Air France Flight 447 Disappears?

[Gawan]

Re: Air France Plane Goes Down Over Atlantic

One is from the pilot of an Air Comet flight from Lima to Lisbon who claims to have seen "an intense flash of white light" which took a descending vertical path and vanished in 6 seconds, this around the time and area where Air France Flight 447 was lost.

Air 'Comet'? Talk about a coincidence.

Given we live in a symbolic reality, this might be a clue!

Currently it really looks like it, hopefully we get more data to falsify or prove this conclusion. But right now it's interesting that the plane is still lost because:

[…]

Trash mistaken for plane debris

http://www.news24.com/Content/World/News/1073/b05165ae6e434de7b30d8288899585d9/05-06-2009%2008-06/Trash_mistaken_for_plane_debris

The absence of a Mayday does indicate that whatever happened, happened quickly, if a Mayday wasn't in fact received. We are always only presented with info that are deemed appropriate for our consumption.

So it -might- have been a really, really strong explosion to take the plane into bits and pieces.

And as already mentioned at the very beginning of the thread: "smashing year"

Here is an excerpt from the "New Oxford American Dictionary"

smash |smaʃ|
verb
1 [ trans. ] violently break (something) into pieces : the thief smashed a window to get into the car | gone are the days when he smashed up hotels.
• [ intrans. ] be violently broken into pieces; shatter : the glass ball smashed instantly on the pavement.
• violently knock down or crush inward : soldiers smashed down doors.
• crash and severely damage (a vehicle) : my Volvo's been smashed up.
• hit or attack (someone) very violently : Donald smashed him over the head.
• easily or comprehensively beat (a record) : he smashed the course record.
• completely defeat, destroy, or foil (something regarded as hostile or dangerous) : a deliberate attempt to smash the union movement.
2 [ intrans. ] move so as to hit or collide with something with great force and impact : their plane smashed into a mountainside.
• [ trans. ] (in sports) strike (the ball) or score (a goal, run, etc.) with great force : he smashed that one into the bleachers for another two-run homer.
• [ trans. ] (in tennis, badminton, and similar sports) strike (the ball or shuttlecock) downward with a hard overhand stroke.

 

[Laura]

Re: Air France Plane Goes Down Over Atlantic

So, looks like cometary - Tunguska-like high altitude explosion is back on the table, eh?

 

[Erna]

Re: Air France Plane Goes Down Over Atlantic

Well, since we are considering all possibilities, and as long as the plane is gone (every single bit of it), I'm wondering if a ripped dimensional curtain isn't also 'on the table'. A bit extreme, I know, I just thought I'd throw it in here.

Those first breaking news headlines all said "disappeared off radar", and it's a bit strange that there's nothing floating in the sea, even if it exploded. And what about the black box that's suppose to transmit for 30 days if it comes in contact with salt water. The Air Comet pilot's testimony maybe rules this one out, if his testimony can be trusted. I suppose a missing commercial plane is not something they are prepared to admit.

The lack of a Mayday maybe supports this theory.

 

[Gaby]

Re: Air France Plane Goes Down Over Atlantic

The Air Comet pilot's testimony maybe rules this one out, if his testimony can be trusted.

The Air Comet pilot's testimony was published today in La Depeche du Midi, in addition it says that his story was confirmed by the co-pilot and one passenger.

_http://www.ladepeche.fr/article/2009/06/05/619746-Vol-Rio-Paris-La-mysterieuse-lueur-blanche.html

 

[Laura]

Re: Air France Plane Goes Down Over Atlantic

Well, since we are considering all possibilities, and as long as the plane is gone (every single bit of it), I'm wondering if a ripped dimensional curtain isn't also 'on the table'. A bit extreme, I know, I just thought I'd throw it in here.

Whoah! You are really raising the ante there! I like it!

 

[Oxajil]

Re: Air France Plane Goes Down Over Atlantic

I wonder if there are any crystals at that area (like the one(s) at Bermuda Triangle).

Q: (T) Are the crystals still active?
A: Bermuda triangle.
Q: (L) I thought that was a myth?
A: No.
Q: (L) And what does that crystal do? Is it continuously active?
A: No. Erratic.
Q: (L) Is it still active in the sense of being a conscious or sentient
entity?
A: No.
Q: (L) What activates it?
A: Many factors.
Q: (L) And when it is activated, what does it do?
A: Transdimensional window is blasted open.

Q: (L) Besides the crystal in the Bermuda Triangle, are any of the
others still active?
A: Yes.

Q: (L) Where are the others located?
A: Off Japan; in Brazil; in Ural mountains of Russia; North and South
Poles.
Q: (T) Are the ones on the Moon and Mars active also?
A: Yes.
Q: (V) Are they responsible for any of the earthquakes like the one
in Japan?
A: Yes.

 

[Z...]

Re: Air France Plane Goes Down Over Atlantic

Also see: Among the Victims on Air France Flight, Doctors, Dancers and Royalty

Well the number of "high profile" personalities on board of this flight is quite astounding, it is not at all impossible that somebody from this flight needed to be disposed off...

 

[GRiM]

Re: Air France Plane Goes Down Over Atlantic

Have you read about:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20090605/ts_afp/francebrazilairaccident

"Brazilian officials said items they had pulled from the sea were not in fact debris from the downed Airbus."

"Up to now, no material from the plane has been recovered," Brigadier Ramon Cardoso, director of Brazilian air traffic control, told reporters in the northeastern city of Recife late Thursday."

and....
"That contradicted a statement Cardoso made earlier Thursday when he said a pallet and two buoys plucked from the Atlantic by navy crews were the first pieces of the Air France crash."

also..

Defense Minister Nelson Jobim has said there was "no doubt" that the debris spotted from the air came from flight AF 477, and that they marked the area close to where the plane hit the ocean.


I dont know what this means but I smell something :)

 

[RedFox]

Re: Air France Plane Goes Down Over Atlantic

Yeah, I wonder if there is debris but its considered not for public viewing (shows how it was destroyed)??

This is developing in some odd ways.

Well, since we are considering all possibilities, and as long as the plane is gone (every single bit of it), I'm wondering if a ripped dimensional curtain isn't also 'on the table'. A bit extreme, I know, I just thought I'd throw it in here.

That did also pass through my mind a few days ago!
The automated system still transmitting for a while via a ripped dimensional curtain...hmmm (too much time watching sci-fi personally!)

 

[Joe]

Re: Air France Plane Goes Down Over Atlantic

Yeah, I wonder if there is debris but its considered not for public viewing (shows how it was destroyed)??

That seems to be the most logical explanation at this stage. Something happened to the plane that they are not willing to have publicly known. They may even produce fake parts.

Someone mentioned TWA 800 back in the 90's

Here's a snippet from a transcript about that event


Nov 23 1996

Q: (T) What did happen to flight 800?
A: This was the result of an experiment gone awry. So was
KAL "007" in 1983.
Q: (L) What was the nature of the experiment?
A: Testing of secret impulse guidance system using civilian
airliner as an arbitrary "bounce" guidance target.
Instead, it became the "homing" target, and a different
aircraft became the bouncer. This was because the
programmers did not anticipate the lower than expected
altitude of the 747. Warning: this must stay in this room
for the present!!!!!!!!!! The facts will eventually be
discussed by others. At that time, the danger is lifted.
[At this point, it has been discussed in the exact same
terms as described here in a reputable, national
magazine.] Now, about KAL 007... that one is not dangerous
to know. The plane was deliberately instructed to fly off
course in order to trigger the Soviet's Pacific air
defense system, to "see what they were made of" in that
area. The plane was lost, but the experiment worked. They
did not expect them to shoot down a civilian airliner.
Now, all moving targets create electronic impuses. These
can be "read" by the proper extremely high tech equipment.
Older radar guided systems are subject to malfunctions in
weather conditions that are severe, as one example. Also,
the impulse system is an offshoot of the electromagnetic
pulse experiments being carried out at Montauk, Brookings
and elsewhere as part of the HAARP project! In connection
with Pentagon missile tests, HAARP has many interesting
tie-ins, not the least of which is your cell phone towers.
Now, the homing target can be any moving object. It can
be whatever is entered on the computer. It can be a
squirrel in a tree, a jogger on the beach, a building,
whatever you want. The system looks for any moving target
in order to establish recognition to the computer, in
order to establish recognition of match pattern of pulse.
TWA 800 was flying at the exact same altitude that was
supposed to be designated for the "drone" craft. The
drone plane was fartehr out at sea. The "bounce" target
was to be any moving object in the air within 400 square
miles.
Q: (L) So, TWA 800, through a series of problems, happened to
find itself at the right altitude, a restricted altitude,
within the parameters of the experiment. Anything further
on this?

 

[Vulcan59]

Re: Air France Plane Goes Down Over Atlantic

Well, after so many days, we still have a missing aeroplane and no debris or perhaps not for public viewing or maybe the rapture has started!!!. ;D

In my earlier post here where I mentioned datalink, I had to look up the navigation charts for that area and found out that, that area does not have FANS, meaning that the pilots had to rely on conventional radio for communications with Air Traffic Control (ATC).

So initially as they coasted out of the northern coastline, they would have been on radio contact with Recife Control on VHF and soon after told to contact Atlantico Center on HF which can be full of static and with the thunderstorm activity around that area, you would not be able to talk to any ATC in a hurry.

So given the situation, my first priority would have been to turn on the seat belt, terminate the service if it was still going on, make an announcement and get everybody seated and try and navigate the aircraft through the green areas on my weather radar (assuming it was working) and avoid the magenta and red areas. You don't want to fly into the red or heaven forbid magenta areas knowingly!! Inadvertently maybe but definitely not knowingly.

Not easy to fly over the cloud tops because very often the rate of vertical development of the cloud easily exceeds the rate of climb of most commercial aircraft. Not easy to go around because often the lateral extend of the storm can be in excess of hundred of miles. And so the only choice very often is to buckle up and try to go fly through the storm using your onboard weather radar and picking out the green spots to fly through. Done this many, many times.

Usually you inform ATC that you are deviating off track due weather but quite often because you couldn't contact them, especially in a HF radio environment you just went ahead and did it anyway instead of trying to fly through the red or magenta areas and once clear of the weather you go back to your original track.

Well hopefully more data comes to light so that we can work out what happened.

 

[Gaby]

Re: Air France Plane Goes Down Over Atlantic

The plane sent 24 error alerts?

_http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8086860.stm

Lost plane 'sent 24 error alerts'

The Air France jet which went missing over the Atlantic sent 24 error messages minutes before it crashed, French investigators say.

Investigators also said the plane's autopilot was not on, though they do not know if it had been switched off or was not working.

Weather experts said there was no evidence storms the plane encountered were "exceptional" for the season.

...

Speaking at a press conference in Paris, the director of France's air accident investigation agency, Paul-Louis Arslanian, said a total of 24 error messages were received in the final moments of Air France 447, as its systems shut down one by one.

But he said it was impossible to tell from the plane's signals why the autopilot was not on.

...

The deputy head of the French weather service, Alain Ratier, said the weather pattern was normal at the time that Flight 447 disappeared.

"According to the analysis of the infrared images, there is nothing to suggest that there was a cluster of thunderstorms of exceptional intensity," Mr Ratier said.

"Certainly there was powerful cumulo-nimbus [storm clouds], but these are found frequently in this area and in normal climactic conditions," he added.

Search efforts

Hopes of locating the plane have been frustrated so far.

Brazilian search teams first said on Tuesday they may have spotted debris from the plane. But material recovered from the sea on Thursday turned out to be unrelated to the Air France jet.

Efforts are now focusing on the two sonar beacons - or "pingers" - attached to the flight's data recorders boxes, the BBC's Hugh Schofield reports from Paris.

But at the news conference, a spokesman for France's accident investigation bureau said there was no guarantee the beacons were still attached to the flight recorders.

He said, given the likely force of the impact of a crash, they could easily have become separated.

On Friday, French Defence Minister Herve Morin said a French submarine was being sent to join in the search since it had sonar equipment that could help locate the airliner's flight data recorders.

The US is also sending specialised listening equipment.

Without the data recorders, investigators are unlikely to determine the cause of the crash, our correspondent says.

 

[Oxajil]

Re: Air France Plane Goes Down Over Atlantic

Two bodies found near plane crash site, Brazil says

Updated Sat. Jun. 6 2009 1:46 PM ET

CTV.ca News Staff

The Brazilian military reports that it has found two male bodies in the Atlantic Ocean close to where an Air France jet crashed last Sunday.

Brazilian air force spokesperson Col. Jorge Amaral said the bodies were recovered Saturday morning about 650 kilometres northeast of the Fernando de Noronha islands off of Brazil's northern coast.

The first was recovered around 9:10 a.m. ET, wile the second body was recovered at 11:30 a.m. ET.

According to Amaral, search crews also found a suitcase that contained a ticket for the flight.

"It was confirmed with Air France that the ticket number corresponds to a passenger on the flight," Amaral said.

Air France flight 447 was on its way from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil to Paris, France when it vanished over the ocean Sunday night with 228 people on board as it flew through strong turbulence.

Brazilian search crews first spotted wreckage on Tuesday, and have since found a number of pieces of the plane. However, French officials have disputed whether the debris was indeed from the missing jet.

Crews had yet to find any survivors or bodies until today.

French authorities are still investigating the cause of the crash, but are focusing on messages sent by the plane that show it may have been receiving incorrect airspeed readings.

Details to follow...

from _http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20090606/crash_investigation_090606/20090606?hub=TopStories

 

[Gimpy]

Re: Air France Plane Goes Down Over Atlantic

According to Amaral, search crews also found a suitcase that contained a ticket for the flight.

A Yahoo article I just read stated that it was a 'leather briefcase'.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/brazil_plane

This reminds me of the passports that were found after 9/11, but I tend to be a bit leery of any kind of 'definite ID' found during a disaster that is this conclusive. It doesn't mean that the bodies couldn't be 'bubbling up' from wreckage....it just sounds terribly convenient.

 

[Joe]

Re: Air France Plane Goes Down Over Atlantic

And then there is this:

http://www.sott.net/articles/show/186127

Did a meteor bring down Air France 447?

Discover Magazine
Thu, 04 Jun 2009

Back in 1996, after the initially very mysterious explosion and crash of Flight 800 from JFK to Rome, there were numerous eyewitness accounts of a "streak in the sky" just before the crash. This led to the "missile theory" of the crash, which was eventually attributed to the explosion of the center fuel tank by the NTSB. But, also at the time, it was suggested that a meteor of sufficient size could have struck the plane, bringing it down.

Could a meteor have brought down Air France 447? Today we are starting to see reports that there actually may have been a meteor:

However, both pilots of an Air Comet flight from Lima to Lisbon sent a written report on the bright flash they said they saw to Air France, Airbus and the Spanish civil aviation authority, the airline told CNN.

"Suddenly, we saw in the distance a strong and intense flash of white light, which followed a descending and vertical trajectory and which broke up in six seconds," the captain wrote.

Obviously for any given flight the chances are very, very small that a meteor will bring down an airliner, but as Hailey and Helfand pointed out in a letter to the NYT in 1996, the correct question to ask is this: "What is the probability that, for all flights in history, one or more could have been downed by a meteor?" They concluded that there was a 1-in-10 chance that this could happen...let's use their logic, brought up to date somewhat, for 2009, for Flight 447.

Helfand, an astronomer, is presumably the one who estimated that "approximately 3,000 meteors a day with the requisite mass strike Earth". This is a difficult number to get. How much mass? How fast does it need to be moving? But let's assume that this number is correct; it translates to 125 meteors per hour.

Next we need to know the total number of flight hours at altitude for all commercial planes. In 2000 there were about 18 millions flights per year. Clearly in the past 20 years (which we'll take as our reference, since it spans 1989-2009, with both flights 800 and 447) it was not always so...but let's take a guess that the 18 million figure is roughly correct for that 20 year period. That would yield 360 million commercial airline flights from 1989-2000. Hailey and Helfand assumed that each flight was two hours in duration. Again, a tough number to find on line, so we'll take it at face value, giving us 720 million flight hours in our reference period.

They also claim that if there were 3500 planes in the air at any time, this would correspond to covering two-billionths of Earth's surface. Now the earth's surface area is 5×1014 m2. Using my trusty HP-15c, I get that this would imply an average target area for a commercial airliner of 291 m2, which is reasonable. Each plane, that is, covers 5.7×10-13 of Earth's surface. If a meteor hits the earth it has that probability of hitting a given plane on average.

So, in our reference 20-year period we have 720 million hours of flight time, times 125 meteors per hour, times 5.7×10-13 = 0.051, which we can take as the average number of airliners struck by meteors in the period 1989-2009. That's a one-in-twenty chance of some plane going down for this reason in that 20 year period. Extrapolating to all flights ever would require a better estimate of total flight hours, but it's not twenty times the number in the past 20 years, for sure - that is, it's not yet close to one.

Obviously there are a lot of uncertainties in this estimate; perhaps a factor of two from the number of meteors of sufficient mass per day, the average flight duration and number of flights?

Anyway the meteor idea is not crazy, though not likely. The weather seems more likely to be at the root of the tragedy...but we may never know. One thing, though, is clear: if we keep flying big planes at high altitude, eventually one will get hit by a meteor.

And Sott commentary:

Let's see what the physics and astronomy professors said exactly in their letter to the NYT in 1996:

In T.W.A. 800 Crash, Don't Discount Meteor
Published: Thursday, September 19, 1996

To the Editor:

In a Sept. 17 news article on conspiracy theories in the crash of Trans World Airlines Flight 800, you report that ''more than once, senior crash investigators have tried to end the speculation by ranking the possibility of friendly fire at about the same level of the idea that a meteorite destroyed the jet.'' In fact, we believe this comparison must be based on a miscalculation of the probability that a meteorite is the cause of the crash.

The odds of a meteor's striking T.W.A. Flight 800 or any other single airline flight are indeed small. However, the relevant calculation is not the likelihood of any particular aircraft being hit, but the probability that one commercial airliner over the last 30 years of high-volume air travel would be struck by an incoming meteor with sufficient energy to cripple the plane or cause an explosion.

Approximately 3,000 meteors a day with the requisite mass strike Earth. There are 50,000 commercial airline takeoffs a day worldwide. Adopting an average flight time of two hours, this translates to more than 3,500 planes in the air; these cover approximately two-billionths of Earth's surface.

Multiplying this by the number of meteors per day and the length of the era of modern air travel leads to a 1-in-10 chance that a commercial flight would have been knocked from the sky by meteoric impact.

No such calculation of the probability of a rare event can be taken as proof of cause. But it is essential to pose the problem correctly in order to obtain an estimate that can be used in determining whether or not the hypothesis is worth considering. We believe the meteor impact theory deserves more considered attention.

CHARLES HAILEY

DAVID HELFAND

New York, Sept. 17, 1996

The writers are professors of, respectively, physics and astronomy at Columbia University.