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| Fox_Weather_News's Blog |
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The disappearance of Air France Flight 447 has investigators puzzled. The latest hypothesis targets the blame on strong turbulence and large hailstones from thunderstorms.
Airplanes avoid thunderstorms in their path by soaring over them. Sometimes, thunderstorms tower too high. In the tropical area where the Airbus disappeared, violent storms erupt and gobble up the warm, moist air from the trade winds to ascend to heights over 50,000 feet--an altitude higher than a jet airliner can fly.
To protect flights, air traffic control monitors the latest forecasters and will guide pilots around unstable air masses that can abruptly spark violent thunderstorms. Right now, investigators have more questions than answers. How did air traffic control interpret the forecast? Did thunderstorms occur too abruptly for detection? What exactly did happen?
Thunderstorms have several, potentially deadly obstacles for flights. Designed to withstand these obstacles, lightning, large hail, and wind shear rarely bring down a plane. Though, wind shear, a change in wind speed and direction over a short distance, can cause catastrophic conditions for pilots taking off or landing. Near the ground, a thunderstorm could produce an updraft that strikes the plane with a headwind. The headwind will cause too much lift, so the pilot will correct for this by steering the plane toward the ground. As he does, the plane will suddenly experience a strong tailwind, from a downdraft, that will sink the plane down toward the ground that lurks only 1000s of feet below. Thus, pilots are advised to not take off or land with imminent thunderstorms in the area.
As for the Air France Flight 447, an automated message from the airliner's computer system reported electrical failure and loss of cabin pressure before the Airbus disappeared.
To understand how this thunderstorm could have damaged the plane, I spoke with Mark Magnotta, a Penn State Aerospace Engineer and a structural analysis intern for Boeing Commercial Airplanes. He explained that "turbulent forces acting on the airplane can cause severe structural damage and failure. Engineers take into account the maximum forces an airplane should ever experience under different flight conditions, such as during ascent, cruising, and descent and the airplanes are designed with these criteria in mind. Therefore, these everyday forces are sustained by the airplane with no problems--it is when the forces become too great or too frequent that the airplane's structures can become fatigued and damaged."
Drew Anderson Penn State Meteorologist and Fox Weather Correspondent
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