Injured On An Airplane?

Republished from: StaffordCountySun.com

Written by: Reed Williams 

LOUISA — Witnesses saw smoke coming from the airplane and noticed that it “didn’t sound right” just before it plunged to the ground, killing the pilot and igniting a house, an investigator said following the incident.

Investigators spent time sifting through the wreckage of the March 4 crash along U.S. 33 in the town of Louisa. The National Transportation Safety Board is in the early stages of a probe that could last from six months to a year, said Robert Gretz, a senior air safety investigator for the agency.

The Cessna T303 Crusader, loaded with 148 gallons of fuel, turned sideways and crashed vertically into the ground beside the house in the 100 block of Jefferson Highway, Gretz said. The crash occurred about 12:45 p.m.

Moments earlier, the plane had left Freeman Field airport a quarter-mile away after stopping to refuel. The homeowner was in the basement of the house when the plane struck, and he emerged unscathed.

Friends and a family member identified the pilot as James “Jay” Youngquist, a Reston resident in his 60s who had flown airplanes for four decades. His passengers had included former Gov. Timothy M. Kaine.

Youngquist left Manassas Regional Airport shortly before noon and stopped at Freeman Field on his way to Danville, where he planned to umpire a baseball game at Averett University.

“He was doing the two things he loved most, which is flying his airplane, and he was on his way to umpire a baseball game,“ his wife, Kathryn Youngquist, said during a brief phone interview.

During Kaine’s 2005 campaign for governor, Youngquist flew him to several campaign events.

“I am deeply saddened by the news of James Youngquist’s passing,“ said Kaine, who is chairman of the Democratic National Committee.

“Jay was a calm and caring person who loved to fly, and I know he will be truly missed by all who knew him. My thoughts and prayers are with his family as they manage through this terrible time.“

Kathryn Youngquist said her husband also is survived by his son from his first marriage, Steve Youngquist, and by Kathryn’s two sons, Tyler and Eric Waldron.

http://www2.staffordcountysun.com/scs/news/state_regional/article/witnesses_saw_smoke_before_fatal_plane_crash/53601/

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Published by The New York Times

Written by CHRISTINE NEGRONI

Wreckage spotted by Brazilian military planes in the Atlantic Ocean is that of missing Air France Flight 447, the Brazilian minister of defense said Tuesday afternoon at a news conference. The jet, bound for Paris from Rio de Janeiro with 228 aboard, disappeared Sunday night without any distress call.

Nelson Jobim, the defense minister, said that “without a doubt” the debris was from the Air France plane. Military planes located the wreckage in a three-mile strip in the ocean, as hope of finding survivors all but vanished. The debris included “an orange life vest, an aircraft seat, a drum, kerosene and oil,” an earlier statement from the Brazilian military said.

Confirmation that the debris, floating 600 miles from the coast of Brazil, is from Flight 447 is sure to help investigators, who have few clues to go on. With no radar information from land and no distress call from the pilots, a series of data messages transmitted by satellite from the plane to Air France’s maintenance office was all the data they had.

Finding the tail of the plane is a high priority for investigators, because that is where the voice and data recorders are located.

The more critical recorder in this crash will be the cockpit voice recorder, said one investigator familiar with flight data devices. “The flight data shows how the aircraft is being operated, but the voice recorder tells you the pilots’ perceptions of what’s happening,” said the investigator, who spoke on condition of anonymity, saying he might be asked to work on the inquiry.

Evidence of a lightning strike — one theory of why the plane went down — would not be recorded on the flight data recorder, he said, but might very well be documented by the pilots’ observations in the cockpit.

The earliest indication of what may have happened on the airplane came 4 hours 11 minutes after the plane departed Rio, when a series of 10 reports transmitted from the Airbus 330 suggests that the flight encountered difficulties with stormy weather and electrical problems. Those issues could be interrelated; a loss of power could set off a catastrophic cascade of events.

The Airbus 330 is a fly-by-wire plane, in which flight controls are activated by electronics. “Very severe lightning may have caused some malfunction in the electronic control system,” said Tom Swift, a former chief scientist for fracture mechanics and metallurgy at the Federal Aviation Administration.

If lightning, turbulence or some other problem caused a malfunction in the electronic control system, pilots might have difficulty flying or the airplane might begin maneuvers without being commanded to by pilots.

Another avenue of interest to investigators may be a special emergency directive to operators of A330 and A340 models issued by European safety authorities this year.

The directive followed several troublesome events in the models’ electronic flight system. More than a dozen people were seriously injured in October on a Qantas flight to Perth, Australia, from Singapore when the heavily loaded airplane, while cruising in level flight, abruptly pitched down. The authorities said the plane had provided random and erroneous information to the pilots, including a loss of altitude readings and warnings that the plane was about to stall.

Whether Air France reported problems with any of its A330s was not clear.

Mr. Jobim said Tuesday that finding wreckage of the plane would ultimately give hope to relatives of the crash victims that they would learn what had happened to their loved ones.

Charlstie Laytin, 31, of Island Park, N.Y., whose uncle and aunt, Michael and Anne Harris, were two Americans on the flight, agreed. “We certainly do hope to see the investigation continue until we know what happened,” she said. “It’s so hard to come to the point of closure when you don’t have your loved ones in front of you to grieve over.”

Air France did not release a passenger list on Tuesday but said that in addition to 2 Americans, it included, among others, 61 French citizens, 58 Brazilians and 26 Germans.