How do we lose an airplane

[Savannahmann]

75. Not really.

There is a series of shows called Air Crash Investigations, or Mayday, or Air Investigations depending on the nation where it is shown. Many of these episodes are available on You Tube.

Many times there is no call because the pilot is very busy trying to fly the plane. Air France flight that went down in the Atlantic a few years ago. The pilots are discussing the problem, and trying to fly the plane, and never made a call. Similar accidents have happened many times. The pilots were just too busy to make a radio call.

When you are making a call, you're supposed to tell the controllers what kind of a problem you are having. With alarms going off and screaming at you, it may be difficult to diagnose the problem as it is. Discussing the details of your efforts with ATC may slow you down.

China Air flight 006 did not respond to several calls from ATC while they were struggling with the problem. Once they had the plane more or less stable, they made the call declaring an emergency.

The Gimli Glider had to wait until the emergency impeller generator deployed before they had radios working to report the problem of running out of gas in midair. They had reported being low on fuel, and then they were off the air.

So the absence of a mayday call shows only that the pilots didn't have time to inform anyone of what was going on, the plane may have suffered a catastrophic incident, like the airplane that exploded over Long Island Sound, or the United Jet that landed better than could be hoped at Sioux City with no control after an engine explosion took out all three of the hydraulic systems.

Taca Airlines flight 110 could not report to ATC what was going on until the APU was started, an event that took more than two minutes. BTW, that is one of the best emergency landings ever. That accident taught us that the engine design on the 737 was not as good as we had thought, and a redesign/modification was needed to make the engines safer.

Before the pilot can report what is going on, he/she has to do the first thing that they are paid to do. Fly the fucking plane. If they can't do that, then they're not going to waste precious time reporting that they're going in, they're going to be fighting to the last second to make that plane fly.

We have to find the Cockpit voice recorder, and the Flight Data Recorder. They provide a lot of information on what went wrong. The alarms that sound are caught on the voice recorder. The position of controls is found on the flight data recorder. With that information, you can be 80% sure what happened. Using that information, you know what parts of the plane are absolutely vital to be recovered.

BTW, the China Air 006 accident started when an engine failed in flight. The cause of the engine failure was determined to be a worn throttle linkage that was worn a few thousandths of an inch beyond specifications. In other words, a part that was worn a little too much caused an engine to fail. A mistake by the pilot led to a plane nearly crashing into the ocean.

A failure of a component could easily bring the plane down. Just look at the DC-10 problems with the cargo door. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_DC-10#Cargo_door_problem

Right now, we don't know what brought the plane down. We need to find the wreck, and the black boxes, in order to learn the truth.

Maintenance could be a problem too. Chalk airlines suffered maintenance problems that led to a catastrophic accident in Miami Harbor.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chalk%27s_Ocean_Airways_Flight_101

I hope this gives you, and others, the briefest of overviews of the kinds of accidents that can happen, and how the pilots are often rather busy trying to fly the plane, and just don't have time to say the magic words Mayday.