The A330-200 that crashed in the South Atlantic on July 1, 2009

Picture © Philippe Jeandy

I am progressing very slowly into the reading and understanding of BEA's Final Report of the Air France A330-200 accident  on July 1, 2009, while she was enroute from Rio do Janeiro/Galeao airport to Paris/ Charles de Gaulle one.

Moder airliners are full of automatic systems, so to understand the probable causes of an accident of one of these you have to understand, at least in a simple way, the working of the systems related to that causes.

From the very beginning, and due to the ACARS transmissions from the plane, it was almost evident that Flight AFR 447 crashed due to problems with her airspeed. Thus, the report dedicates a lot of pages to explain how important air data such as Mach number (M), Calibrated Airspeed (CAS), True Airspeed (TAS) and True Air Temperature (TAT) are calculated and presented to the flight crew...