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AF 447 fell so fast the oxygen masks did not deploy. Flight recorders in good shape.
Air France 447 fell so fast the oxygen masks did not have time to deploy. It looks like they will be able to get all the information from the flight recorders. Many bodies are still in fuselage but it is miles deep in the ocean and recovery is a very long process. (www.cnn.com) Más...Sort type: [Top] [Newest]
Great news to hear that the data has been recovered. Speaks very highly of modern engineering that something so essential to getting answers about this crash withstood some of the harshest conditions on Earth for 2 years.
I'm very anxious to hear the results of all of this. However, reading some other news sites and newspaper articles, it already seems like the French BEA is trying to pin it on the pilots. That's what I got from reading the articles anyhow and is purely an opinion based on the choice of words they used.
Oxygen masks don't deploy because the plane "falls fast". They don't deploy because the plane is falling. The deploy because there is a loss of cabin pressure. It has been established a long time ago that the aircraft was largely intact until it hit the water. Intact aircraft equals no loss of cabin pressure equals no masks deploying. Really dumb headline.
There are several factors involved here. Soon the facts will leak out and Airbus will, depending on the severity, correct the errors. There has to be some catastrophic series of events to put this plane in this position and to incapacitate the pilots at the same time.My questions is why did this get recovered so quickly after criminal charges were filed, yet not after the original loss? There is much more to this one than we know.
The parallel system for investigating crashes that is used in France (and elsewhere) invariably leads to early targeting of scapegoats for prosecution in the courts later. In the past, these targets have been named very publicly early in the investigation and then the "facts" are twisted to condemn them (e.g. the Concorde crash). Airbus and Air France are officially supported by the French government, so any guilt on the part of either one is going to make the government at least partially culpable. The pilots, on the other hand, are mere pawns and can't rebut any statements against them. The NTSB may be maddeningly objective and tight-lipped during the early stage of an investigation, but in the long run that is the best way to handle these accidents.
There are conflicting reports, on one hand they say that airplane hit the water largely intact but it came down so fast that the oxygen masks did not deploy but that implies that it was on a free fall easily passing Mach 1+ in which case it should have destroyed in mid air as the wings should have snapped away from the fuselage. If it plunged largely intact sort of gliding downwards giving enough time for the pilot to send out a Mayday call on 121.5 or whatever the new frequency is alerting other aircraft and the Sarsat system but he did not.