Not good

Have they checked all the remote islands in the South Pacific... 30 years ago.

Was it flight number 815?!?!?!



Maybe JJ Abrams was forseeing the future.



I hope they find it though. Not a good start for Airbus though

(Sorry, misread the title, thought it was a A380)

Still, not good though.

Airbus have an excellent safety record tbh. I hope this plane turns up, although it doesn't look likely.

If the worst has happened, I would be interested to know if it was due to mechanical failure or pilot error.

The latest is:
A) The plane would have run out of fuel by now, so it will have crashed/ditched
B) The plane sent an automated message to Air France saying there had been a short circuit after flying through turbulence. Contact was lost shortly afterwards.

It's being said a lightening strike might have taken it down.

Depends on where the lightning struck it.

A mate has twice sat in a plane struck by lightning. Neither time was there a problem.

Yeah a lot of ex-pilots have been on the news explaining lightening strikes on planes and the tiny (if any at all) damage they do. There was an electrical storm in the area and the planes systems reported some circuit failure so its possible. Its suggested they might never find the plane too. Such a shame.

If it did have a short circuit then that would probably have knocked out all its computer flying systems - in that scenario the plane would have gone straight down

Planes are tested for lightning strikes - it happens a lot. I'd be very surprised if a strike took one down.
Would a short really have taken out all the computer systems? I thought they had secondary systems for that sort of thing.

I would have thought that aircraft would have secondary and tertiary back up systems to stop things like this happen and I know that they have systems to stop lightning strikes from taking out any systems.

I feel it's highly unlikely that a lightning strike would be able to take out all systems to the point where it would go down.

Also secondary RADAR systems would still be able to see the aircraft in the sky if they had any systems that far into the ocean.

I'm no expert or anything but apparently there's a pretty big spot in the atlantic where there's no radar. An image showed a big gap between where the South American radar stopped and the African radar started. It was BBC news I think.

I also overheard something about 'would this have happened if the plane had mechanical backup....' or something on the news when I was getting my breakfast. It got me thinking arent these modern Airbus' all fly-by-wire electronic joysticks, etc?

Shouldn't they be looking for big inflatable dinghy things?

There is a BBC news video with the title "Plane Debris Spotted in the Ocean" but I dont have sound at work so I can't hear what they are saying.

Airbus aircraft, most civilian airliners, are all fly by wire but with at least triple redundancy throughout the electrics and electronics as far as I'm aware. If they loose both engines then a mini wind turbine pops out of the fuselage and provides enough power for the essential controls and instruments.

This suggests to me something mechanically/structurally catastrophic happened that defeated all that redundancy; especially as it has been said one of the automated signals was about a depressurisation happening. As a BBC web site report quoted an expert saying 'this was a something leading to something' accident (as most are, a cascade of things). Given the position it occurred in we are unlikely to ever know what really happened and it is certainly far to early to do more than speculate rather wildly.

Richard.

Don't Airbus 's have a ridiculous number of backup computers?
Aircraft are designed to survive lightning strikes.
Like most modern crashes, I'd expect this to be a combination of several unlikely factors. Hopefully they'll be able to track the black box transmission , though it'll be a pain to get the off the floor of the Atlantic.