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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful.
Tragedy at 35,000 feet
By Big Al
**This review is on Nova Volume 6, Ep. 10 “Crash of Flight 447″**On June 1, 2009, Air France Flight 447 fell out of the night sky over the Atlantic Ocean killing all 216 passengers and 12 crew members on board. In this program “Nova: Crash of Flight 447″ broadcast on PBS on February 16, 2011, investigators piece together available weather and radar data as well as automatic electronic messages from the airplane transmitted through the airwave, in an effort to reconstruct the tragic event and the possible cause of the crash. It is an aviation detective story. I found the program riveting.**Spoiler Alert** The rest of this review may contain spoilers.SYNOPSIS – The crew of Flight 447, with the limited range of the on-board weather radar, apparently flew the airplane into a severe thunderstorm over the Altantic Ocean at 35,000 feet, unable to detect it visually in the pitch darkness of the night. Then the three Thales pitot tubes of the air-speed indicator froze up when the airplane encountered super-cooled water droplets at high altitude, which totally overwhelmed the heaters of the tubes. Without reliable airspeed data, the automatic controls of the highly computerized Airbus A330-200 aircraft shut down one by one in rapid successions. The crew was forced to fly the airplane manually. Standard procedure in the event of an air speed indicator failure is to set the engine thrust at 85% and adjust the pitch of the airplane up 5 degrees. The show suggests that the crew was simply overwhelmed by the event and failed to do so. The plane stalled and fell into the Atlantic Ocean killing everybody on board. It hints that pilots of modern highly computerized airliners are not trained adequately to react to emergencies which require skilled manual control of the aircraft. The show ends with the note that a year later, authorities were still looking for the on-board black box containing vital voice and flight data, which might shed light on the cause of the accident.Footnote: On May 2011, the flight data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder of Flight 447 were found at 12,000 feet on the ocean floor. An interim report confirms that the pilots had not applied the standard unreliable airspeed procedure. It paints a picture of an aircrew overwhelmed by inconsistent data and warning signals and unable to control the aircraft.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
NOVA is programming we can all be proud of.
By Christopher Walter
They are not afraid to do a program that is controversial either. There are few programs I can compare NOVA because it is a standard of excellence that I associate with NOVA. I have to laugh when I hear about funding cuts to public broadcasting. NOVA is proof of how programming like this is some of the best way to spend education dollars. If you do not like or agree with an episode in this format skip to a different one that is why on demand works

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
Indepth and fascinating
By Ronald L. Montes
There is nothing like NOVA. I grew up with NOVA. Remember Leonard Nimoy? Well, NOVA has evelved since those days. There are those documentaries on The Science Channel but they just don’t cover stories quick like NOVA. NOVA has the special touch and dives deeper than any other documentary media source.

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