thedailybeast.com — Was it a lightning strike, an electrical failure, or violent turbulence? As possible debris of Air France 447 surfaced 600 miles off the coast of Brazil on Tuesday morning, The Daily Beast tracked down seven expert theories on the cause for the mysterious crash that killed all 228 on board.
Jun 3, 2009 View in Crawl 4
naieveJun 3, 2009
SOSUS was never built for rapid upgrades to make use of newer technology, and with the end of the Cold War received very little extra funding.Anyways the majority of SOSUS was focused on areas like the GIUK gap which Ruskies had to go through to get to open water. I'm not sure how much coverage they have down where this plane went out, but I'm guessing it's not that much.
ballisticxJun 3, 2009
Why has no one discussed positive lightning.Positive lightning strikes are much more powerful than normal strikes. They only account for 5% of the strikes on earth, but even modern planes are not designed with the voltage they output in mind. An average bolt of positive lightning carries a current of up to 300 kA (kiloamperes) (about ten times as much current as a bolt of negative lightning), transfers a charge of up to 300 coulombs, has a potential difference up to 1 gigavolt (one billion volts), and lasts for hundreds of milliseconds, with a discharge energy of up to 300 GJ (gigajoules) (a billion joules).
jimroobJun 3, 2009
Electrical failure... Hmmm... On the FIRST ROHS COMPLIANT AIRCRAFT?!?!? No lead in the solder sure sounded like a great "green" idea - Until "tin whiskers" started appearing on many lead-free solder connections. Tin Whiskers have proven to be a big problem in a lot of modern electrical applications, to the point where many military applications refuse to allow the lead-free solder design in their components. Look up "tin whiskers" in your favorite search engine, and see for yourself...
crossmrJun 3, 2009
its trivial for them to check the ocean currents and figure out what time the plane went down and where the debris would have traveled since then. They should be able to figure out roughly where the plane went down and start looking there for the black box.
saggybJun 3, 2009
You make it sound a lot easier than it is. First of all, it's a big ocean, in the time since the crash the debris has already spread to a massive area. If the plane broke apart mid-air, which many are speculating is possible, then the debris field gets even wider. In previous cases of trying to recover the boxes in deep ocean it took weeks, and some were never found.
isnyJun 4, 2009
There's a man on the wing of this plane?
packetpaulJun 4, 2009
For those who dug me down because of the NTSB reference:"NTSB Acting Chairman Mark V. Rosenker has designated senior air safety investigator Bill English as the U.S. accredited representative. The U.S. team will include technical advisers from the Federal Aviation Administration; General Electric, which made the plane's engines; and Honeywell, which made the plane's data recorders."Source:<a class="user" href="http://community2.myfoxaustin.com/_Air-France-jet-may-have-broken-up-in-ocean-not-sky-official-says/BLOG/333856/82263.html">http://community2.myfoxaustin.com/_Air-France-jet- ...</a>And yes there will be a NTSB report.
skibum357Jun 4, 2009
gravity caused the plane to crash. End of discussion.
halo969Jun 5, 2009
Thank you. I thought I recall reading the same thing on CNN.
dmotaJun 5, 2009
What the f**k!, how come they haven't found anything floating around???, Either the plane went to the bottom of the sea in one piece, or millions of objects would have been floating around, even bodies. What the f**k!??