Good Reads About Air France 447

Scientists are trying to piece together what exactly happened on Air France Flight 447 that went down off the cost of Brasil on June, 1st. Some have great reading material, so have great images and projections of the flight path through the storm.

One blogger, Miles O'Brien from True Slant, has a great (and ongoing) blog about the crash. Here is the first link. You can go through the rest by clicking "Next Post" at the bottom: Dark Stormy Night.

Another scientist is Air Force meteorologist Tim Vasquez who put together cordinal data to show the flight path and possible crash sites. His data is here: Detailed Meteorological Analysis

Others have posted satellite images of the storm called a mesoscale convective system. It's essentially several storm, converging into one, feeding off one another, becoming a bad @$$ storm. Here is on image of the system:

I personally have NEVER seen black, grey and white on a Doppler radar image before. This had to be one strong storm!

Another image shows the storm, and the projected flight path of Flight 447. The cross is where the last transmission came that all the instruments were failing. Other labels mark the strong updrafts fueling the storm:

Finally the storm itself was massive. The top of the anvil of the cumulonimbus clouds were topping out at at least 56,000 feet! The flight level for flight 447 was only 35,000 feet. There was pretty much NO way this plane could have avoided this storm and subsequent crash. This image shows the vertical comparison of flight 447 and the storm system:

Hopefully they will find the black box to figure out exactly what happened, but until then all they have is speculation. This is pretty interesting (at least to me) to read about how insane it had to be for the pilots (and passengers) for flight 447, as well as how narrow of a "flight envelope" they had to fly through.