Could a Meteor Have Brought Down Air France 447?

niktemadur writes "In light of an Air Comet pilot's report to Air France, Airbus, and the Spanish civil aviation authority that, during a Monday flight from Lima to Lisbon, '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 Cosmic Variance blog team on the Discover Magazine website muses on the question 'What is the probability that, for all flights in history, one or more could have been downed by a meteor?' Taking into account total flight hours and the rate of meteoric activity with the requisite mass to impact on Earth (approximately 3,000 a day), some quick math suggests there may be one in twenty odds of a plane being brought down in the period from 1989 to 2009. Intriguingly, in the aftermath of TWA flight 800's crash in 1996, the New York Times published a letter by Columbia professors Charles Hailey (physics) and David Helfand (astronomy), in which they stated the odds of a meteor-airplane collision for aviation history up to that point: one in ten."

Re:Could a Meteor Have Brought Down Air France 447

[siloko]

The BBC has a better explanation in their article about Airbus reissuing guidelines on what to do when speed detectors give differing results, how this may happen and why it could have caused the crash. From the article: "Meteorologists say that the Air France Flight 447 had entered an unusual storm with 100mph (160km/h) updrafts that sucked water up from the ocean. As the moisture reached the plane's high altitude it quickly froze in -40C temperatures (thus freezing the airspeed detectors). The updrafts would also have created dangerous turbulence, they say. More info here [bbc.co.uk].

Re:Could a Meteor Have Brought Down Air France 447

[hattig]

Or that Jumbo Jet the US military equipped with a missile-killing laser system.

Military test gone bad?

Or just an unfortunate and sad accident that happens every so often. There's a good chance it was very large hail stones that can crack aircraft windows, that would explain the decompression if a couple hit the same window and smashed it out, plus extreme turbulence and lightning - none of which on their own would even worry a pilot.

Re:EMP Testing

[mftb]

I enjoy flying simply because the idea is so absurd. I often try to imagine what it would be like to show someone from the 1700s or so around the world as it is today and modern flight is one of the more ridiculous things - you have these massive hunks of metal held in the air by the air itself that carry people at high speeds and high altitudes all over the world. In flying, I feel I have experienced something amazing the human race has achieved. Car travel, by contrast, is largely mundane.

Re:In the absence of any evidence of any sort.....

[slack_justyb]

Tin foil hat?

Re:EMP Testing

[Lurker2288]

The thing to remember is that statistics speak to populations, not individuals. As you noted, the odds of an accident for a typical driver may be X, but if you drive safely, or very rarely, or only in optimal conditions, etc., then your personal risk will be less than X.

It should also be remembered, though, that people tend to underestimate the extent to which they match the statistics. Like that Garrison Keillor joke about Lake Wobegone, "where all the children are above average." I think I read once (no citation, sorry) that something like 80% of drivers believe they're above average in driving skill. They can't all be right!

Re:Could a Meteor Have Brought Down Air France 447

[SatanicPuppy]

The probability of a lightning strike is quite high. It happens all the time. This article is about meteors, not about lightning or your personal prejudices. The odds of it having been a terrorist bomb are practically nil at this point, given that no one has been able to convincingly claim credit.

Re:EMP Testing

[Tom]

Actually, you can change your chances of survival in a plane as well. Not choosing the ultra-cheap airline that's known for skipping maintainance every now and then, for example.

The rest is, sadly, intuition not fitting to facts if numbers are very large or small. Rationally, you would always choose a 0.1% to die in a situation with no control over a situation where, depending on your behaviour, your chance is between 0.1% and 0.2% - but if you'd set that experiment up, I'm pretty sure that a lot of people would choose the "I'm in control" situation, even though even if they play it perfect, they're no better off. But our intuitive feeling doesn't say "no matter what I do, there's still a risk". Our intuition of control is "if I do everything right, nothing bad will happen".

Re:Could a Meteor Have Brought Down Air France 447

[dgatwood]

Some pilots on PPRuNe suggested that it is very unlikely to find any hail of significant size at FL350 (35,000 feet), and that if you find any at all, it was blown up there from a lower altitude (i.e. relatively low speed). Besides, there's no reason to believe a hail ding is going to bring down something the size of an A330.... That said, anything is possible, I suppose, particularly given the amount of composite material involved.

Re:EMP Testing

[AvitarX]

That's interesting.

I don't want to knock air travel, which is truly remarkable, but on a holiday weekend, when a highway is at capacity, but not over, and dusk is upon me, the sight of thousands of cars traveling together at 70+ MPH truly amazes me.

The fact that I can, at a moments notice, simply travel hundreds of miles (days or even weeks of travel historically), with hundreds of pounds of stuff, do something and travel back, all in a weekend is quite marvelous.

And I would never fly anywhere in that short of a period willingly (yuck!), though I did it once pre-911.

Re:Reduces liabilty.

[Junior J. Junior III]

Super, now all the insurance company should need to do is establish that God exists.

And if they can do that, then isn't the entire Universe an Act of God?

What do we pay insurance for, then?

Re:In the absence of any evidence of any sort.....

[TapeCutter]

Glad you emphasised REAL, WILD speculation and INVALID statistical analysis are not what I call real.

Fact: There are no recorded cases of death by meteor, unless you count a dog in France.

Given this information how do they get the statistic of around 100 people per decade killed by meteor without ignoring reality?

I agree with the OP, TFA is psuedo-scientific ambulance chasing.

Re:EMP Testing

[CuriHP]

You may not be able to move your whole body that fast, but you can get parts up to that speed. It's not too hard to throw a small object at highway speed, so being able to react to someone else doing it could be quite useful. Same idea applies to a punch or kick.

don't blame statistics

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not statistics that are at fault, it's your understanding of them. When someone says that the probability that you're going to die in a car crash is X, this is a correct statement. Of course it doesn't take into account other things like your speed, and it doesn't claim to. If you wanted to analyze that, then you would want to calculate P(dying in a car crash | you stay under the speed limit, wear your seat belt, pay attention to the road), which is of course a lower probability.

There's nothing wrong with statistics if you understand what's being calculated.

Re:EMP Testing

[asCii88]

Yet there are more car crashes that people crashes. I, instead, get impressed while walking down a street full of people and being able to slow my speed, move faster, turn a little, turn a lot, make a step aside, stop moving, all that while singing a song or thinking about some maths problem or linguistic thing, and still not bumping into somebody.

Re:The suck!

[Is0m0rph]

Really God must have given you a chance if you somehow survived a 35,000 foot fall to the sea to drown eh?

Re:EMP Testing

[TerranFury]

I've often had the same thought, but my focus is a tiny bit different: I think about the gas turbines that propel planes. In the end, we're "just" burning a bunch of stuff. It's an application of the discovery of fire millions of years ago. Something about that juxtaposition of the primitive with the sophisticated -- in combination with the thought of how people from the past would see this -- just fills me with awe.

Re:EMP Testing

[drinkypoo]

the trouble comes when people don't keep a large enough margin of safety and something breaks the general rules that allow you to treat the situation that way.

The trouble comes when the real world intersects with your imaginary situation. At 60 mph there's four times the potential force acting on your tires than at 30 mph, and the interface between road and rubber changes dramatically — to say nothing of the rubber itself! The same is true of every other little bit of your car, except that some of those relationships produce a multiplication and/or reduction of force, such as the lever arms in your suspension. The behavior of the bushings, springs, and shock absorbers is wildly different when you hit a bump at 30 mph than when you hit it at 60 mph.

If you're not thinking about what each tire is going to do at your given speed when you press a pedal or turn the wheel, you're not driving. You're chairing a committee.

Re:EMP Testing

[geekoid]

"Yet there are more car crashes that people crashes. "

That's not reu at all. Far more people run into each other all the time. They just don't leave piles of wreckage on the road, and the mas and speeds are both a lot lower.

Re:EMP Testing

[drinkypoo]

This is also why there is such a huge push against automated driving

The push against automated driving was initiated by the car companies, it was called buying up rail, bus, and streetcar lines, mismanaging them to drive users away, then terminating them when it could be justified by lack of profit.

There's one right way to do automated driving, it's called rails. Roads are stupid, wasteful, and unnecessary. They are inefficient to produce and to maintain. Their only advantage is that tanks can still drive on them when they've been bombed full of holes and if we're going to stick to a military mentality forever, someone please let me know how to get off this fucking planet without cutting off my nuts and eating the pudding.

Re:EMP Testing

[fishbowl]

>I read somewhere that statistically, airplanes are safer than cars, you're more likely to die in a car accident.

"per event" or "per hour?"

Over the past ten years, how many hours have you spent in airplanes?
How many hours have you spent in cars?

Usually, statistics that say "planes are safer than cars" equate these two, very different values.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Dude... you have so not imagined it..

[Uncle Rummy]

However, a person of the 18th century wouldn't have any context in which to evaluate the relative planet-shrinking abilities of cars vs. planes. Ballpark it at 500 miles per day for a car vs. 10,000 miles per day for a plane. To a Parisian commoner of that era, that's a matter of being able to travel to Turin vs. Tokyo, both of which are just names of far away places to him, if he's even heard of them.

For comparative purposes, imagine that somebody from the future were to show a modern Earthican two forms of space travel - one that could take you to Polaris (430 light years) in a day, and one that could take you to the Orion Nebula (1,500 ly). Sure, if you know the distances it's obvious that one's faster than the other, but what does that mean to you? Both are so far from anything you know, and so far beyond any distance that you ever imagined travelling, that the difference is meaningless to you.

debris from another plane?

[Ogive17]

For those following the story you might have already read they believe the debris they picked up is not from the Air France flight. Is it possible there was a mid-air collision with an unregistered plane/jet?

Re:Dude... you have so not imagined it..

[LunaticTippy]

I disagree. A fast horse on good terrain could make 100 miles per day. A car is just like a somewhat faster horse. A plane, not requiring roads and able to travel anywhere on the planet in a day is a several order of magnitude increase.

Re:EMP Testing

[dbcad7]

Over 100 incidents in 9 years.. and how many auto incidents in the hour since you posted ? .. how many bus or train incidents in the same 9 years ? .. how many flights takeoff and land at your nearest airport each day ? .. What is interesting, is that I have asked people who won't fly because they fear crashing, if they are afraid of planes falling on them.. no one ever said they were, but there are probably more planes flying over most people per year than flights taken by them.

Re:EMP Testing

[skeeto]

I think I read once (no citation, sorry) that something like 80% of drivers believe they're above average in driving skill. They can't all be right!

Almost every human on earth has an above average number of legs. All those drivers could be right.

ADS-B

[sponga]

UPS uses this system on all their planes, not only for air safety but also for tracking.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADS-B [wikipedia.org]

Pilots and air traffic control love the system, it allows them to see visually where everyone is located/speed/atlitude/GPS and all broadcasting is done from the plane to ground based radar.

Doesn't take much bandwidth at all, as they can use the VHF channel, 978 MHz UAT and another mode.

Re:EMP Testing

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, crashing more than once is not _that_ uncommon if you consider that the first (or any subsequent) crash may not be fatal. The Gimli Glider had a wing tip hit the ground on landing a couple of years later (ATC OKed a landing on an icy runway; the plane ended in the ditch). An aircraft that lost a tail cone over Boston (loss of one passenger through the opening) landed in flames in Cincinnati years later ( ~20 killed). I know of a few others, but I think you get the idea. Some in the airline industry believe that there's such a thing as jinxed aircraft as it seems that the same few aircraft keep suffering tragic or at least extremely scary flights.