Word: airs
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...those kind of altitudes, the gap between excess speed and stalling narrows, especially when you factor in 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...
...Despite the paucity of evidence, the inquiry is 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...
...enough of it is found, physical evidence can be as helpful as black boxes, or even more helpful, to air-disaster investigators in figuring out what went wrong. Painstaking examination of the wreckage of a New York City-Geneva Swissair flight that mysteriously 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...
...Everyone knew what happened - there were photos of the Concorde on fire and blowing up - but examination of the remains allowed investigators to trace the entire sequence of events back to the accident's smoking gun," says Jean Guerry, a former pilot and current assistant director of the Bourget Air and Aerospace Museum, outside Paris. "The current Air France investigation will be much harder, since little debris has been recovered, and the material that has - because it floats - will only tell one part of the story at best. Getting the black box is very important...
...radar-equipped ships from the U.S. and the Netherlands have joined the hunt. Their job is daunting. "Experts in the TWA and Swissair inquiries did absolutely excellent work, but they recovered sea wreckage in depths of 100 to 130 ft. [30 to 40 m], while the Air France search is in waters of about 12,000 ft. [3,600 m]," says aeronautic engineer Favé. "With most of Flight 447 that far underwater, French investigators are at a real disadvantage - even if they do find the black...