Frightening news, have a look here.Apparently the jet vanished from radar and all communications lost.They say there is little hope but it's not been found yet... uhhm.

All we can do is hope and pray that it is just a simple communications problem. :(But indeed it looks doubtful - the plane was supposed to land over 2 hours ago.

Unfortunately there is no more hope :-((

Unfortunately there is no more hope :-((

Why not? CNN says it could have landed into the ocean, like the accident at the hudson river. Small chance, I know, but as long as the airplane has not been found there's hope IMHO.

Why not? CNN says it could have landed into the ocean, like the accident at the hudson river. Small chance, I know, but as long as the airplane has not been found there's hope IMHO.

Ditto.I won't believe something bad happened to that people until the aircraft (or sadly the remains of it) will be found.

They say the ocean at the likely site of accident is up to 6000m deep... Although I know everything is still speculation, I'd like to know from an expert if there are any studies on how far ELTs could transmit in the air or even under water. Assuming the above was correct I'd doubt any ELT would be of great help out there, but anyways, if someone has relieable data, I'd appreciate if it was shared.

I never was a big fan of lightning and Fly By Wire...

I never was a big fan of lightning and Fly By Wire...

Although that may be a joke :(, I doubt that lightning could cause the fly by wire to malfunction, unless Airbus did not wire the aircraft properly or had a poor design for lightning strikes in their planes. All kinds of planes have been struck by lightning numerous times, and it very very very very very very very very very very very very veryyyyy rarely results in problems. In fact aircraft are expecting to get struck by lightning once or twice a year. The bodies of planes are made of aluminum so if it get struck by lightning it gets conducted through it then it exits through through an extremity like the wing tips or the tail. You can't expect a plane not to get struck by lightning, because the fly through clouds and lightning occurs when there is an positive in one place and a negative in the other. Most strikes are negative, so the cloud has a negative charge and the ground has a positive charge. So the lightning occurs because of an extremely fast movement of electrons from one place to another to balance the charge between usually the ground and the cloud. The balance can be upset easily if there is an object in the air, and especially when you have a big metal conductor flying through the air... an airplane. This is why there are regulations for building aircraft with equipment that will not be affected by lightning strikes.Speaking off aluminium... something strikes me. 787 composites. GE90 on the 777s composites. Cirrus SR22 composite. Just kidding, just kidding. The probably would not be legal to fly if they weren't certified to be protected from lightning.

The bodies of planes are made of aluminum so if it get struck by lightning it gets conducted through it then it exits through through an extremity like the wing tips or the tail.

How true. Plus, also the antennas are apparently designed in a way so they would not get in trouble when being hit... An avionics tech guru explained it to me a few months ago (antenna length, wave lengths, frequencies and all that sort of stuff), but Gosh, I guess not only forgot I most of it but didn't quite grasp in the first place. :(

What strikes me is the lack of any emergency radio communication, we know there was an electrical short circuit , but from what I read this was sent automatically. Something very quick and potentially catastrophic happened it seems.If I was going to ditch into the sea I'd want the world to know three times over my location as precise as it could possibly be.Either way, my thoughts are with the families and friends of those who have anyone on the flight as it must be a very horrible time for themMatt

There is also the possibility that it was not catastrophically quick and that the crew was simply not in a position to transmit a radio message. I know it is unlikely that it would have lost all radio communication abilities, but such a thing is not impossible. I guess we will just have to wait to find out, and perhaps we will never know what really happened.Al

They say the ocean at the likely site of accident is up to 6000m deep... Although I know everything is still speculation, I'd like to know from an expert if there are any studies on how far ELTs could transmit in the air or even under water. Assuming the above was correct I'd doubt any ELT would be of great help out there, but anyways, if someone has relieable data, I'd appreciate if it was shared.

ELTs are line of sight as any radio signal is. However, there are satellites equipped to detect ELT signals. If the ELT is above surface and working, it would have been found by now.

You guys that think getting nailed by lightning isn't a big deal oughtta try it sometime. It sure can be. When energy at those levels (tens of millions of volts) starts moving around, it doesn't necessarily follow the design engineer's playbook. Modern FBW jets have a lot of redundancy built in, so the odds of losing the whole flight control system are small...but small does not mean zero.OTOH, a more likely scenario is something involving the other forms of nastiness associated with flying around convective storms...severe turbulence, violent up/downdrafts, hail, massive wind shear, etc.Given where it went off the scope, we may never know.During the 50s and 60s airplanes going missing on overwater flights wasn't nearly so rare as today. Sometimes we get to taking things for granted.RegardsBob ScottColonel, USAF (ret)ATP IMEL Gulfstream II-III-IV-VColorado Springs, CO

Well there was a report of cabin pressure lost. I figure there was some major structural failure due to an explosion - fuel tank, bomb (I really hope not). But no may-day calls, it had to happen fast. These losses, especially the unexplained ones, really shake us up. I hope we can learn the lesson here to figure out how this can be avoided.

Absolutely, I know of a couple of pilots whose glider disintegrated when it was struck by lightning, the bolt drilled a hole through the (GRP composite) wing, superheated the moisture in the core filling, which of course expanded, and blew the thing to pieces. They both hit the silk and they didn't even need to undo the straps, because one second they were in an aircraft and the next they were falling through the sky! Both survived the incident, although not completely unscathed, suffering injuries on landing and injuries from the lightning strike itself.I've piloted a glider that was hit by lightning too in the past, fortunately with no ill effect other than some minor localised damage in two places, one hole where the lightning went in and one where it went out, it scared the crap out of me (and was truly deafening) especially because I knew about that disintegration incident at the time and in my case I was too low for my parachute to be of any use (I was desperately heading for the airfield at the time).Although lightning strikes rarely cause a massive problem, they do very often cause damage, and if that happens to be near a vital component, then it could mean big trouble, especially when lighting is invariably accompanied by very severe air movement. Having flown in thunderstorm conditions a few times, it wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if an updraft had ripped a wing off the missing aircraft, or possibly caused some other catastrophic damage of a similar nature; it's rare, but violent winds can certainly tear even a big aircraft to pieces, read about the BOAC 707 which that happened to, near Mount Fujiyama in 1966 here Warning, there are a couple of quite distressing pictures of the aircraft falling down through the sky on that site, which aren't nice to look at.On the other hand, there is also the possibility that it could have simply lost all comms during a less devastating incident and gone down under control. Total radio failures might be rare, but that doesn't make them impossible, so the loss of communications from the thing doesn't necessarily mean it was a rapid catastrophe. However, trying to put an airliner down on the open ocean at night, possibly in very foul weather, is a much more demanding proposition than bellying one onto the calm water of the Hudson in clear weather, and even that must have been tough to manage.Clearly something bad happened, and it is really very sad indeed, but the evidence that might tell us what happened may well be unrecoverable; if the aircraft broke up in mid air over deep water, then significant parts of the wreckage may never be found at all. Given that the ELT may well be in deep water, that might be hard, or even impossible to locate, but there is a possibility that seismic detector or underwater network similar to SOSUS may have picked up the shock from an impact with the water.Whatever happened, I think the best we can hope for is that the people on board did not suffer too much. A tragic business.Al