Sir Richard Branson: These dramatic pictures bring home the horror of what happened last week. It’s very sad and I hope the investigators reach conclusions as quickly as possible.

Recovery personnel have located the vertical fin of the Air France Airbus A330 which crashed in the South Atlantic on 1 June.

The Brazilian defence ministry says it has discovered "dozens of structural components" from the aircraft.

Search teams have also retrieved a total of 16 victims, it adds. There were 228 occupants on the aircraft when it disappeared en route to Paris from Rio de Janeiro.





Anyone besides me think they did some abrupt manuver in the storm and the tail came off the A/C like the AAR A/C in NYC? I can't imagine what the crew thought if they had any time at all to try and control an A/C that had no controls left. Scary!

Looks that way. Wonder if some freak storm would generate enough force to actually break it off ...?? Some combination of torsional load from the turbulence combined with aggressive control inputs and perpendicular pressure spike ... it's a big ol flat surface - not hard to imagine ...

Not hard at all when you consider a tail broke off an Airbus in NY a few years back. Just by using the rudder.

It is established fact that commanded control inputs can cause the vertical stabilizer to break off of the aircraft

No underlying "Cause" you could do it intentionally on any of several airbus aircraft.

After the NYC crash Airbus "fixed" the problem by telling pilots "don't do that"

this is the aircraft mfg that designs their flight control systems so that it that takes over so many functions and is so cabable of overruling the pilot yet will obey control inputs that will cause the rudder to snap off.


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"Airbus - Just Say No ..."

They scare the hell out of me. And I'm stuck riding a 330 AMS/DET in August. Kinda makes me nauseous.

Maybe they'll locate the boxes and ground the fleet. Eight weeks until the flight. I'm probably out of luck.

quote:

Wonder if some freak storm would generate enough force to actually break it off ...??

Doesn't take a freak storm to do that. Any fully developed cumulonimbus can do it. The vertical wind shear inside one of those things is awesome to contemplate.

So over the last decade the score is

Airbus 2
Boeing 0

For having major quality of life pieces fall off.

Works for me, but see my brilliant analysis on the other Airbus thread jorge