Friday, June 12, 2009

AF447 - Dearly Beloved We Are Gathered...

Another airline "accident", Air France this time. Their Airbus A330-200 fell from the skies off the northeastern coast of Brazil with a loss of all 228 persons onboard. Lots of questions remain as the bodies are being pulled from the Atlantic and id'd thru DNA analysis. This occured on June 1st and the black boxes with their all important data are being sought from deep on the ocean floor. With luck they will be found, without luck we will have endless speculation about those last few minutes of the A330's career. Here's the WIKIPEDIA page on the "accident" (more about the quotes in a minute).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_447

I've been an aircraft fan for a long, long time after riding myself of my fer of flying obtained from US airlines during the 60's and 70's. I'm fascinated by them really and always have been. Accidents though are curious occurances as it seems things pile up one by one until it breaks the system of control and down she comes.
So "things" on THIS particular flight are quite a few. The frozen pitot tubes, the thunderstorm, the autopilot system itself, the radar coverage, the radio coverage, the pilots, Air France, Airbus Industries and probably a half dozen or so more.
It takes MORE than one thing to bring one down but it takes many things to put an airplane up there with warm, fragile human bodies on board and it always seems that something MUST happen to cause blood to flow before whatever criticality in the airplane system gets fixed. Why this last dubvious fact is a matter of money vs. threat and responsibility vs incompetence. At what levels? Oh, the builder certainly, the airline company, the maintenance organization, the pilots and maybe evn the flying public, dead men flying. Bean counters of all types and officialdom abound in the aircraft industry and efforts to keep down costs have shown time and time again to cost human lives, our lives, the flying publics and those on the ground or sea (in this case) that just might be under the damned thing when it comes a calling. Air France began a program to insure that 2 of the 3 pitot tubes were replaced with new, improved, guarenteed to never fail with me onboard ones on their fleet of A330's and A340s since they share the same pitot tubes. Nice...2 out of three...66%, not a bad fix but is it all the fix we want? Do you like your eggs cooked 66% right? Does your tire have 66% of it's air and that's ok with you? Is the ticket you paid for to GO aboard this aircraft cost but 66% of normal...a bargain huh? It might be. Of course there are reasons for this 2/3rd of a real fix,
it MIGHT not even be involved in what brought the plane down. Simple incompetence (Oh I know Pilots and their all powerful unions will scream at this statement) in light of terribly confusing checklists on speed arguments between the pilot and co-pilots systems. That alone, how much time does it take to correct a failure of incompetence? How rare is the failure? More incidents of this type have been forthcoming in the last few days, maybe more time should be spent in the flight simulator, but that would cost more money. Here's more about this problem:
A Similar situation:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austral_L%C3%ADneas_A%C3%A9reas_Flight_2553
About those pitot tubes:
http://tinyurl.com/npxy4d
A weather analysis:
http://www.weathergraphics.com/tim/af447/

"Air France ordered Pitot tubes replaced on the long-range Airbus planes on April 27 after pilots noted a loss of airspeed data in a few flights on Airbus A330 and A340 models, he said.

Those incidents were "not catastrophic" and planes with the old Pitots are considered airworthy, Gourgeon said."

Not a problem huh? Well these passengers and crew had BIG problems as they flew into that thunderstorm, how many bean counters in Air France corporate does it take to replace those pitot tubes...all of them? Yes, ALL of Them.