Breaking: Air France Airbus A330 disappears outside of Brazil

An Airbus A330-200 carrying over 200 passengers lost radar contact off the coast of Brazil late last night. The flight was apparently reporting electrical problems experienced during turbulence on its route between Rio de Janeiro and Charles de Gaulle Paris.

Hope is still standing for some reemergence of the aircraft, although it has been several hours since contact was lost. In addition, the Brazilian Air Force has been deployed to the last sight of contact in order to search for any sings of the aircraft.

If AF447 did go down, this would be the first large jet crash in over seven years. We’ll keep you updated on the story

Tunisian pilot who prayed while crash landing a plane gets 10 years in jail

If I were a pilot landing a plane after the engines had conked out on me, I might pray. That doesn’t mean I’d take my hands off the controls and stop doing my part to aim for a safe landing, but perhaps there would be words beseeching a power bigger than myself for a dose of divine intervention. It couldn’t hurt. Right?

For the Tunisian pilot I read about in the guardian.co.uk, uttering a prayer out loud got him in hot water when his case went to court. Back in 2005, he crash-landed a Franco-Italian ATR 72 charter plane into the Mediterranean off the coast of Sicily after the engine stopped working because the wrong fuel gauge had been mistakenly installed by a mechanic. The fuel gauge was too small, thus the plane didn’t have enough fuel. As a piece of information to keep in mind, the smaller gauge looked the same as the larger gauge.

At the time of the crash, the pilot was considered a hero since everyone on board didn’t die. Twenty-three people survived. After the investigation and trial, the tides have turned. The Italian court has decided that the pilot should have tried to glide the plane to Palermo. The court thinks that if he had done this, the 16 who died would not have. His prayers meant that he stopped doing his job correctly.

I guess these people didn’t hear about the US Airways plane crash landing on the Hudson River after the pilot was told to try to make it to an airport. What’s intriguing about this latest case is that the Tunisian pilot is Muslim. Calling out to Allah doesn’t seem to translate all that well in Italian court.

The co-pilot, mechanic and other airline executives are also going to jail. The charges include manslaughter.


These women were NOT praying — though they did cause problems in the air. Click the images to find out what they did.



Deadly Everest Airplane Crash

A Yeti Airlines Twin-Otter plane carrying sixteen passengers and three crew members crashed at a remote airstrip in Nepal yesterday morning, local time. The plane’s wheel became entangled in a security fence as it was landing at the trekking base of Lukla, about 30 miles from Mount Everest. 18 people, including a group of 12 German trekkers, were killed. Only the pilot survived, though he remains in critical condition at an area hospital. Passengers waiting for other planes were first on the scene, but they were ill-equipped to fight the fire that had broken out on impact. By the time it was finally extinguished, everyone in the passenger cabin was beyond help.

The crash was initially blamed on poor visibility. It was quite foggy at the time of the crash, though two similar planes had already landed at the airstrip that morning. The government has promised a full investigation. The team looking into the disaster will be headed by the country’s attorney general. The airport is located at 2500 meters above sea level and many people say it is ill-equipped to handle the heavy traffic it sees during trekking and climbing season.

Source

Boeing 747 breaks in HALF during takeoff in Brussels

The Associated Press is reporting that A Kalitta Air Boeing 747 broke in half while trying to take off on Sunday. The cargo aircraft, which was carrying diplomatic baggage for the United States ambassador to Belgium, ruptured in the center of the aircraft around the main fuselage and again at the rear of the plane.

All five crew members escaped with no injuries.

There is no indication as to how or why the aircraft crashed, but speculation is buzzing around the internet. Runway 20 is one of the shortest in the Brussels airport, so it’s possible that the increased strain of pulling the aircraft up at lower speed caused the airframe to rupture. It’s another possibility that the cargo was overloaded to begin with and that failure was imminent anyway. Others conjecture that the cargo could have shifted during take off and caused the tail to strike the tarmac as the aircraft lifted off.

Either way, don’t let this deter you from flying on a 747 any longer. A variety of factors could have caused the failure that aren’t necessarily the product of the aircraft design. Once the NTSB (or Europe’s version of the NTSB) gets their hands on the data we’ll have a better idea of what truly happened.

Until then, take a look at this footage of the carnage.

Ask The Pilot

Ok, so we missed it the first time around, when it was published, back in 2004. But it’s made its way to paperback and is now at Hudson News (at a lot of airports, so it’s easy to pick up while traveling). It’s Patrick Smith’s Ask the Pilot.

Based on his salon.com “column” of the same name, it’s really a series of questions and answers about air travel related issues, by a straight-talking writer, who happens to be a commercial passenger jet pilot.

The tag line says that the book is ‘for anyone who’s the least bit afraid to fly,’ but this book has enough in it to inform and amuse even the more “seasoned” flier.

He answers questions like, “what happens if a bird flies into an engine during take-off?” “What’s that smoke that trails from the wings?” “Will turbulence crash a plane?” “What’s a commercial pilot’s life like?” “What were the 10 worst airplane crashes?”

The one question he didn’t tackle: why is airline food so bad?