Two A330 airspeed and altitude incidents under NTSB scrutiny , page 1

Its going to be difficult to put together what happened to the AF flight without the data recorders. I wonder what the relative cost / benifit ratio would be to have the aircraft send data in microbursts every few seconds as aback up?

The US National Transportation Safety Board today said it is investigating two recent incidents involving possible malfunctioning of airspeed and altitude indications in the cockpits of Airbus A330 aircraft.

Four days after the 1 June crash of an Air France Airbus A330 off the coast of Brazil, French investigators confirmed automatic messages transmitted by the aircraft show the jet was experiencing conflicting airspeed information from onboard sensors.

The first incident under NTSB scrutiny occurred on 21 May, and involved a TAM A330 operating from Miami to Sao Paulo, Brazil. The A330 experienced a loss of primary speed altitude in cruise. Initial reports indicate the crew observed an abrupt drop in indicated outside air temperature followed by the loss of the air data reference system. Both the autopilot and autothrust disconnected, and speed and altitude information were lost.

NTSB says the TAM flight crew used backup instruments, and primary data was restored in five minutes. The flight landed in Sao Paulo with no further incidents.
www.flightglobal.com...

reply to post by FredT

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The "conspiracy" theory, as some may be aware, is that these planes are getting shot down. Some say, by electromagnetic pulse-type weapons.

The theory goes that they get shot down either because one of the power groups decides it needs to flex its muscles, or is trying to send a warning to one of the other power groups, or is retaliating for one of its planes being shot down. This is a pretty far-out theory, as far as I can tell. If they could get those flight recorder gadgets to work better and be easier to recover, they might be able to learn more, but of course if what they learned was too embarrassing, they wouldn't release the data anyway.

I think the only solution that would get closer to the truth would be to have a technology that would continuously monitor a plane the whole time it was aloft and send the data as a public broadcast that any old joe could pick up and decode. Then there would be no way for a government to lie about what was recorded on the flight recorders, and no excuses like "oops, it sank" or whatever, which seems awfully lame to me in this day and age.

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