Plane missing

[Rodo]

An Algeria airliner has gone missing soon after takeoff. It has gone completely off the radar and has been missing for over 6 hours.
There are 110 passengers and 6 crew on board


http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-28460625

[Diflower]

Just this minute heard about it Rodo

[meriad]

such a worry and so very very sad

[Aggers]

Oh, No!

Not another.

[meriad]

First reports are saying that they very strongly suspect bad weather and I really hope that that is the cause; because another act of deliberate terrorism just doesn't bear thinking about

[Kaz]

Just appalling

[Suff]

That makes 3 in very short order. One to trigger happy idiots with big toys and two (it would appear), to weather.

I'm just so sorry for the families.

I recall watching a program about a 747 which tried to fly into a pacific island mountain as it was landing. One of the accident inspectors was talking about "assessing" the airlines you fly with. OK Malaysian is a well respected airline, but the other two, not so much. The inspector was saying that if you want to assess the risk of flying on an airline, you need to check the country and how it values human lives. The more it values human lives, the greater the chance that the airline will have very well trained crews who know what to do in all circumstances, storm, fog, whatever. OK it didn't work so well for the Air France Airbus which went down in the Atlantic, but in fairness, nobody at that time believed that a pilot could actually crash an airbus through incompetence. The computers on board were supposed to forbid it.

It appears that this plane was on charter with crew from an [edit] Spanish [/edit] company.... Also probably not helped by the fuel quality issue in Africa. Bring it all together and it just spells tragedy.

A lot of families have lost loved one's these last two weeks.

[Diflower]

Do you think all these 'minor' airlines just get a bit lax when they plod along ok for a few years?
Without the big names' reputation maybe they just don't pay quite so much attention as they should?

[Suff]

Having flown as much as I have and seen/read as much as I have about aircraft accidents, I realise just how important simulator time is for pilots. It's not the 999 times things go OK that we have to worry about. It's the 1 time things go wrong and the pilot must do exactly everything right.

From what I read, if pilots are not constantly reminded of what to do when things go wrong, they are like any other human, they make mistakes. My father was an aircraft electrician all his working life, their motto was "you can't just step outside and fix it at 25,0000 feet".

Smaller airlines have less leeway to spend valuable pilot time on that kind of training and then it's up to Governments to make sure they do....

[pederito1]

I understand the Airbus computers do hand back to the pilots if things get too difficult. There was the one in Russia where the pilot left his son in the cockpit flying the plane with the inevitable result.