 |
         
|
The disappearance of Air France Flight 447 from radar screens en route to Paris from Rio de Janeiro would ordinarily have been Story of the Day. "No hopeful news," was how ABC's Lisa Stark put it, the plane, "flying at approximately 35,000 feet, simply vanished." NBC's Tom Costello showed us the weather satellite picture of the Intertropical Convergence Zone--the Atlantic Ocean between northeastern Brazil and western Africa--where the plane went missing. The zone is "notorious for extremely volatile weather with thunderstorms towering to 50,000 feet."
CBS' Mark Phillips was in Paris with worried relatives of the 228 on board. The plane "has recently been serviced and was in the hands of a highly experienced cockpit team," he assured us. The search area in the ocean, however, "is about the size of the continental United States."
Even if the Airbus 330 encountered a thunderstorm that should not have been fatal, CBS' Nancy Cordes noted. "Lightning strikes can be catastrophic on the ground but in aviation they are a daily and uneventful occurrence." The 330 is "built with materials that shed lightning charges and comes equipped with redundant electrical systems." The jetliner sent out automated messages indicating electrical and cabin pressure problems but the crew "never had time to issue a single Mayday." ABC's in-house aviation consultant John Nance (at the tail of the Stark videostream) called the 330 "very, very sophisticated" with computerized systems for handling turbulence. That led him to place a 50-50 wager that the cause of the crash "could be an explosion; it could be an in-flight breakup."
You must be logged in to this website to leave a comment. Please click here to log in so you can participate in the discussion.
