I for one cannot imagine that an A321 can crash from FL310 like that because of an engine or isolated system failure …. I am almost sure the investigation will bring up another reason. IMHO only a complete computer/system failure could result in such a crash … but not an engine failure, and not even a double engine failure.
I know it’s too early … but what do other pilots think?
Aircraft is a whooping 18 years old!!! Minister of transportation has been working hard on the case of banning such old planes operation out Russia the last years (according to the press).
Outrageous. They should all be on the scrapheap.
Used to be proud of being 5 years younger than the youngest DC-9(30 years+) I flew in SAS -98 to -03. Best aircraft I ever flew.
Im going to be ahead of Peter on this one: “My bet is that some muppets managed to fly an Airbus in to the ground again”
Single engine failure is not a reason enough.
We will have to wait and see.
Sorry, but that’s B.S: An 18 year old Airbus, maintained properly, is just as good as new one. (My Piper is 44 years old and flies just aswell as a new one too).
Flyer59 wrote:
Sorry, but that’s B.S:
YEPP. Somebody should tell the press that. And CC in the Russian minister of transportation while you’re at it ;)
There is hardly anything I hate more that opportunistic journalists, when 200+ people is laying dead in a smoking hole….
Oh, yes. In three hours listening to the radio in the car i heard so much unqualified stuff … but it’s really normal, the media, and even most of the “Experts” have no idea … The last news was that “weather cannot be the reason, becasue the visibility was 8 km” …
Weird accident from what we know.
By the looks of it so far, the aircraft flew a normal departure and joined the Airway UL550 towards El Arish, climbed up to slightly above FL300 before it went into a massive descent and contact was lost. According to some reliable sources there was a radio com by the crew requesting a diversion due to engine trouble. The wording is not known however.
At the time of the event, another Russian A321, flight number NWS1969 was about 10 km away from the accident airplane when whatever happened happened, FL330 flying opposite heading, so actually looking pretty much in that direction. I wonder if they saw something.
A total loss of control like that due to “engine trouble” is quite unusual, particularly at that stage of flight. And whatever it was, it came quite suddenly too, as if they had had earlier indications of a severe trouble, they could easily have diverted to either Taba, Eilath or back to Sharm el Sheik. Ahead they were almost in gliding distance to El Arish.
So whatever happened must have been quite sudden and unexpected.
Yesterday evening Israeli TV showed a clip (mobile phone) of an aircraft at high altitude that suddenly starts to trail huge amount of black smoke while going down very fast.
The airplane had a tailstrike in 2001… and the tail was found 8 km from the main crash site?
No, I am not into speculations … but that doesn’t sound good.
The tail is in several portions. The main part was about 2.2 km from the main wreckage, the APU and cone further and I have not seen any pics of the horizontal stab yet.
Important to know is that the whole wreckage is pretty much below and around the point of last radar contact. Which means the point of the last contact appears to have been the break up point as well.
you can check maps of the distribution of the parts here.
http://www.avherald.com/h?article=48e9abe4&opt=0
My first reaction to that repair was indeed that. Right now, I am not so sure anymore looking at some of the pics coming out of Egypt. One of them shows a pretty ugly smoke trace coming out of the airplane, which somehow doesn’t look like it started on the ground.
I saw this pic today.
While I don’t know where exactly this part is located, the smoke trail does definitly look as if it came from the inside and was not a ground fire. We don’t know really but this (and some others) start to worry me.
Interesting web site, thank you!
