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WORLD> Europe
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Missing plane flew well beyond range of radar
(Agencies)
Updated: 2009-06-03 14:49 Air traffic controllers lost contact with the jet just as it was entering a band of violent thunderstorms and heavy turbulence that stretched along the equator. All modern planes like the A330 are equipped with weather radar that displays a multicolored map showing hazardous weather in yellow or red colors.
Since thunderstorms can tower to altitudes of more than 60,000 feet (18,000 meters), where passenger planes cannot climb over them, pilots will often weave left and right to find a route that avoids the worst of the weather.
Some analysts have speculated that the pilot may have been trying to return to Fernando de Noronha, about 220 miles (355 kilometers) off Brazil's northeastern coast, when disaster struck. The airport there, built by the US military during World War II, has a runway that is more than 6,000 feet (1,800 meters) long, sufficient for an Airbus A330 to land safely in case of emergency. As the crash investigation progresses, analysts will zero in on the flight data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder, if they are recovered from ocean depths up to 9,800 feet (3,000 meters). "The aircraft was cruising at 35,000 feet (10,500 meters)," Ewers said. "Wreckage could have dispersed over a wide area of ocean and then drifted even further apart while sinking to the ocean floor a couple of miles (kilometers) down." Despite the lack of radar data, officials from the US National Transportation Safety Board and from Eurocontrol say that investigators have many ways to begin investigating the accident even before they recover any wreckage or the black boxes. "Investigators will have to do a forensic analysis, by piecing together all available information as best they can," said Jim Hall, a former chairman of the NTSB. They will review the maintenance records of the aircraft, interview the crews who flew the plane in the last few weeks and go to the locations where recent maintenance was done to interview mechanics. They will also study the personal histories of the crew members and reconstruct what they did in the last 36 hours before the crash. "In other words, they'll be compiling as much background information as they can to compensate for the lack of other data," Hall said.
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