66 Dead: Egyptair Flight 804 Crashed Into the Mediterranean

[legoboyvdlp]

That the actual plane?

[KL-666]

Of course not, nothing of that plane has been lifted yet. It is an illustration of how a cockpit fire can cause a leak in your cabin.

Btw, A cockpit fire does not necessarily need to have blazing flames. Smoldering through the systems can produce quite enough heat.

Kind regards, Vincent

[HJ1an]

Those acars seem to have been confirmed by BEA. To me they indicate a fire chewing away the systems in the rh-side of the cockpit. To avoid a decompression when the heat would chew through the skin, they may have started a rapid descent and mishandled it, either by getting control problems or getting incapacitated. Or by themselves, you know what bus pilots can be like. I heard that the boxes are located. Let them tell what happened.

Btw, the window sensors are temperature sensors to assist anti-ice and window heating to regulate themselves.

Well, if that is the case, logically then the AVIONICS SMOKE (or whatever label it uses for that area) would come up first, followed by ANTI ICE R WINDOW and R SLDIING WINDOW SENSOR, way before lavatory smoke. Unless there's some wiring or something in the lavatory / no smoke sensors in the cockpt (which would be nuts)..

00:26Z 3044 ANTI ICE R WINDOW
00:26Z 561200 R SLIDING WINDOW SENSOR
00:26Z 2600 SMOKE LAVATORY SMOKE
00:27Z 2600 AVIONICS SMOKE
00:28Z 561100 R FIXED WINDOW SENSOR
00:29Z 2200 AUTO FLT FCU 2 FAULT
00:29Z 2700 F/CTL SEC 3 FAULT

[HJ1an]

Automated messages sent from the aircraft suggest that some type of fire had broken out prior to the crash. Whether this fire was caused by a bomb or other incendiary device, or by hazardous cargo, or by a malfunction in one of the plane’s systems, is unknown.

Meanwhile, some in the media have been making an issue over the lack of a distress call from the crew. This isn’t something to focus on, and is most likely meaningless. Communicating with air traffic control is not a priority when dealing with an onboard emergency. The task hierarchy calls first for dealing with the emergency itself: keeping the aircraft under control, troubleshooting the problem, running the checklists and so on. If and when time permits, ATC is brought into the loop. This is especially true if something happens during the cruise portion of flight — as it did in EgyptAir’s case — when communication matters are less urgent than they’d be during landing or departure.

http://www.askthepilot.com/egyptair804/

[jwocky]

More reasoning for wondering is, why the pilots didn't know a few minutes earlier, something was wrong. To spread in about three minutes, it must be one hell of a fire already and I somehow doubt that this would be unnoticed because chances there, other systems around the smouldering cables would also show some effect. So I think, we still miss here something.

[HJ1an]

More reasoning for wondering is, why the pilots didn't know a few minutes earlier, something was wrong. To spread in about three minutes, it must be one hell of a fire already and I somehow doubt that this would be unnoticed because chances there, other systems around the smouldering cables would also show some effect. So I think, we still miss here something.

In my opinion, any detection of smoke would have the pilots calling emergency for landing priority.. that's what I'd do anyway. Not, you know, get out of the seat to swat at the fire with magazines or fire extinguisher.

Unless the comm switch itself is the fire, of course.

[KL-666]

Be careful not to read too much preciseness in acars. They are maintenance information, not precise investigative information. There is no guarantee that events occurred exactly at the mentioned time or that they are exactly in order of the events happening. The impreciseness is also expressed by leaving out the (milli)seconds.

Another thing is that smoke in the lavatory does not need to have it's origin there. Airflow is from front to back, so the smoke can have come from the cockpit area.

The windows messages do not necessarily mean that something occurred at the windows. They say the sensors are defective, which can also be caused by severed cables running from the windows to the electronics, or by the electronics themselves.

So be aware again that those acars tell us very little. Only that there was smoke in the electronics bay. Maybe also in the cockpit (lavatory smoke). But whether a fire started in the cockpit and then worked it's way to the electronics bay, or the other way around is hard to tell. Lavatory fire is hard to imagine in combination with electronics bay fire. There is no connection between lavatory and electronics bay.

Furthermore some systems were registered defective. But we do not know if the systems themselves were defective, or that the registering agent simply could not reach them anymore.

Kind regards, Vincent.

[jwocky]

Well, if ACARS says 2:27, we can't be sure, whether it was 2:27:30 or 2:27:32 ... but we can be pretty sure, it was not 2:15 ... because ACARS has a sending rhythm.
Well, yes, the window message obviously was no blast window but the sensor. We have no decompression warning there. And yes, the air flow goes front to back. However, why don't we draw the logical consequence here. If the lavatory smoke message refers to smoke coming from the cockpit, it means, there had to be already a considerable amount of smoke in there. More than it would be credible to go unnoticed. See, you can argue "maybe that smoke came from the cockpit" but then you have also to wonder, when did that smoke build up, from where as in where was the fire, and most of all, why was the cockpit crew a few minutes earlier unaware of it? Because skipping that part in asking question is like "smoke came from the cockpit because Scotty beamed it in there". And, for the sake of investigative logic, you can't just skip messages with "they don't give us anything". They are there, those messages. Maybe they are irrelevant, maybe they are unconnected, maybe they hint to something entirely different, We don't know, we have to find out, but we can't just ignore them.

Admittedly, my investigative experience come from other area, but the thinking is not so different. And yes, I am often confronted with the kind of "we have no idea so we ignore it" thinking, it drives me crazy on some days. Like "serial killers create clustered dump sites for revisiting". Yeah, about what is wrong with this generalized idea, I could write books. A whole library full. And then there is this one guy who created his clustered dump site along a road. Not just any road, but the only one there, the one, everybody has to take. So, obviously not the place where he can sit pants down and play with his victims, right? But because people don't want to be bothered with thinking about some things, they, and also otherwise hard-boiled and experienced detectives, ignore the fact. The road is there, the bodies were there, nothing goes away only because one refuses to think about it. But all too often, people play it like that. The result is clear, this guy is still out there and kills and at some point, we will find more dump sites full of dead girls and some moron will write me an email "Congratulations, Peter, you were right again" and it will not make me happy.

Now, get this example back to the crashed Airbus. The window message is there. Why? Why is it before the smoke message? If you say, it's maybe because the cable was severed by fire ... why is there later a message, the problem is fixed? Does that mean, the fire reconnected the cable? No kidding, maybe a short cut caused by molten solder? But, there are whole bundles of cables and firewalls. So, for smoke to come from the cockpit to the lavatory, at least one of those firewalls had to be compromised, right? Which means, we don't talk about a little smoldering here, we talk a fully blown cockpit fire. Now, how likely is it that such a fire only burns the cable of the R Window sensor? And that the pilots didn't notice a few minutes earlier that their rears were on fire and they were grilled? I would notice if my butt approaches well-done.
Soooo, obviously, the window message is mysterious in two ways. First because it is there and second because there are not many other messages. If you have a fire, there should be a lot of other sensors on the right going off because their cables are all melting. There are no messages and we all know how talkative Airbus computers go in such situations. So, there is some discrepancy that needs explaining. Ignoring it doesn't make it go away.

[KL-666]

Hello Jwocky,

There are different sorts of investigations. The ones you are used to may have some urgency. A homicide may lead to more. But in air crash investigation there is all the time in the world to evaluate the evidence and get to a conclusion that will help the industry forward. So generally such investigation clings more to facts and releases conclusions only after a year of investigation or so. There is just less hurry.

Kind regards, Vincent

[HJ1an]

Both good points - however, IMO, there is some urgency, because if it is a bomb or similar destructive device, the clock is ticking to find out what and how.

Also, just curious, what how does the smoke sensor work? because if it detects any sort of particulates, then it's possible it's not smoke at all, but very fine stuff in the air tripping it off.

Also, I'll be flying in June. A fire is not sitting well with me so I will convince my brain it is an attack caused by a lucky bomber slipping past security, confined to that region.