MetaFilter posts tagged with airdisaster

French plane lost over Atlantic

ArkhanJG — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 06:03:45 -0800

Air France flight AF 447 has gone missing over the atlantic. The flight left Rio at 2200 GMT on Sunday, and was due to land at 0910 GMT in Paris, but contact was lost at 0130 GMT, some 186 miles northeast of the Brazilian city of Natal. It had 216 passengers and 12 crew on board, including three pilots. The passengers included one infant, seven children, 82 women and 126 men. The flight has not been heard of since, and by now would have exhausted all fuel reserves and is assumed lost. Air France said the plane sent an automatic message at 0214 GMT reporting a short circuit after turbulence, and may have been struck by lightning. Searches are ongoing in the area. The Airbus A330-200 is a large-capacity, wide-body, twin-engine, medium-to-long-range commercial passenger airliner that was introduced in 1998. On 24th August 2001 another A330, Flight 236 from Toronto to Lisbon suffered a serious mid-air fuel leak over the atlantic, but performed the world's longest recorded glide with a jet airliner to land safely in Azores. Modern airliners are designed to cope with lightning strikes. On average, lightning strikes a commercial jet once for every 10,000 hours it spends in the air. However, they can result in loss of instrumentation despite shielding, and loss of the positioning instruments can result in the pilots becoming severely disorientated and flying into the ground. But, according to David Learmount safety editor of Flight International magazine, there is no case of a modern airliner being lost because of a lightning strike alone.

cockpit voice recordings and tower transcripts

JohnR — Wed, 08 Jan 2003 17:36:02 -0800

"Tower, we're going down, this is PSA." These are the best sites I've found for cockpit voice recordings and air traffic control transcripts for airplane accidents." Feel that mother go"..the second link also has the transcript of the Challenger crew.

wackybrit — Wed, 31 Jan 2001 10:20:16 -0800

Libyan gets minimum of 20 years for Lockerbie Bombing by Scottish Court. Why are British courts handing out such tiny sentences? After all, in America it's not uncommon for people to receive 99 years for a single murder. Some people are doing over 10 years for rape alone. This Libyan could have easily received the death sentence if he were in the US, as it was similar in scale to the Oklahoma City bombing.

Yet, in the UK, it's possible to kill people through negligence, and get away with it. Just last month an uninsured driver was speeding, killed a pedestrian, fled the scene, and although found guilty, only received a driving ban!

Is the UK overly soft in its sentencing? Or is the USA overly draconian?