Air France 447 - Casting Doubt on Weather as Culprit (with video)
latimes.com: A sophisticated flight-control system that relies on electronic instruments and computers came under growing scrutiny Thursday as investigators tried to unravel the mysterious crash of an Air France Airbus 330 into the Atlantic.
A series of messages sent automatically by the jet moments before it plunged into the ocean late Sunday with 228 passengers and crew members aboard has raised speculation that the crash might have involved a malfunction of the automated system that flies the plane most of the time.
One of the messages reported that one of the plane's navigational control units had failed and that, almost simultaneously, the autopilot system had disengaged.
The sequence of events forced the crew of Flight 447 to fly the jet manually, a difficult task on an Airbus traveling at high altitude near its maximum speed, aviation experts said. Any significant change in airspeed could have caused the plane to lose lift or stability, both potentially deadly conditions.
Meanwhile, new analysis of the weather in the vicinity at the time of the crash appears to cast doubt on earlier reports that the plane encountered severe thunderstorms, lightning and wind gusts. Though there were storms, they were almost certainly less intense than those sometimes encountered above the United States, and lightning was at least 150 miles away, said Greg Forbes, severe-weather expert for the Weather Channel.
Forbes said an examination of weather data for Sunday, including satellite images, indicated updrafts of perhaps 20 mph, far from the initial reports of 100 mph.
"I wouldn't expect it to be enough to break apart the plane," Forbes said.
weather.com: Earlier this week, we talked about the lack of lightning where the plane began experiencing catastrophic malfunctions. Here's a repost of that data research.
NASA completed a study a few years ago concerning world lightning density.
The image below shows lightning flash density/time in units of flashes per square kilometer per year.
This count includes both cloud-to-ground but also in-cloud flashes.
As you can see in the map, there is little lightning flashes in the location of the tragedy; just roughly .2 to .4 flashes per square kilometer per year.
Meanwhile, even more doubt was placed on the lightning strike theory when the World-Wide Lightning Network (WWLLN) announced that they did not detect lightning anywhere near the suspected crash area for an hour or more on either side of the event.
The network may be as low as 20 percent efficient in detecting individual lightning strokes, but rarely misses a whole thunderstorm.
So, while there were tall clouds there in the Intertropical Convergence Zone, there is some question about how much lightning was present, if any, in those clouds where things began to go terribly wrong.
Furthermore, one more new graphic this time from a second lightning network called STARTNET.
Information is courtesy of Carlos Augusto Morales Rodriguez, Univ. of Sao Paolo.
The time with the CLOSEST lightning is shown below, with the closest stroke about 150-200 miles from the flight path.