Word: planes
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...Based on what has been recovered thus far, you really can't expect investigators to come up with much about how and why the plane came down," says Vincent Favé, an aeronautic engineer and judicial expert who has participated in past French aviation investigations. "What they do have supports the obvious hypothesis that the plane broke up while still in the air. But with so little debris and few victims recovered this late, they'll really need to get the black box to have any chance of finding out what happened." (See pictures of the search for Flight...
...significant evidence. That, they say, increases the value of the 24 automated alerts the A330 emitted just before it vanished on June 1. Those warnings signaled electrical problems, reduced cabin pressure, considerable turbulence and, above all, conflicting information from the three Pitot tubes, devices that help pilots determine the plane's speed. Based on the alerts, one of the leading theories now is that malfunctioning sensors may have prevented the crew from correctly gauging the plane's velocity as it entered a turbulent zone. Traveling too fast in such conditions could have caused the A330 to break up; insufficient speed...
...complications like turbulence," says Paul Hayes, director of the London-based Ascend Worldwide fleet consultancy, which advises global airlines and air-transport companies. Without the black box, Hayes adds, the alerts could provide some answers, but not all of them. "Correctly sequencing the cascade of technical reports the plane sent should give investigators clues into what was going wrong as it flew into difficult weather," he says. "At this point, the limited remains of the plane and its passengers recovered will probably be most helpful to investigators to determine which parts of the aircraft began breaking up and falling...
...still young - and past air-disaster inquests have successfully solved the causes of crashes even after long and confounding investigations. Most notable of those was the investigation into TWA Flight 800 from New York City to Paris, which exploded off Long Island, New York, in 1996. Though that plane's flight recorder was found, the blast caused it to stop operating along with the rest of the craft, rendering it basically useless. However, much of the plane's remains were recovered, and once a large part was reassembled, it allowed experts to conclude that the explosion was the result...
...crashed into the Atlantic in 1998 ultimately revealed a swiftly spreading electrical fire as the cause. Hayes also notes that after the Pan Am 747 explosion over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988, the discovery of metal fragments and an examination of the type of damage to one section of the plane pointed experts to a small bomb as the source of the calamity. Forensics has also cleared up questions in otherwise obvious accidents, such as the fuel-tank explosion of an Air France Concorde in 2000 that killed 113 people. During that thorough inquiry, experts not only discovered where...