Though the ultimate reason for the Air France A330 crash in the South Atlantic will likely never be known for sure, the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) has recently issued an urgent Airworthiness Directive to replace certain Thales-manufactured pitot tubes on A330/A340 airplanes. A pitot tube problem is one of the possible explanations for that Air France crash.

For those who don’t know, a pitot tube is a goofy little thing that sticks out from the aircraft into the air. You can see a great example of one at left. These little guys use pressure measurement to determine airspeed. One of the theories regarding the Air France accident is that the pitot tube incorrectly measured airspeed and that triggered all kinds of problems that ultimately led to the accident.

Now, EASA is saying that any A330/A340 aircraft with the Thales pitot tubes need to be changed (and the FAA has followed as well). There are apparently two different types of Thales pitot tubes. The “AA” version must be replaced no matter what. The “BA” version is ok in one place, but the other two places must have Goodrich ones involved.

So what exactly is the problem? According to EASA:

Occurrences have been reported on the A330/A340 family aeroplanes of airspeed indication discrepancies while flying at high altitudes in inclement weather conditions.

The Thales AA pitots have “a greater susceptibility to adverse environmental conditions” than the Goodrich ones. The Thales BA pitots are better, but “it has not yet demonstrated the same level of robustness to withstand high-altitude ice crystals as the Goodrich . . . probe.”

While they say that they haven’t actually found any safety issue and that this is a precautionary measure, the fact that these all need to be replaced within 4 months certainly makes it seem somewhat rushed.

By the way, Air France had Thales pitot tubes, but they’ve already made these changes. Delta has also already made the changes to their A330s. Both US Airways and Lufthansa have always had Goodrich.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/neepster/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

Last year, when then-Senator Obama was busy criss-crossing the country in support of his presidential bid, he ran into some trouble on one of his flights. At the time, we were told that it wasn’t a big deal and, of course, it landed safely. But now as more details come out, things appear to have been somewhat more serious.

The President was on an MD-80 chartered from Midwest Airlines. The only thing unique about this airplane is that it was actually flown by Midwest – that’s more rare than seeing a panda in the wild. As the plane was climbing, the crew had trouble controlling the airplane’s pitch (nose up attitude), so they ended up diverting to St Louis. Here’s what the President would have felt:

It should be noted that while 16 to 20 degrees is normal, some flights do reach 25 degrees. So this wasn’t completely out of the ordinary at 26.8 degrees, but it could have gotten much worse had the crew not been able to stabilize the plane.

What happened? Well, in the tail of the MD-80, there is an emergency exit. On this particular flight, the slide at that exit inflated and pressed on the cables controlling the elevators. The elevators are used to make the plane go up and down, so this pressure made the plane go up a little too much. The pilots did regain control, and once they descended, things seemed to go back to normal and they landed safely.

There has only been two other incidents remotely like this one in the past, and one of those happened on the ground, so this is a very rare occurrence. Still, that must have been one wild ride.

Here’s a weird one for you. Yesterday, Southwest flight 2294 diverted to Charleston, West Virginia when a football-sized hole opened up in the top of the fuselage. And thanks to the magic of Twitter, someone had posted a picture from inside the cabin right after it happened. Click at left to blow it up.

Southwest 2294 was supposed to go from Nashville to Baltimore. It appears that as it passed through 34,000 feet on the way to its cruise altitude, the hole opened up and the plane lost pressure. The crew sent the plane into a rapid descent (as required in order to get to breathable air) and 7 minutes later they were at 11,000 feet. In case you were wondering, that descent would normally take at least double that amount of time if not more. About 20 minutes after that, they had an uneventful landing in Charleston, West Virginia.

All accounts that I’ve seen have said that Southwest handled this really well. The plane was on the ground just after 6p, and Southwest was able to find a new plane, get it to Charleston (a place they don’t serve) and get back in the air at 945p. They arrived in Baltimore a little more than four hours after original scheduled arrival. An impressive move, indeed.

Now let’s get back to that airplane. This was N387SW, a 737-300 that was delivered brand new to the airline on June 29, 1994. So it’s only about 15 years old. (Fun fact for me: I actually rode that plane on November 18, 1994 from Phoenix to Burbank.)

I’m sure we’ll hear plenty of speculation that compares this relatively minor incident to Aloha Airlines 243, the plane that became a convertible mid-flight. Don’t remember that one? Maybe this will refresh your memory.

That’s right. This one truly became a convertible. Incredibly, the only person who died was a flight attendant who wasn’t strapped in. The plane landed safely, and it was impressive enough for a cheesy TV movie to be made about it. But let’s not jump to conclusions about this Southwest flight.

The Aloha incident started with a small hole as this Southwest one did, but then something went wrong. The 737 fuselage is designed so that if a hole does develop, it will remain isolated. That’s what happened with the Southwest flight, and the aircraft maintained structural integrity. For that reason, this was effectively a non-event.

The Aloha flight was on a 19 year old 737-200, an earlier version of the 737 than in the Southwest incident. That aircraft had frequent, short flights in salty and humid conditions that ended up causing corrosion. So on that plane, the initial hole, caused by corrosion, quickly created outdoor seating as the fuselage gave way. That led to some major changes in terms of corrosion inspection.

On the Southwest plane, the question is a more simple one. Since the fuselage stayed intact, the only real question is . . . what caused the hole in the first place? That’s what I’ll be interested in finding out.

It’s been well over 24 hours since we first heard that an Air France A330 disappeared over the ocean on its way from Rio de Janeiro to Paris. In that time, I’ve seen a million different theories about what happened, and that always makes me angry. We have no idea what happened here, and really, we’ll be lucky if we ever find out. Here’s what we do know about the accident.

• Air France #447, operated by a 4-year-old A330, left Rio at 703p bound for Paris
• The airplane was off the coast of Brazil, beyond radar coverage when it hit some rough weather
• Something bad happened and a bunch of technical faults were automatically sent to Air France, but the pilots never sent a distress message
• The plane never arrived in Paris

Really, that’s all we know. And remember, while there were storms in the area alongside reports of strong turbulence, we have nothing to indicate that turbulence caused the accident. Also, those automated technical fault messages that were received by Air France stating that there had been an electrical problem and pressurization was lost (among other things)? Even if that did happen (false reports are always possible), we still have no clue why any of that happened, and there could be a million explanations.

There were no distress calls from the pilots, and I can only think of three reasons that might happen. Either the radios failed (highly unlikely), the pilots did this on purpose (even more unlikely), or it happened so fast that there wasn’t even time for a radio call (most likely). It makes me sick just thinking about what it was like on that plane toward the end.

I think it’s safe to say that this isn’t going to end up like the TV show “Lost.” This airplane is likely in a million pieces scattered on and in the Atlantic Ocean. At some point, search teams will find a debris field, and they might be able to put together some fact-based theories. But the true jewel here will be the cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder; the so-called black boxes. Those might be at the bottom of the ocean, but hopefully they’ll be recovered with good data still retrievable. Without those, it’s going to be incredibly hard to figure out what really happened.

Right now, the list of suspects is long, and it’s certainly baffling. Airplanes just don’t fall out of the sky, not even during severe turbulence. There were other airplanes flying through the area that made it safely, and I’m sure those pilots will be interviewed. For example, Iberia 6024 left Rio for Madrid 20 minutes after the Air France flight. Lufthansa 507 left Sao Paulo for Frankfurt about half an hour before the Air France flight, so they might have been fairly close to each other. Air France itself had another A330 leave Sao Paulo for Paris only 27 minutes later. And these are just some of the aircraft in the neighborhood.

Hopefully we will learn more about what happened here, because none of the theories that keep being flung out there by the media seem to make sense on their own. As always, this will end up being a series of different problems that come together to form a true catastrophe.

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