Experts connect crash of Air France’s Flight 447 to high-speed winds and lightning

Air France’s Flight 447 that crashed into the Atlantic Ocean on May 31, 2009, might have flown into updrafts that shook the plane and also into lightning, which together contributed in knocking the plane out of the sky, according to aviation experts.

The weather-forecasting website AccuWeather.com says that wind measurements showed that the doomed Airbus A330-200 met tropical thunderstorms with updrafts of 100 miles per hour (161 kilometres per hour). Gusts which are that much strong, combined with lightning, might have caused structural or electrical failures of the aircraft, AccuWeather.com said in a statement. 

Hans Weber, president of Tecop International Incorporated, a consulting company based in San Diego, California, the United States, was quoted by the website bloomberg.com as saying that “aircraft are built to withstand roiling currents far stronger than maximum loads that arise in most storms.” The crashed Flight 447, Weber added, might have hit “something worse.” 

Most inter-continental flights bump into at least some turbulence, Weber explained, adding that flights that cannot find a safe route might take a detour to Africa to refuel – often in Dakar in Senegal. 

Even though lightning-strikes to aircraft are common, a disabled electrical system would be very dangerous to an Airbus A330-200 plane, which has “fly-by-wire” electronic controls connecting the cockpit to motors that move the aircraft’s steering surfaces and engine settings, Hans Weber was quoted as saying.

The Airbus A330-200, with 228 passengers and crew on board, had lost contact with air-traffic controllers after hitting turbulence as it was flying to Paris in France from Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. The flight at first reported an electrical breakdown, then sent as many as 10 automated distress signals, and finally vanished.

John Hansman, an aviation expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the United States, said thunderstorms often contain “punishing updrafts and downdrafts” that pilots try to avoid. The ill-fated Air France flight, according to Hansman, disappeared in an area called the “inter-tropical convergence zone” – a region near the equator where tropical storms move from east to west. 

Meanwhile, Airbus Industrie, the aircraft-maker based in Toulouse, France, said in a statement that “it would be inappropriate for Airbus to enter into any form of speculation into the causes of the accident.”

Air France, a subsidiary of the Air France-KLM Group, said in a press release that it “was not ruling out lightning as the cause of the crash of the Flight 447.”

The plane’s flight data recorders, however, have not been recovered yet, so it is almost impossible to determine the cause of crash at this point, an aviation expert said.

But what is now clear is that before it vanished, the Flight 447 was flying hundreds of miles beyond the range of the nearest radar station, just as scores of commercial flights do every day when they fly over the oceans.

While flying over oceans, pilots follow different rules for navigation and safety because they are very far from land and also because the air-traffic controllers may not be able to locate those planes’ exact positions. Radars can track the planes only when they come closer to the shore.

In the meantime, Brazil has confirmed that a mass of debris, which was found floating in the Atlantic Ocean, contained bits and pieces the Air France plane that vanished.

Brazil’s Defence Minister Nelson Jobim told reporters that there was “no doubt” that the debris spotted in the Atlantic Ocean by planes of Brazil’s Air Force belonged to Air France’s Flight 447.