Air France Crash - shocking

[Cliphead]

All the way from 38,000 ft? Terrifying.

Not a pleasant experience. Windshear forces in storm cloud have been known to break aircraft apart, four engined airliners. There's a reason planes avoid thunderstorms and have weather radar to detect them.

[centurian]

Interesting table of travel safety statistics here.

Mmm. Interesting twist on statistics. So when people say "air travel is the safest", it's often down to distance - and because planes travel so much further, they are deemed "safer".

It is worth noting that the air industry's insurers base their calculations on the number of deaths per passenger-journey statistic while the industry itself generally uses the number of deaths per passenger-kilometre statistic in press releases

If I'm interested in whether I am going to have an accident using one form or another, surely it would be down to the likelihood of an accident occurring on a journey overall - and for that, air travel is one of the worst.

[Clever Hans]

Mmm. Interesting twist on statistics. So when people say "air travel is the safest", it's often down to distance - and because planes travel so much further, they are deemed "safer".

If I'm interested in whether I am going to have an accident using one form or another, surely it would be down to the likelihood of an accident occurring on a journey overall - and for that, air travel is one of the worst.

No (and until I'd taken a look at that table, I was sceptical of the air travel is safest claim, because I didn't know the passenger-deaths-per-mile figure).

If you were going to go to India from the UK (say), apart from the impracticality, the sum of deaths-per-journey by other means (assuming several legs by car/train/bus/etc.) would exceed that of a single flight.

If you went by motorbike alone, you'd be dead by the time you got to Turkey.

[Sysman]

Not a pleasant experience. Windshear forces in storm cloud have been known to break aircraft apart, four engined airliners. There's a reason planes avoid thunderstorms and have weather radar to detect them.

I saw a documentary on windshear, and the best policy is definitely avoidance.

[doodab]

what a lovely day

Sitting in the beer garden enjoying a mass of helles and the paper, grand prix commentary on the phone and sunglasses on.

[minestrone]

I am petrified with flying, takes a lot of lorazemaps to get me on a flight.

The FOS on plane parts is the lowest of any certified mechanised device where human life is a factor, down to 1.2 in some components.

[Zippy]

I am petrified with flying, takes a lot of lorazemaps to get me on a flight.

The FOS on plane parts is the lowest of any certified mechanised device where human life is a factor, down to 1.2 in some components.

Is this similar to Mean Time Between Failures?

[doodab]

Is this similar to Mean Time Between Failures?

Factor of safety.

[TimberWolf]

Lots of interesting speculation here, including that the autopilot took them into deep tulip and dumped them up there without a paddle, plus the warning systems that were remaining gave misleading indications. For example because the aircraft was so deeply stalled and out of a valid operating range (airspeed too slow) that the stall warning turned itself off, and turned back on when the pilots pushed down the nose partly restoring the situation, because the sensors started receiving credible data, then turned off again as the pilot hastily pushed the nose back up. In that scenario they thought they were plunging to the ground nose first rather than tail first. All speculation, but reading through the posts, some from experienced airline pilots, goes to show how complex flying a plane that does everything for you can become when things go wrong.

[OwlHoot]

Maybe one of the flyers here can answer this. If you're descending rapidly or in a stall, and given plenty of height, can't you just put one main flap up and the other down, with tail flaps both down, to turn or "fall away to the side", then hopefully sort of turn that into a dive. Then, once you pick up speed, you could hopefully level off back into normal flight.