Air France Flight 447 en route from Rio de Janeiro to Paris disappeared over the Mid-Atlantic (just north of the equator) at approximately 1.33UTC on June 1st 2009.
No mayday signal was received from the aircraft and almost two weeks later, aviation officials have yet to give a coherent explanation as to what could have caused the sudden demise of a high tech Airbus 330-200 passenger plane. Severe weather has also been proposed as a possible cause. This theory is based on the report that at about 1am UTC the pilots reported that they had encountered “stormy weather with strong turbulence”. Daniel G. Kottlowski, a senior meteorologist with Accuweather.com calculated that thunderstorms in the region of the crash could have generated updrafts in the range of 100 miles per hour, although he conceded that this was not unusual weather for the region.
According to commercial transport pilots familiar with the route, it is likely that the flight crew of the Air France aircraft was aware of the intensity of the storm in the flight path at that altitude long before actually encountering the thunderstorms. Using the on board radar pilots can see and fairly easily navigate around particular storm cells.
Lightning is also unlikely to have caused any serious problems because modern aircraft are designed to take lightning strikes without significant damage. The most compelling evidence against the weather theory however is the fact that two Lufthansa jets flew through the same area both before and after Flight 447 without incident.
On Monday, a source with access to the data transmitted to the World Meteorological Organisation told Reuters in Paris that the two jets passed through turbulence before and after the plane without incident, leaving experts scrambling to assess the weather’s role in the disaster.
Indeed, no less than 12 other flights shared more or less the same route with Flight 447 around the time of the accident. No weather problems were reported by any of the planes.
Recent reports that passengers bodies have been found 54kms apart, strongly suggesting that the plane broke apart high in the air.
Though no one yet knows for sure what destroyed the plane, investigators are concerned that it was not caused, as first suggested, by a lightning strike or a bomb or a meteorite. Instead they fear it was a fatal collision of high technology and the brute force of nature.
Ah yes, the “brute force of nature”! Now that is getting close, but even closer was the reference to a meteorite.
Within a few days of the crash the first piece of evidence that something other than high technology and weather destroyed AF 447 came in.
A Spanish pilot with Air Comet (which flies from South and Central American countries to Madrid) flying the Lima to Madrid route reported a bright descending light in the region of AF 447’s last position:
“Suddenly we saw in the distance a bright intense flash of white light that fell straight down and disappeared in six seconds”.
At the time of the sighting, (the co-pilot and a passenger who was in the front kitchen area of the airplane also saw it), the Air Comet aircraft was located at seven degrees north of the equator and at the 49th meridian West. The estimated location for the A-330-203 until the moment of its disappearance is at the equator and around the 30th meridian West
It seems reasonable to suggest that an aircraft would not produce a bright and intense white light for six seconds as it fell from the sky. The many dozens of meteorite and fireball sightings over the past few years however are often seen as bright white flashes of descending light.
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