Another Bus Down

[schlamm]

The vast majority of commercial flights are over land in the U.S. which is also why no ELT is required, they are required to stick to the established air routes, have an active transponder and be handed off from one jurisdiction's airspace to the neighboring one. You wouldn't need fancy stuff to watch your dog in the back yard either if someone was in every window and required that the dog check in with them.
Over water flights are a little different with regard to the MEL (minimum equipment list), life rafts and engine out flight while maintaining altitude.
As for the rest of the world, good luck in getting the carriers to agree on a single governing board that would monitor the flights and what equipment would be used to do so....only flights with destinations in the U.S. are required to have a MEL meeting the U.S. requirements

[kham]

Now that the Caliphate News Network has moved on to gurgle about other retardations, they tend to ignore the 'realworld'...

All that SAR n stuff so boring, likewise salvage ops and fighting shitty weather, murky water, strong ocean currents and masses of tangled wreckage --- but couple days ago the folks actually doing the work recovered both the CVR and DFDR. So the odds of figuring this one out just shot way up


I'm no air crash investigator, but that's remarkably intact from a fall from 38,000 feet

[Mynock]

Maybe tried to belly land it and screwed up? Most water landings I've seen/read about don't end as well as the one on the Hudson. Plane usually ends up cartwheeling and throwing pieces of itself off in every direction.

[kham]

Most drivers aren't Sully either, but the heads over at AvHerald some suggesting the fuse fractured at wing trailing edge, suggests a nose-high water impact, so you might be right. Need more imaging, the port wing isnt visible, so it might have been torn off. Also, the vertical stab was sheared off and found in a different location. LOC from encounter with weather/upset, Airbus Industrie strikes again same as in Queens Oct 2001 and you got something thats unrecoverable?
The boxes should tell

[DangerGirl]

The vast majority of commercial flights are over land in the U.S. which is also why no ELT is required, they are required to stick to the established air routes, have an active transponder and be handed off from one jurisdiction's airspace to the neighboring one. You wouldn't need fancy stuff to watch your dog in the back yard either if someone was in every window and required that the dog check in with them.
Over water flights are a little different with regard to the MEL (minimum equipment list), life rafts and engine out flight while maintaining altitude.
As for the rest of the world, good luck in getting the carriers to agree on a single governing board that would monitor the flights and what equipment would be used to do so....only flights with destinations in the U.S. are required to have a MEL meeting the U.S. requirements

The thing is, even with the newer 406 MHz EPIRBs, the signal is so degraded when underwater that the thing is next to useless when a plane goes down at sea. The aircraft would need to release a free-floating transmitter (which they don't carry) in order to get a really usable signal out.

[nachtjaeger]

Vertical stabilizer sheared off, and found separate from the rest of the wreck? Hmm. . . Maybe the collided with something- swamp gas, the planet Venus, the moon seen through clouds, a weather balloon- that sort of thing.

All kidding aside, the realization that a modern airliner can't survive a thunderstorm any better than a 1930s Airship is terrifying.

Question for you pilots: If you were flying a long overwater route on a regular basis, would you feel safer flying something like a modern version of the "Pan Am Clipper" flying boats?

[Mynock]

I think I heard it mentioned that it was monsoon season over there, so to be fair this was probably pretty major weather. Survivability also depends, again, on the skill of the pilot. I keep going back to that because just about every news article I read on this mentions that the airline was growing very fast and was on a hiring spree. If you give an inexperienced pilot a hard to fly airplane and then make them to fly through serious weather you're asking for a disaster.

[kham]

Myn, information I have seen suggests the Pilot was fairly experienced, not sure about the Copilot. Until hear the CVR, you won't know who was the Pilot Flying (PF) Jethead over on his blog makes a couple good points, about flying near or in weather; especially regarding how small the flight envelope can shrink to

adi-2.jpg

The upper and lower limits are clearly defined. He mentions the mach tuck phenomenon, which if you aren't on the ball, can result in a situation where recovery is impossible in a matter of seconds. Sitting there pushing buttons with your peanuts and coke, definitely would be a bad day

[kham]

Here's another ADI shot at high altitude; the envelope shrinks down to a rather narrow band