What happened to Flight 447?

As long as we are talking about pilot inputs leading to broken airplanes, consider this important point: when the airbus FBW system is up and running as it should, there are all kinds of limits placed on the pilot's ability to move the control surfaces of the airplane. It's sort of like a governor on a car engine. If you pull the stick or step on the rudder too far, too fast in any direction, the computer, in essence, ignores the human being's commands and keeps the plane inside the flight envelope. This is designed to stop a plane from stalling, spinning, gaining too much speed or pulling too many "Gs" because a pilot is over-correcting.

But as the electrical systems start failing, the machines lose their authority to trump the humans fairly quickly. Depending on how many multiple failures of redundant systems there are, the so-called flight control laws change to "Alternate", "Abnormal Alternate" and finally "Direct Law". At each level, the pilots get more authority to move the control surfaces without the machine's intervening. So a combination of loosened fly-by-wire reins, cruise speed and extreme turbulence would increase the potential for an in-flight breakup.

We do know whatever happened on that airplane in its last few minutes was nothing short of horrifying. It is hard to imagine the kind of turbulence that would break up an airliner. My heart goes out to the passengers and crew.

Will we ever know what happened? This one will be hard. The wreckage will be likely strewn over a wide area - and locating the Flight Data and Cockpit Voice Recorders won't be easy since they are likely at the bottom of the sea - possibly 24,000 feet below the surface. Even if they are transmitting their homing signals, you would need a lot of luck and a pretty stout submersible to retrieve them. But that may be moot - as simply knowing where to search will be difficult.

One thing which may help: those automatic messages indicating system failures - which are designed primarily to give mechanics a heads up about problems so they can turn a plane around on the ground faster - no doubt contained much more information than is now in the public realm.

Which brings me to this wild idea: why not send steady streams of telemetry from airliners to the ground all the time - via the space shuttle? This effectively places the "black boxes", safe and sound - on the ground. Imagine how invaluable that much data would be right now - given the distinct possibility this could remain an unsolved mystery.

We all need to know what happened to Air France 447. Is there something that makes the A-330 fleet unsafe in certain conditions? In the absence of real facts, will conspiracy theorists spin a tale of terrorism and government cover ups? Did the flight crew make crucial errors in judgment? Or was this an unavoidable scenario - bad luck with odds so long that nothing or no one is really to blame?