The loss Tuesday of a state-of-the-art airliner in mysterious circumstances is of deepest concern, not simply to regular air travelers but to airlines everywhere and in particular for the safety operations specialists at the International Air Transport Association (IATA). The disappearance of the Air France Flight 447 from Rio de Janeiro to Paris 400 miles off the Brazilian coast has shaken the experts as well as its makers, because until now the A330 had an unblemished in-flight safety record.
Since there was no voice message from the flight deck crew announcing an emergency, only automatic signals indicating electrical faults and cabin depressurization, whatever disaster overtook the aircraft, happened with considerable speed. Had the plane lost power and begun to descend from its operational ceiling of around 30,000 feet, there would have been ample time to send a Mayday message. That no such transmission was made suggests strongly that the aircraft was destroyed in midair. It was traveling through a notorious equatorial region known as the Inter-tropical Convergence Zone where Southeast and Northeast trade winds meet and propel warm moist air upward to produce major thunderclouds reaching up to 41,000 feet. It is more than 40 years since lightning alone caused a major air crash. Modern aircraft are designed to withstand lightning strikes, which are not in fact unusual, as well as massive stresses to wings caused by violent turbulence. The only part of an aeroplane that is not, however, shielded from a strike is the nose that houses the weather radar. It has been suggested by one expert, that an initial strike knocked out this radar, meaning the pilots could no longer pick their way around dangerous cumulus nimbus thunderhead clouds. Such storm cells produce major up winds and can also hurl hailstones the size of tennis balls.
If terrorism is ruled out, which at the moment it is being, then Flight AF 447 seems to have run into a series of untoward events that produced a catastrophe. The problem is no one will know for sure until the two flight recorders are recovered and the data analyzed. Yesterday Air France said even though wreckage has now been found in two areas 35 miles apart, the recorders might never be recovered. This may be unduly pessimistic given the beacons on the devices have another 28 days’ battery life and a French naval vessel with two remotely operated submarines is on its way to the disaster site. Even before it arrives, subsea microphones will be deployed in search of the signals.
If however the Air France executive is right and no data is recovered, a very big question mark will remain not just over the A330 but all modern aircraft that are supposedly capable of surviving major storms. There may even be fundamental and probably expensive major routing changes to avoid the worst seasonal storm cells. Unfortunately, the only certainty today is that the families of the 228 passengers and crew from no less than 28 different countries deserve our deepest sympathy for their loss.
The debate about two cultures
Science — and engineering — must not be alien territory for politicians, the media and policymakers, said The Times in an editorial yesterday. Excerpts:
Fifty years ago C.P. Snow, a research scientist, former civil servant and novelist who had paced the “corridors of power” before he invented the phrase, delivered a lecture in the Cambridge Senate House. Entitled “The Two Cultures”, it warned of the growing gulf between scientists and “literary intellectuals”, a class he described as “natural Luddites” who not only sneered at science as an inferior branch of learning and were ignorant of the Second Law of Thermodynamics but in their complacent uninterest in the scientific revolution were blind to the menaces of nuclear weapons, overpopulation and the gap between the rich and poor. They were, he announced portentously, slowly leading Britain into Venetian decadence.
His lecture was often naive, in parts sloppily argued and at times as bland as his novels. But it touched on an issue that had resonance in postwar Britain: Why had the education system so neglected science that most people could no longer understand the language, let alone the purpose, of those new technologies that were in the forefront of social and material “progress”?
Snow might have begun a useful debate on the teaching of science and the breadth of knowledge needed to be a public figure as rounded — indeed, almost spherical — as Snow. But then came the riposte. F.R. Leavis, a prickly, puritan Cambridge literary critic, delivered an ad hominem attack on Snow of such astonishing vitriol, so reptilian in its fusillade of personal abuse, that all discussion of the “two cultures” was lost in the cacophony of scandal. Not only were Snow’s warnings ridiculed; but the very notion that science was talking a language others could not follow was denounced as philistine nonsense.
The debate has not been stilled. Nor should it be.
