Anatomy of a plane crash- What happened to Air France 447

[n2doc]

By Jeff Wise
Published in the December 2009 issue.

Seven miles above the empty expanse of the South Atlantic Ocean, on May 31, 2009, an Air France A330 passenger jet cut through the midnight darkness. The plane had taken off 3 hours earlier, climbing from Rio de Janeiro on a northeast heading, its navigation computers hewing to a great-circle route that would take the flight 5680 miles to Paris.

At 10:35 pm local time, one of the co-pilots on the flight deck radioed Atlantico Area Control Center in Recife, Brazil, and announced that the plane had just reached a navigation waypoint called INTOL, situated 350 miles off the Brazilian coast. The waypoint lay just shy of the Intertropical Convergence Zone, a meteorological region along the equator famous for intense thunderstorms. Staff at Atlantico acknowledged the transmission and received the airplane’s reply: “Air France Four Four Seven, thank you.”

It was the second time within the past 12 hours that the jet, F-GZCP, had crossed this stretch of ocean, having flown the Paris-to-Rio leg with only 2 hours to refuel and load passengers before departing again. Such was the lot of the four-year-old long-haul plane: a repeated cycle of flight and turnaround, as rhythmic and uneventful as the phases of the moon. But the routine was about to be broken.

After receiving AF 447’s transmission, Atlantico asked for the estimated time it would take the aircraft to reach the TASIL waypoint, which lies on the boundary of the Atlantico and the Dakar Oceanic control areas. At that point communication would pass from Brazil to Senegal. AF 447 did not reply. The controller asked again. Still, there was no reply. The controller asked a third and fourth time, then alerted other control centers about the lapse.

According to the flight plan filed by AF 447, the plane should have crossed into Dakar Oceanic at 11:20 pm, at which point the flight crew would have made radio contact with Dakar to confirm their position. They didn’t. They also failed to contact the Cape Verde controller, whose airspace they were supposed to enter at 12:43 am. As time went on, controllers along the aircraft’s route began to worry that the problem was more than just a communications breakdown.

more:

http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/air_space/4338827.html