Arfa Daily wrote:
Seems that today, an Air France Airbus A330 en route from Rio to Paris
with
238 people on board, has gone down without warning over the Atlantic. Hard
to see what the pilot might have done wrong with the thing at 38000 ft in
the cruise ...

Apparently, it disappeared off African trans-atlantic ATC radar, at around
3am, our time.

This is not instilling a lot of confidence in me, regarding flying on one
of
these things in October, instead of my usual Boeing ... :-|

Electrical and turbulence problems reported. Aircraft was sending
distress signals so it may have made a decent ditch. Air France's last
air disaster was the Concorde in 2000.

I've flown the 320-100 several times and the Mulhouse crash never
entered my mind. We actually had a 5 hour delay one time after a
hydraulic pump failed on the ground and had to be replaced.

I wouldn't worry about the 330 considering the number of those things
in the air at any given time and it's wonderful track record.

Yeah, I know what you're saying. It just bothers me a little that on say a
747, the driver has got a triple redundancy control system which
hydraulically links his yoke and pedals directly to the control surfaces,
and a robot driver that can be thoroughly switched off, such that in an
unusual set of circumstances, a quick-thinking and experienced guy sitting
behind those controls, might be able to recover a potentially catastrophic
situation by thinking outside the box, and doing something which maybe puts
the airframe outside of the 'safe' envelope. From what I can understand of
the FBW systems, they are never going to allow you to do this, and in the
event of a total electrical systems collapse, your little joystick, and the
computer(s) that it's connected to, are not going to be of any use to
control the aircraft, anyway.

My pilot friend rang me yesterday when all this was going down (honestly, no
pun intended). He felt that there had to be more to it than just flying into
a storm. He says that in general, if lightning hits an aluminium-bodied
plane, it tends to pass around the outside, and re-discharge and carry on
its way from the opposite side or wherever. He questioned whether the same
would happen on a carbon composite bodied plane, as the A330 apparently is,
or whether the higher electrical resistance of such a material, would cause
the lightning to 'stick around' as it were, and just fry the internal
systems, or even heat the material to the point where it just exploded. He
reckons that unless there was an absolutely catastrophic failure of the
airframe, a distress signal should have been able to be broadcast almost all
the way down, as the last voice transmitter is battery powered to ensure
that it can still operate, even in the event of a catastrophic electrical or
systems failure. Sobering thoughts ...

From reading the boards, it appears that, rather than flowing arond the
outside of the aircraft, lightning is more inclined to punch holes right
through composite skins, thereby getting into the metalwork and wiring.

Ron(UK)