Air Mystery

By now most people would have heard about the disappearance of Air France flight 447 en route from Rio de Janerio to Paris this past weekend. Since the disappearance of the plane a search has been ongoing yet the fact that the plane was in radio contact (not radar contact) has hampered search efforts. Although the flight's path was more or less pre-determined, the plane was beyond the radar range of South American radar networks as well as those on the West African coastlines. It's a narrow window when one thinks about it but it's still hundreds of miles across through a zone in the ocean where air and ocean currents from the northern and southern hemispheres collide and often result in major storms that can and do create thunderstorms that can go as high as 52,000 feet (well beyond the range of most commercial airlines to fly above).

Reports indicate that the plane's computer reported automatically to the Airbus maintenance shops that there was a sudden loss in electrical power followed shortly thereafter with a loss in cabin pressure. Now these two reports together don't provide definitive proof of what may have befallen the aircraft yet it points out that there are still many mysteries to be solved with the disappearance of this plane. Some experts already appear to be downplaying hope by pointing out that the vastness of the ocean, the uncertainty of the plane's position when it may have gone down and a variety of other unknowns will make it very difficult to find (if ever) what exactly happened to the plane and it's 228 occupants.

The media however is already ripe with speculation and theories based on countless interviews with 'aviation experts' and other subject matter specialists. And already you can see that Air France, Airbus, General Electric and anyone else with any association with plane are in full defensive mode and a lot of it has to do with pointing the finger and wanting to blame someone for what has happened. Recall several months ago when the U.S. Airways flight performed an emergency landing in the Hudson, suddenly the number of hours a pilot has flown and their technical expertise is what came into the picture as being a vital factor in determining whether or not a plane would survive a calamity. In subsequent incidents involving planes then one of the first statistics that the media would clamp on was who the pilot was and how many hours of flying time they had.

Even now Air France has started providing info on the pilot that explains how many hours of flight time he had. There are stats on how old the plane was (to mitigate accusations of old equipment being the cause) along with stats on when the last maintenance period was (again to avoid accusations of what shoddy condition the plane was in). General Electric (who supplies the engines) has been providing statements about how reliable these latest engines are and how they can survive a general lightning strike. And there is what all signs seem to be pointing to; that a lightning strike hit the plane and caused the electrical systems to fail on the plane resulting in an assumed emergency that led to the disappearance of the plane.

Now as much as there is truth in the stats that lightning strikes are rare, when you are in the air there is not much else that will attract lightning in a storm as much as a metal airplane. That's not to say that that's the definitive proof that a storm is what brought the plane down but it is possible. With a plane that is largely controled by electronics and a 'fly-by-wire' system (which basically means the controls are moved and the computer then translates those moves into the corresponding control surfaces as appropriate) which can be affected by electrical surges, it is possible that this caused the plane to come down. Yet until some trace is found, there will be no way to know for sure. In the meantime, I'm sure the media will continue looking to pin the blame the way kids play pin the tail on the donkey.