Boeing 777 appears to have fallen out of a clear blue sky. My taken on the question is that it was blown up; I can't think of any other explanation. Whether it was by a missile, or an on-board explosion, time will tell; the information being released now isn't enough to go on.
There is yet one other possibility, far more chilling: that nothing will be found of Flight 370. It is explored here.
UPDATE JULY 2, 2014
For my post of Flight 370, see here. It was apparently flown into the sea at stall speed, allowing it to sink slowly to the bottom in such a way that the wreckage will not be found for years.

Flight 447: Answering the Questions

As anyone who was following the news on June 1, 2009 knows, Air France Flight 447 turned up missing in the mid-Atlantic en route from Rio to Paris. I'm opening up this post now, on June 3, as reports come in that the crash site has been located and recovery units are headed to the scene. I'll continue to visit this situation and add more information as the situation develops. I intend to address the following questions:

1) Is this the greatest air disaster in history?

2) Could there be any survivors?

3) Could it have been a terrorist attack?

4) Could it have been caused by bad weather?

5) Will the cockpit data recorders give any clues as to the cause of the crash?


First, I'd like to comment on the phrase now being used, "Lost over the Atlantic."

Despite the settled claim the wording has in the English language, Flight 447 was never "lost over the Atlantic." This well-turned phrase hearkens back to the early days of Lindbergh and Balchen, when planes took off from one coast, not to be heard from until they reached the other. If they didn't show up, they were "lost over the Atlantic," which could mean that they got off course and landed somewhere else, ran out of fuel and had to ditch, or perhaps had actually flown into the ocean in bad weather.

None of these things happen now. Both pilots and air controllers know within a few miles where a commercial airplane is at any moment. Yes, pilots sometimes divert from their course to get around a thunderstorm, but they always let the controllers know what they are doing. A quarter of an hour before Flight 447 broke up in midair, the pilot sent a signal back to Brazil that he was flying into a thundercloud. It was clear after the burst of automatic signals had reached Paris that Flight 447 was lost--not over, but in, the Atlantic. And it is in the Atlantic that searchers have been looking for the wreckage; first on the surface, and eventually at the bottom.

Now on to Question Number One.

Although this is the worst air disaster in Air France's history, there have been several airplane crashes with far greater loss of life, beginning with the Tenerife disaster, when KLM Flight 4805 flew into Pan Am Flight 1736 on takeoff, killing all 248 aboard the KLM 747 and 335 on the Pan Am plane. The deaths can be indirectly blamed on a terrorist attack; both planes had landed at the inadequate Tenerife runway after a small explosion in the terminal of the Las Palmas airport rendered it temporarily off-limits to incoming flights. Most of the other nine reasons for the crash were due to technology limitations and the human factor, along with a fear of violating Dutch overtime laws.

The second worse airplane crash ever took 520 lives aboard Japan Air Lines Flight 123 on August 12, 1985. This was, at the time, the deadliest crash ever, and the number of fatalities in a single airplane has never been exceeded, and probably never will be; few planes ever take off that heavily loaded. The 747 on a domestic run had just reached cruising altitude after takeoff from Tokyo when the rupture of a faultily repaired aft bulkhead, damaged in a hard landing seven years earlier, drained the hydraulic system, rendering the jet almost uncontrollable. After a 32-minute struggle to gain control of the plane, the flight crew brought it down so low that it hit one of the foothills of Mt. Fuji. The maintenance supervisor responsible for signing off on the plane's airworthiness later committed suicide--the 521st fatality from the crash.

What's amazing is that even though the airplane clipped the side of a mountain, flipped over, and landed on its back at hundreds of miles an hour, not everyone died. It's unknown for sure how many survived the impact--one survivor landed in a tree--but by the time rescuers finally got around to making their way to the crash site, they only found four survivors, and evidence that many more had died of their injuries overnight while awaiting rescue.

The single worst terrorist-caused air disaster was on June 23, 1985, when a suitcase bomb blew up Air India Flight 182 between Montreal and London. The 747 fell out of the sky into 2,000 meters of water 120 miles off the Irish coast, killing all 329 aboard--more than died aboard all three hijacked airplanes on 9/11. Subsequent medical examination of the bodies showed that some had died of drowning, indicating that they were still breathing when their bodies hit the water after a drop of 31,000 feet.

So the first question is not hard to answer--this isn't the worst air disaster in history; it doesn't even make the top ten. It's not the most people to die when an airplane broke up on or over the ocean; it's not even the most for a 2-engine airplane, although all but one of the top 10 (an Airbus 300 shot down over the Persian Gulf in 1988) involved 3- or 4-engine aircraft.

This will amaze most of my readers, but they probably haven't even heard about any of the last ten major air disasters, in each of which an average of 163 people died--more than three times the combined air and ground casualties of Continental Connection Flight 3407. Count on it, unless at least one American citizen is killed in an air crash--any air crash--it generally doesn't even rate Page Two coverage.

Moving on to Question Number Two, we can learn some lessons from the worst air disasters: first of all, that an airplane certified as airworthy can carry a hidden factor just waiting to blow it out of the sky--whether that factor be a bomb or a bungled repair job. Secondly, that it's possible to survive being blown out of the sky, but continued survival is contingent upon quick rescue. This is why forces from three countries converged on the area so quickly on June first. But by the time any of them reached the scene, it would have already been too late. Anyone still alive after the plane broke apart was most likely dead by the time the sun rose on Flight 447's fuel slick.

Here's what the people on the plane had to survive, just to reach the storm-tossed surface of the mid-Atlantic [but see second update]:

1) Rapid decompression at 35,000 feet would have popped numerous blood vessels in their eyes and noses. Their hands would have swollen so fast, it's unlikely anyone could have released a seatbelt until they reached lower altitudes. And the captain would certainly have required everyone to be buckled before he took the plane into a thundercloud.
2) Temperatures about 40 degrees below zero would have caused almost instant frostbite.
3) The shock of deceleration from 520 miles an hour would have broken limbs like matchsticks.
4) Pieces of wreckage would have filled the air, with potential extreme trauma injuries.

Even if they survived the shock of hitting the water, they would have penetrated so deeply before resurfacing that their traumatized lungs would probably have filled with water.

There is one very real possibility, though, that the tremendous updrafts associated with the thundercloud that brought down Flight 447 may have contributed to the temporary survival of some passengers. In 1971, several passengers survived the crash of LANSA Airlines Flight 508 when it blew apart in a thunderstorm over the Peruvian jungle. They were still buckled in their seats when they hit the ground, and it is thought that their fall was greatly slowed by updrafts. We'll come back to Flight 508 later.

So if any passengers of Flight 447 did survive the breakup, they would have to have remained buckled in an intact portion of the aircraft, thus being sheltered from the wind and cold as their piece of the airplane descended; assumed a braced position before hitting the water; and managed to swim to the surface before their seat sank to the bottom. It's almost inconceivable, though, that they didn't have enough injuries by then to attract sharks to their bleeding bodies before daybreak brought with it some hope of rescue.

Moving on to the question of a terrorist attack: I can guarantee that France's investigation will conclude that anything else caused Flight 447 to fall out of the sky before they admit that a terrorist bomb did it. And I won't say why. Just oogle the following search terms and you may come to the same conclusion:
Flight 800 shot
Flight 587 flat

But regardless of what the official report ends up saying, I don't believe that a terrorist bomb brought down Flight 447. For one thing, there's a reason why this is Air France's worst air disaster ever: terrorists don't target French airlines. Even Richard Reid, flying out of Paris, chose an American Airlines flight on which to detonate his shoe bomb. Terrorists target airlines like American, TWA, and Pan Am (the last two of which having gone out of business in the wake of their air disasters). A flight from Rio to Paris just wouldn't be on anyone's target list.

Secondly, the timing was too coincidental. A bomb does not just happen to go off--or a meteor strike--just after a plane enters an area of tremendous turbulence and electrical activity. Wings do fall off, and fly-by-wire systems do fail, however, in exactly such circumstances.

I'll answer Question Number Five now, as Question Number Four will take a while.

No doubt the cockpit data recorders will give some clues as to the cause of the crash, but we already have most of the information needed to find out what caused the crash, and it's unlikely that the data recorders will tell us much we don't already know. Voice recordings have shown to be notoriously deficient in explaining what went on in the final seconds of a flight that ended in disaster; you won't generally hear things like, "Oh, there goes the right wing" or "why isn't this @#% thing working?" Pilots in an air disaster are concentrating on keeping the plane under control, not on describing what's going wrong.

The Data Recorder won't tell us how fast the updraft was; how much the wind shear was; whether it was a negative or positive lightning strike; how many gallons per minute of water the engines were taking in; or even how fast the plane was flying, inasmuch as the information we already have gives two conflicting readings.

And this leads us right into the Fourth Question.

You see, part of the contributing factors to this crash, as well as many or most others, was a strange combination of old and new technology. Airplane designers have to decide whether they want the pilot or the computer to fly the plane, because a disagreement between the two often ends in disaster. The aircraft used in Flight 447 was an Airbus A330, which employs a state-of-the-art computer system that is capable of taking over from the pilot when it perceives he isn't flying the plane correctly. Only when all else fails does it turn control back over to the pilot. Yet the instrument feeding airspeed information into the computer was a Pitot tube, an invention that pre-dates the airplane itself and has remained relatively unchanged for over 150 years. The only modification of note is that after it was found to ice up at only a few thousand feet of elevation, an electric heater was added to keep its intake clear of ice. This small heater seems to have proven inadequate to handle the extreme icing conditions possible in a mid-Atlantic tropical thundercloud. Despite this, pilots are given no training on how to recognize, much less respond to, this deadly condition.

As well as the Global Positioning System technology has proved at identifying the location of an aircraft in mid ocean, it has not been approved for use in identifying the rate of change in location, commonly referred to as speed. And had the A330's radar screen been allowed to instead display an online satellite image, it's highly unlikely that the flight crew would have flown into the 100 mph updrafts that were only visible on the latter. Once again, state-of-the-art flight systems are shown to have limitations that are as much legislative as technological in nature.

June 8, 2009
I'm closing out this post today. Many bodies have been recovered, at tremendous expense. Per capita, I don't doubt the three governments will have spent more than the US did on weregild for 9/11 by the time this is all over. Obviously changes in procedures for transoceanic flights will result in the aftermath; see the link in the post title for some suggestions.

The fact that the bodies were found 45 miles farther down the track suggests that the computers on board the Airbus had pushed the craft to an unsustainable speed following faulty input from the frozen pitot tubes. For sure this will be changed, as this has happened before and will happen again if modern technology is not brought to bear on a 200 year old invention.

Having addressed these questions to the best of my ability, I will now leave the discussion to others.

And now I can start posting about something else again.

FIRST UPDATE April 2012
Well, it's been 10 months since the cockpit and data recorders were found, but the official report still hasn't been issued. Suffice it to say that there won't be a whole lot to add once it is. Flight 447 really was flown into the ocean, for the simple reason that the pilot kept the plane nose-up, at too high of an angle to sustain altitude, from 38,000 feet all the way down to sea level. He did this because the planes' computer was programmed in such a way that every time he lowered the nose, a warning sounded alerting him that the nose was too high. But when he raised the nose again, the alarm went silent. The flight crew, all during their 3 minutes of rapid descent, were being bombarded with frequent and often conflicting computer-generated warnings. The most effective way of dealing with them all appeared to be exactly what was done: flying the aircraft into the sea.

It has been said that all safety regulations are written in blood--the blood of those whose deaths showed the need for them. Inasmuch as aircraft engineers will now take a more human-centered approach to how a plane is flown in crisis situations, they both ensure that the passengers of Flight 477 did not die in vain, and show once more that in a crisis with massive equipment failure, no control system designed by the human brain has ever managed to improve on the human brain itself.

SECOND UPDATE June 2013
Looking back over this post, I see that I had given a scenario in which the plane fell apart at altitude. This clearly did not happen; passengers would have ridden in relative comfort all the way to the water's surface. However, the scenario in the cockpit is chilling in its resemblance to what happened in the final minute of Flight 3407's approach to Buffalo: amidst much confusion, as a stall warning horn broke the pilot out of his autopilot-induced lassitude, he gave the opposite control input needed to keep the plane in the air. Tragically, at the time Flight 447 went down, the "Lessons Learned" from Flight 3407 were yet to be published. The changes in aviation policy that have resulted from these closely related disasters could mean that from now on, pilots will finally be able to resist the urge to pull up on the stick when in a free fall at low airspeed due to icing.

THIRD UPDATE August 2013
I see that I was going to say more on the crash of Flight 508. I can't remember now what it was, although I have since learned that it set the task of Bible Translation in the Western Amazon Basin back by several months or years. Finally, it appears that the only thing that saved any of the passengers and crew on Asiana Airlines Flight 214 was a willingness of the pilot to take over from the computer before it flew the airplane into the ground. Unfortunately for those who were hurt in the crash, he was too late in taking over to completely prevent the plane from hitting a sea wall at the end of the runway.

FOURTH UPDATE March 2013
For those searching on information regarding Malaysian Airlines Flight 370, follow the links from this update.

FIFTH UPDATE December 2014
Whenever there is an air disaster, this page draws a lot of viewers. So I suppose I should briefly say something about Asia Air Flight 8501.
As with all breaking news stories, we are being fed a lot of disinformation. There were 40 bodies found. No, seven. No, six. Well, two were brought back to land. One was wearing a life jacket. No, it wasn't. And so on. About all I can say with confidence at this point, two days after the crash is:
1. It was weather-related. The plane, like Flight 447, was flying into a thunderstorm.
2. I'm sure that the altimeter problem on this Airbus had been fixed, but there was still the computer vs. pilot problem, and this being a cut-rate airline, I'm afraid the pilot wasn't up to the challenge.
3. There were no survivors.

Among the interesting bits of trivia, this flight having originated in an officially Muslim country:
1. Most of the passengers were Christian Indonesians.
2. Among the passengers was a family of Korean missionaries to Indonesia.
3. Despite there being no Americans on board, this disaster made front-page news in America.

SIXTH UPDATE May 21, 2016
With the demise of Egyptair Flight 804, we are getting used to the scenario of conflicting reports emerging from a search-and-rescue mission. What I should point out in relation to this is that search teams ALWAYS find debris in the area of a downed aircraft, for the simple reason that the ocean is full of it. Initial reports of crash-related debris are therefore almost always followed up by a retraction. 

SEVENTH UPDATE: an historical account of the crash