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Air France 447: The ‘Coffin Corner’ and a ‘Mesoscale’ Maw

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Re: Air France 447: The ‘Coffin Corner’ and a ‘Mesoscale’ Maw

#41

Post by ken »

dpifke wrote: post #36
anamax wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> However, as a realist I realize that the barrier to entry for airlines is very high and competition is sub-optimal. Is the barrier actually high? (I see new airlines every so often.) What are the actual barriers? If they're govt, why isn't reducing the barriers the right response? > So I'd settle for a government mandate of how high commercial airlines can fly. And govt would get it right because that's what they d…

Is the barrier actually high? Besides the obvious cost of acquiring multi-million dollar jetliners (which, if bought new, typically have to be ordered 5-10 years in advance of delivery) and signing leases for gate space and hiring ground crew at airports and so on? You also need FAA and TSA approved operations plans, adding for instance the cost of screening all your employees and equipping your planes with things li…

You don't need to buy new jetliners to run an airline. You can go to ILFC and rent them. Even big guys like American and Continental do this for some of their aircraft.

One webpage I found suggests the lease price for a 737 is between $50,000 - $100,000 per month (which seems reasonable, or maybe a little low). Wikipedia says YouTube's bandwidth costs are estimated at $1M per day, so the hardware cost of a couple aircraft doesn't seem all that expensive.

(Disclaimer: I know almost nothing about commercial aviation.)

Re: Air France 447: The ‘Coffin Corner’ and a ‘Mesoscale’ Maw

#42

Post by anigbrowl »

stcredzero wrote: post #37
anigbrowl wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like a rather suicidal market strategy. So you invite people to pay 2x to fly with FlySafe (perhaps an existing airline with n outstanding safety record that rebrands itself), milk the resulting controversy to sell tickets for a while, only to later have every untoward incident, no matter how trivial, spun into a damning indictment of your business philosophy? No thanks. Furthermore, the first time such a compa…

it's simply impractical in a mass market like commodity air travel. Uber-expensive executive flying, perhaps. If it wasn't for the coverage of this incident, I would never have known of the "coffin corner." How would market forces operate on factors of which the public is not even aware?

And until that pilot landed in the Hudson, I'm betting you never thought too much about birds getting sucked into jet engines (I certainly didn't). Perhaps the conclusion from this is that there isn't really much utility in your being aware of it, since you're not a pilot. That is to say, the knowledge is of little benefit to you as a consumer because the weight of this particular factor in the overall safety of air travel is not that big.

Like say you design software for something critical like medical devices, and one of these fails and somebody famous dies or a bunch of people die in different places. Suddenly everyone is talking about unit testing and software verification as it pertains to your field, someone with a talent marketing starts up safercoding.com and so on. I'm not sure the stock of human knowledge has really gone up.

Re: Air France 447: The ‘Coffin Corner’ and a ‘Mesoscale’ Maw

#43

Post by stcredzero »

lutorm wrote: post #40
stcredzero wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Instead of flying a lot lower and slower, how about marginally lower and slower? You could give the plane 50 knots leeway in speed and still fly over most of the weather out there. For conditions like the ones that the Air France flight was going through, this would seem prudent. You can't fly above thunderheads like that. Might as well get yourself into a safer part of the flight envelope in case something bad happe…

There is a maximum safe speed in turbulence (it's called "design maneuvering speed") and I really doubt they would exceed that in these conditions. (You want the wing to stall in case of severe turbulence, because the alternative is to overstress it. That's why you don't want to fly fast.)

Yes, but that depends on the amount of turbulence, yes? Perhaps the margin of safety needs to be bigger for that region of the ocean?

Re: Air France 447: The ‘Coffin Corner’ and a ‘Mesoscale’ Maw

#44

Post by mhb »

shizcakes wrote: post #3

Insightful but it seems that there's a lot of speculation about this. Theres an article from timesonline that tied some pieces together and answered some questions for me (like: "How do they know this much detail of the flight without the black box?" A: ACARS). I hope this is helpful to someone else: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/...

Q: ACARS? A: automatic communications and reporting system

Re: Air France 447: The ‘Coffin Corner’ and a ‘Mesoscale’ Maw

#46

Post by chipmunkninja »

While there is a lot of good information in this article, the tone is a bit too tabloid-sensationalist for my tastes.

"So while you are napping, eating or watching a movie on that flight to LAX, you should know the plane you are flying is cruising along at the ratty edge of its capabilities. Why? Money. The higher an airliner flies, the better gas mileage it gets."

Boo those big corporations for trying to pick optimal flight paths, save customers flight time, or otherwise make a buck (and who cares about all the environmentalists breathing down their necks about burning so much kerosene). How DARE they? Think of the children!!

The one thing common after all these crashes is the amount of looney speculation that goes on right after, and then we magically forget about it. Does anybody even remember the British Airways 777 from Beijing that landed short at Heathrow a couple of years back? The reason: entirely mundane - faulty fuel pump.

Re: Air France 447: The ‘Coffin Corner’ and a ‘Mesoscale’ Maw

#47

Post by tomiles »

dpifke wrote: post #35
tomiles wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm talking about satellite imagery like it is shown in the article, which is the only kind that would provide reliable and usable info for storm evasion. You need a view from above to see a storm size and not just a surface look at it from the sides (with a radar). Weather radar only provides limited information, like the article says. "interpreting its display is a bit of a black art." - "It is akin to a blind man…

More raw data to the cockpit is unlikely to help. Pilots have a lot of things going on and varying levels of weather knowledge and experience (even professional pilots - weather is but one thing you train on). A professional meteorologist on the ground who can interpret and summarize the relevant information is of way more use.

I agree that it's also useful but this is not black and white. It's not one ore the other, it should be both. Because when your flying into a storm front in the middle of the atlantic you are on your own and it's not that interpreting a satellite picture is a black art like radar. Besides that's why there are 2 of them in the cockpit. If a pilot can't handle that he shouldn't be flying a plane. It's like saying we shouldn't invest in new CT machines or other better medical imagery, doctors have more than enough data to handle.

Re: Air France 447: The ‘Coffin Corner’ and a ‘Mesoscale’ Maw

#48

Post by vinutheraj »

tomiles wrote: post #47
dpifke wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More raw data to the cockpit is unlikely to help. Pilots have a lot of things going on and varying levels of weather knowledge and experience (even professional pilots - weather is but one thing you train on). A professional meteorologist on the ground who can interpret and summarize the relevant information is of way more use.

I agree that it's also useful but this is not black and white. It's not one ore the other, it should be both. Because when your flying into a storm front in the middle of the atlantic you are on your own and it's not that interpreting a satellite picture is a black art like radar. Besides that's why there are 2 of them in the cockpit. If a pilot can't handle that he shouldn't be flying a plane. It's like saying we sh…

Er .. why should the pilot interpret it, can't we have a specialist inside the cockpit to interpret the meteorological data ?!

Re: Air France 447: The ‘Coffin Corner’ and a ‘Mesoscale’ Maw

#49

Post by david927 »

TweedHeads wrote: post #6

I will always say it was a bomb, and the more they try to make it look like it wasn't, the more I believe they are just trying to hide it from the public not to scare them to fly like in 2001. It was a bomb.

Both pilots of an Air Comet flight from Lima, Peru, to Lisbon, Portugal, sent a written report on the bright flash they said they saw to Air France, Airbus and the Spanish civil aviation authority, the airline told CNN.

"Suddenly, we saw in the distance a strong and intense flash of white light, which followed a descending and vertical trajectory and which broke up in six seconds," the captain wrote.

http://edition.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/americas/06/04/plane.crash

I think you were voted down unfairly. We don't know what happened, but whatever it was, it was instantaneous and caused a bright flash.

Re: Air France 447: The ‘Coffin Corner’ and a ‘Mesoscale’ Maw

#50

Post by tomiles »

vinutheraj wrote: post #48
tomiles wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that it's also useful but this is not black and white. It's not one ore the other, it should be both. Because when your flying into a storm front in the middle of the atlantic you are on your own and it's not that interpreting a satellite picture is a black art like radar. Besides that's why there are 2 of them in the cockpit. If a pilot can't handle that he shouldn't be flying a plane. It's like saying we sh…

Er .. why should the pilot interpret it, can't we have a specialist inside the cockpit to interpret the meteorological data ?!

because you can't fit in the extra guy in all cockpits :-) Would be unpractical and expensive to put a 3rd person there just for weather. Good updated meteo from the specialists on the ground, and basic training in and availability of satellite images in the plane.

Like it's said you might loose contact with any ground station when flying in the middle of nowhere or you might lose imaging data of the storm. So both should be there to provide a better standard than the current limited info of printed weather maps in preflight briefings, especially for long flights.

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