Word: circuitousness
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...plane or its black box are not recovered, it will be impossible to know what caused the disappearance of Air France Flight 447, says Gourguechon. "As frustrating as it is, we'll need more information before we can imagine any scenarios." But for Learmount, if a short-circuit fire is to blame, one thing is for sure. "We have to look here for the lessons we got from that [Swissair flight]," he says. "Airplanes should have heat and smoke detectors all over them ... so that if a fire started anywhere, you would know immediately." He adds, "That has not been...
...fire starts onboard somewhere, behind panels, the only detectors you've got in a large part of the airplane are the cabin crews' noses. There are areas where they've got smoke detectors - in the lavatories and in the cargo holds - but if one starts in an electrical circuit behind the cabin wall next to you, sitting there by the window, you don't know about it, because there are no smoke detectors there." (Read about the deadly 1998 Swissair crash...
...Airbus passenger jet bearing 216 passengers and 12 crew members en route from Rio de Janeiro to Paris. After leaving the range of Brazilian radar controllers, the plane encountered stormy weather over the Atlantic Ocean, French officials said, and then suffered an unknown failure possibly caused by a short circuit. Speaking to France Info radio, the French government minister supervising the search for the aircraft, Jean-Louis Borloo, said, "We must seriously imagine the most tragic scenario...
...witnesses, identifying the circumstances of Flight 477's disappearance will take time. For Julien Gourguechon, international secretary-general of the SNPL French pilots' union, the current hypothesis of an electrical-systems failure leads to more questions than answers. "If Air France mentioned they received a message of short circuit, we can conclude it was a rather serious one," he says. "But in the case of an A330, even the most serious type of short circuit - known as an emergency electrical configuration - is something absolutely manageable for a trained team. So at this time I cannot explain the exact reasons...
...lightning can have serious consequences. "The primary effects of a lightning strike would not bring an airplane down - the airplane is designed to be able to absorb it and then to be able to get rid of the static electricity," he says. A lightning strike actually hitting an electrical circuit and causing a short circuit is "terribly rare," he says. "But the [term] short circuit was used. Short circuit equals sparks. Spark equals fire. We're speculating, but an airplane has gone missing." It's believed to be the first time a plane has gone down between South America...