Striking flight attendants in Virgin?. Well, in the advert….I recently flew from Hong Kong in Premium Economy. Any of them looked like the lovely ones in the “Red Hot” campaign. Nothing turned their eyes in HKG airport when they were passing by 😀

In my cabin only male flight attandants. 😡

A piece of cake. You should have to see planes landing in crosswinds in SCQ or in other Spanish northwestern airports. That´s hard. 😀

Well, that´s the normal procedure. They simply don´t give information about the airline because in the case of charter flights they are probably still negociating with different airlines, to get the best price for the lease.

Even if the have the airline, changes occur quite frecuently. Even travelling with Pullmantur Cruises, in which they are supposed to be using their B747-400, you could get different airlines if the number of reservations are not good, or lower than expected.

I mean….literaly?. Or simply a verbal argument?. I once saw a fight behind the galley curtain (I was on row one) between two female flight attendants on a former Aviaco DC9-30 in a domestic flight. A journalist was close, and tried to separate them, and then wrote something in a newspaper.

Both were fired as well as the pilot on board. One was the wife, the other was the lover. 🙂

I am off to Singapore next friday. On my nerves again.

SQ A380 from London. Should I be happy?. Not quite. I have to admit that lately storms and turbulences are being a kind of headache for me. I don´t want to say, I am a flying piece of jelly, but I wonder how adverse is weather in Singapore. I know scattered t storms means little and frequent showers with lightening in local areas. I know 6:30 is not a proper time for a big storm to develop. SQ know their place, and are quite used to handle with the situation but still a matter of concern, because I don´t understand storms.

Probably because not many times pilots have explained the procedures, and media tend to alarm people. I have never thought of the actually encountering one in the middle of the flying path. But AF447 still keeps me asking…..Why did they get in there?. Why AF got into trouble while landing in Montreal?. Are we pushing the limits too much?. I am not assessing anything just asking.

I would love to hear some comments about the kind of storms one could encounter, how to know if all black clouds are necessarily turbulent, and if it´s starting be something wrong with the weather screens. I have some occurences in my mind, and despite the A380 being more stable I am really uneased, or more than usual.

Are we losing the battle of information?. Why can´t I trust clouds on landing?.

It´s hard for us, since it´s one of the main operators in our place. I tried to be sympathetic with them, but enough is enough. 😡

I am back, and I have been sent email, from a cousin of mine who is Iberia copilot and hearing his explanation. Too technical…I am trying to translate it roughly.

Being cautious about the reasons and assuring that they did their very best to save the plane, I have one theory, since I have had a similar event some years ago. We were crossing the area on may 2001, when I was coming back from Buenos Aires on a A340. We followed the same route than the crashed aircraft and were crossing a FIC (intertropical front). Don´t think we don´t where the bad weather is, don´t think it´s a compact thing. We usually find gaps to get through as the plane can´t overfly this storms. At FL370 we had moderate turbulences, and in 1 or 2 minutes we had a sudden external temperature rise from -49 to -19 C. Due this, we had to fly from a margin of 10.000 kh to 15.000 kg, out of regulations on this level having a stall.

Vibrations….we switched the autopilot off and went down losing 4000 fl. We were in the middle of the “Coffin Corner”, in other words stall for high and low speeds. Should we hadn´t switched the autopilot off, we would be down in the bottom of the seas. The autopilot had tried to mantein the altitude, keeping the power of the engines. That was not possible, and we would have got into an abnormal situation which it´s hard to overcome. It´s dark, and no signs of orientation.

According to Airbus you mustn´t disconect the autopilot while flying into severe turbulences, but such a serious situation isn´t considered.

ACARS:” New information provided by sources within Air France suggests, that the ACARS messages of system failures started to arrive at 02:10Z indicating, that the autopilot had disengaged and the fly by wire system had changed to alternate law.Between 02:11Z and 02:13Z a flurry of messages regarding ADIRU and ISIS faults arrived, at 02:13Z PRIM 1 and SEC 1 faults were indicated, at 02:14Z the last message received was an advisory regarding cabin vertical speed. That sequence of messages could not be independently verified.,”

When the autopilot can´t hold any longer it switchs off and the plane is fully out of control, then alternation in the control, inercial failure and ISIS, which is the emergency artificial horizon, then computer failure (PRIM1 and SEC1) and then the plane desintegrates. All occurs from 2.10z and 2,14z

It doesn´t make sense to me…..too technical and probably badly translated.