TECH ERA

Sunday, 22 May 2016

EgyptAir: Images released of debris found in plane search

The Egyptian military has released images of items found during the search in the Mediterranean Sea for missing Egypt Air flight MS804.

They include life vests, parts of seats and objects clearly marked EgyptAir.

The Airbus A320 was en route from Paris to Cairo with 66 people aboard when it vanished from radar early on Thursday.

Investigators have confirmed smoke was detected in various parts of the cabin three minutes before it disappeared, but say the cause is still not known.

Speaking on Saturday after meeting relatives of victims, French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault said "all theories are being examined and none is favoured".

Images posted on the Facebook page of the spokesman for the Egyptian Armed Forces showed life vests and other items with the EgyptAir logo.

Official Facebook page for the military spokesman of the Egyptian Armed Forces — Image captionStills of the recovered items were also published

Relatives and friends of Yara Hani at a church in Cairo, 21 May — Image captionRelatives and friends of missing air hostess Yara Hani attended a church service in Cairo

The search has also reportedly found body parts and luggage.

The main body of the plane and the two "black boxes" which show flight data and cockpit transmissions have not yet been located.

While no bodies have been recovered, memorials have been taking place for the victims.

A service was held in a Cairo church on Saturday for air hostess Yara Hani, who was aboard the doomed plane.

Smoke alarms

The Aviation Herald said that smoke detectors had gone off in the toilet and the aircraft's electronics before the signal was lost.

It said it had received flight data filed through the Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System (ACARS) from three independent channels.

It said the system showed that at 02:26 local time on Thursday (00:26 GMT) smoke was detected in the jet's toilet.

Jump media player

Media player help

Out of media player. Press enter to return or tab to continue.

Media caption

A minute later - at 00:27 GMT - there was an avionics alert indicating smoke in the bay below the cockpit that contains aircraft electronics and computers.

The last ACARS message was at 00:29 GMT, the air industry website said, and the contact with the plane was lost four minutes later at 02:33 local time.

ACARS is used to routinely download flight data to the airline operating the aircraft.

Confirming the data, France's Bureau of Investigations and Analysis told AFP it was "far too soon to interpret and understand the cause of the accident as long as we have not found the wreckage or the flight data recorders".

Jump media player

Media player help

techera99.blogspot.com

Out of media player. Press enter to return or tab to continue.

Media caption

Agency spokesman Sebastien Barthe told Associated Press the messages "generally mean the start of a fire" but added: "We are drawing no conclusions from this. Everything else is pure conjecture."

Philip Baum, the editor of Aviation Security International Magazine, told the BBC that technical failure could not be ruled out.

"There was smoke reported in the aircraft lavatory, then smoke in the avionics bay, and over a period of three minutes the aircraft's systems shut down, so you know, that's starting to indicate that it probably wasn't a hijack, it probably wasn't a struggle in the cockpit, it's more likely a fire on board."

Analysis: Richard Westcott, BBC transport correspondent

This data could be the biggest clue yet as to what happened. It suggests there was a fire at the front of the aircraft, on the right-hand side.

The sequence begins with a warning of an overheating window in the cockpit. Smoke is then detected in the lavatory (we assume it's the one behind the cockpit) and in a bay right underneath the cockpit, which is full of electronic equipment.

Finally, another window becomes too hot, before all the systems begin collapsing. All of this takes place over a few minutes, then the aircraft drops off the radar.

Some pilots have suggested that the 90 degree left turn the plane then made is a known manoeuvre to get out of the way in an emergency, when an aircraft needs to drop height suddenly.

The 360 degree turn after that, they say, could be the crew managing a crisis.

So it seems that the aircraft caught fire and that the fire spread very quickly. But whether that fire was deliberate or mechanical, we still can't say.

Security consultant Sally Leivesley said the timing on the data suggested an "extremely rapidly developing flame front from a fire that has overwhelmed the avionics very, very quickly".

She cited the case of "underpants bomber" Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, who tried to set off an explosive device hidden in his underwear on a Detroit-bound flight in 2009.

Although the attempt failed, a fire from the device's chemicals still spread "right up the side of the plane".

Greece says radar shows the Airbus A320 making two sharp turns and dropping more than 25,000ft (7,620m) before plunging into the sea.

The search is now focused on finding the plane's flight recorders, in waters between 2,500 and 3,000 metres deep.

In October, an Airbus A321 operated by Russia's Metrojet blew up over Egypt's Sinai Peninsula, with all 224 people on board killed.

Sinai Province, a local affiliate of the Islamic State jihadist group, said it had smuggled a bomb on board.

If anyone is concerned about relatives or friends following the disappearance of the flight, they can call this free number provided by EgyptAir: +202 259 89320

Alps plane crash: What happened?

The co-pilot of a Germanwings flight that crashed into the French Alps may have practised a rapid descent only hours before he sent the plane plunging into the mountainside "intentionally", according to French investigators.

Evidence from the Flight Data Recorder (FDR) showed Andreas Lubitz had repeatedly changed the setting of the altitude controls during the plane's flight from Duesseldorf to Barcelona earlier, but as the plane was on autopilot its planned descent was not affected.

Later the same day Lubitz was alone in the cockpit during the flight from Barcelona back to Duesseldorf when he initiated the plane's dive. He refused to allow the captain back through the cockpit door or respond to air traffic control. Speculation over the reasons for his actions has centred around the co-pilot's mental wellbeing.

The German A320 Airbus flight 4U 9525 from Barcelona to Duesseldorf came down in a remote mountain valley in France on Tuesday 24 March, killing all 150 people on board.

Jump media player

Media player help

Out of media player. Press enter to return or tab to continue.

Media caption
Richard Westcott on what we know from the cockpit voice recorder
The plane took off from Barcelona at 09:01 GMT on 24 March. Reports from Flightradar24, which tracks air traffic around the world, said the Airbus climbed to 38,000ft within the next half hour.

At 09:30 the plane made its final contact with air traffic control - a routine message for permission to continue on its route.

One minute later it began to descend. The descent lasted nearly 10 minutes before last radar contact with the Airbus at 09.40:47.

The Airbus crashed in a remote, snow-covered mountainous region - some parts reaching about 1,500m (4,900ft) high - that is inaccessible by road.

On 26 March, French investigators said information from the cockpit voice recorder (CVR) - found at the crash zone revealed that co-pilot Andreas Lubitz had taken over the controls of the plane and sent it into a dive intentionally.

The captain, named by German media as Patrick Sonderheimer, had left to go to the toilet, leaving Mr Lubitz in sole control. At this point, the co-pilot activated the plane's descent.

It was Mr Lubitz's "intention to destroy this plane," Marseille prosecutor Brice Robin said.

The cockpit voice recorder, discovered at the crash site, has given investigators details of thelast 30 minutes of the flight.

For the first 20 minutes, the two pilots talked normally, prosecutors said, then the captain is heard asking the co-pilot to take over. The sound of a chair being pushed back can be heard followed by a door being closed.

Then, during the final minutes of the flight's descent, pounding can be heard on the door and muffled voices as the captain tried desperately to get back into the cockpit. Alarms also sounded, warning the pilots to "pull up".

The Marseille air traffic control centre and the French Air Defence system both attempted to contact the flight crew several times.

While the co-pilot did not say a word after the commanding pilot left, his breathing could be detected, indicating he was still alive at the time of the impact, Mr Robin said.

At 09:41:06 the CVR ceased recording when the plane hit the ground.

1. 09:30 - Plane makes final contact with air traffic control. Captain believed to have left the cockpit at this stage.

2. 9:30:55 - Autopilot is manually changed from 38,000ft to 100ft, according to data analysis by Flightradar24.

3. 9:31 - Aircraft begins its descent, with only the co-pilot, Andreas Lubitz, in the cockpit.

4. 09:35 - Air traffic controllers try to contact the pilots, but receive no response.

5. 09:40:47 - The last radar position of the plane is registered at 6,175ft, just 2,000ft above the mountains of the French Alps.

There has been speculation that the co-pilot's actions were a result of mental health problems. Investigators found anti-depressants at his house along with evidence of treatment by various doctors, including a torn-up sick note for the day he flew the plane.

There have also been a number of newspaper reports he had faced problems with his eyesight - possibly a detached retina - which could have affected his ability to carry on working as a pilot.

The interim report by French accident investigation agency BEA confirmed Lubitz had been treated for depression in April 2009 and subsequently his pilot's licence was issued on condition he undertook certain regular medical checks.

More: How are cockpit doors locked?

The plane's CVR - one of its two "black boxes" - was retrieved from the crash zone, although in battered condition.

The second box, recording technical data, was recovered a few days later. It was also severely damaged - but did reveal information about the previous flight from Duesseldorf to Barcelona.

An aircraft's flight recorders are often the key to establishing what caused a plane to crash. Each plane carries two recorders: the CVR and the flight data recorder (FDR). Although they are popularly known as black box recorders, they are, in fact, orange to aid in recovery.

The CVR, as the name suggests, records the voices of the pilots and other sounds from the cockpit.

It retains two hours of recording - on longer flights, the latest data is recorded over the oldest. On some older models, magnetic tape is still used for the recording, but newer models use memory chips.

The FDR records technical flight data, including at least five basic sets of information: pressure altitude, airspeed, heading, acceleration and microphone keying (the time radio transmissions were made by the crew).

The FDR retains the last 25 hours of aircraft operations and, like the CVR, data is recorded on an endless loop.

Both recorders are designed to withstand a massive impact and a fire reaching temperatures up to 1,100C for 60 minutes.

The interim report by BEA, released on 6 May 2015, published a chart using data from the FDR, showing how Lubitz altered the altitude setting to the minimum 100ft several times, when the captain left the cabin. But each time he changed it back to the correct level after just a few seconds.

Because the plane was on autopilot on a planned descent to Barcelona, its actual course was not altered.

"I can't speculate on what was happening inside his head - all I can say is that he changed this button to the minimum setting of 100ft and he did it several times," BEA director Remy Jouty told Reuters news agency.

Debris from the aircraft was spread across an area of about four hectares (10 acres), about 1,550m up the mountainside in a sloping rocky ravine. The largest pieces of wreckage were 3-4m long.

Parts of the plane's wings and fuselage were found towards the bottom of the ravine, where tree trunks had been uprooted and the ground was churned up.

The plane is one of the oldest A320s in operation. It entered service for the German airline in 1991.

It had passed a routine maintenance check only the day before the flight.

Co-pilot Andreas Lubitz, 27, joined Germanwings in September 2013, directly after training, and had flown 630 hours.

Lufthansa said the captain had more than 6,000 hours of flying experience and had been with Germanwings since May 2014, having flown previously for Lufthansa and Condor.

Lufthansa said its cockpit protocols are in line with rules established by the German aviation safety authority. These stipulate that when there are two crew, one can leave the cockpit but only for the absolute minimum time.

EASA - the European Aviation Safety Agency - has since issued new guidelines requiring two authorised staff to remain in the cockpit at all times.

Who was on on board?
There were 144 passengers on board the plane, four cabin crew and two more crew in the cockpit.

Germanwings officials said victims included 72 German nationals, among them 16 school students. The Spanish authorities say there were 51 Spaniards.

Other victims were from Australia, Argentina, Britain, Iran, Venezuela, the US, the Netherlands, Colombia, Mexico, Japan, Denmark and Israel.

Debris in Alps crash zone

What happened?

'Black boxes'

Debris field

The aircraft

Viewpoint: Are e-cigarettes really a menace?

A few years ago they were a rarity, but now there are nearly three million e-cigarettes out there. Many people think that they are as bad for you as normal cigarettes. But are they?E-cigarettes, devices that give you a nicotine-hit by heating up a liquid which you then inhale, have become all the rage. But is the concern about them justified, asks Michael Mosley.

I've recently spent a couple of months making a documentary about e-cigarettes, trying to find out truth behind the headlines. I took up heavy vaping (that's what you do when you inhale vapour from an e-cigarettes). I have never smoked anything before and I wanted to see what effects inhaling nicotine in the form of an e-cig would have on a non-smoker. The results surprised me.

Everyone knows that smoking is bad for you and can lead to lung cancer. It also increases your risk of dying from a range of other conditions including heart attack, stroke and dementia. If you're a man you might like to know (but then again you might not) that smoking is one of the main causes of impotence.

Fans of e-cigarettes say vaping can reduce the burden of smoking either by making it easier for smokers to quit or by providing them with a safer way for them to get a nicotine hit.

Image captionMichael Mosley and Hon Lik, the inventor of the e-cigarette

Critics, however, say that we are gambling with a technology we don't understand and that there is no convincing evidence that e-cigarettes help people quit smoking. It may even encourage non-smokers to start.

Some countries have warily embraced e-cigarettes, while others have effectively banned them.

The UK has so far adopted a liberal approach, but on Friday new European legislation will come into force which will limit the size of refills and the nicotine content of the fluids. Vaping will become more restricted.

So, who's right? Are e-cigarettes one of the greatest public health measures ever invented, with the potential to save millions of lives, or are they just another cunning way to keep us hooked on nicotine? I was keen to find out.

Well the scientific consensus is that vaping, at least in the short term, is a lot safer than conventional smoking. A recent study for Public Health England concluded that e-cigarettes are 95% less harmful than normal cigarettes.

To be honest when I took up vaping I wasn't that worried about the short term health effects. What I was far more concerned about was getting hooked on nicotine. Yet as the weeks went by and I puffed away, nothing happened. When I leapt out of bed I didn't feel a longing to reach for my machine. If anything I found it a bit of a chore.

Chatting to experts I discovered, to my considerable surprise, that although cigarettes are highly addictive, nicotine alone may not be. Although no-one knows for sure, research in animals suggests that nicotine is far more addictive when delivered in combination with the other chemicals found in regular cigarettes.

And nicotine in its pure form may have an upside. There's evidence it can help patients with Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease.

The National Institute on Aging in the US has recently funded a trial of 300 patients with mild cognitive impairment (a precursor to Alzheimer's). The patients, none of whom are smokers, will be randomly allocated to either nicotine patches or placebo patches. Over the next few years they will have regular health checks, as well as memory and cognition tests.

Michael Mosley — Image captionEverybody agrees that smoking is bad for you

A similar, smaller study, published in 2012, found that non-smokers given nicotine patches saw improvements in memory, attention and reaction times.

But before you start slapping on the patches or firing up an e-cig you should be aware that though nicotine may help people who already have impaired memory, there's no evidence it will help the rest of us. Although I was tested before and after doing a month of heavy vaping, the nicotine didn't enhance my brain, apart from a small improvement in my fine motor skills.

But the main health justification for e-cigarettes is that they can help those who are keen to quit smoking tobacco, quit. So do they?

There have been very few randomised controlled trials, but the ones that have been done suggest it does.

When Horizon conducted a small study where we randomly allocated a group of hardcore smokers to either e-cigs, nicotine patches or simply giving up (going cold turkey), we found the vapers and those who slapped on the patches were far more successful at abandoning their cigarettes.

E-cigs are not risk free and after a month of heavy vaping there were signs of increased inflammation in my lungs (which rapidly reversed when I stopped). Nonetheless I think that for smokers e-cigarettes could prove to be a game changer.

There is a huge amount at stake. A billion people worldwide spend around £500bn a year on cigarettes and around half of them will die of smoking related diseases. In the UK alone smoking kills around 100,000 a year. Anything which gets people off cigarettes is going to save a lot of lives.

The beautiful flower with an ugly past

Dieter Dorner takes a long sip of his Gemischtes, a mix of dark beer and lager, and smiles.

We are sitting in an inn in Untersiebenbrunn, a little town east of Vienna, where he is a councillor for the far-right Freedom Party. Over a meal of sausage, chips and locally grown white asparagus, he tells me about a planned dance.

In true Austrian fashion, it's to be a ball - the local Freedom party's first Cornflower Ball, Der Kornblumenball.

"We've never had a Freedom Party Ball in Untersiebenbrunn before," he explains. "So we said to ourselves, let's do something, let's have a ball. The band will play dance music. My favourite is the slow waltz."

Image captionA poster for the Austrian Freedom Party's Cornflower Ball

The ball was arranged last September, but the timing is felicitous, because these days the Freedom Party in Untersiebenbrunn has a lot to celebrate. In the first round of voting in Austria's presidential election in April, 53% of people here voted for the Freedom Party candidate, Norbert Hofer.

Dotted through the town's leafy streets are the blue Freedom Party campaign placards and posters for the Kornblumenball, featuring a silhouette of a dancing couple in evening dress.

"Hasn't there been some controversy about the blue cornflower?" I ask. "Something to do with the Nazis?" Dieter shakes his head. "The cornflower is simply the Freedom Party flower and we like it," he says.

"To discuss what happened 80 years ago, or what didn't happen or perhaps happened doesn't bring us forward. There is certainly nothing deliberately nasty about it."

But other Austrians are not so sure.

"The cornflower is a complicated symbol," Vienna historian, Bernhard Weidinger, tells me. "It was the German Kaiser Wilhelm's favourite flower, and was used by pan-German nationalists in the 19th Century.

"Then between 1934 and 1938, when the Nazis were a banned party in Austria, it was the secret symbol they used to wear in order to recognise each other."

Austrian Freedom Party members Heinz Christian Strache and Martin Graf wear cornflowers in the Austrian parliament in 2008 — Image captionAustrian Freedom Party members Heinz Christian Strache and Martin Graf, 2008

Nowadays, it's traditional for Austrian MPs to wear a flower in their buttonholes at the opening of parliament, he explains. The colour of the Freedom Party is blue, so they wear a cornflower.

"You are not a neo-Nazi if you wear a cornflower," he continues. But it is fair to say that the Freedom Party cultivates a certain ambivalence when it comes to the past.

Their presidential hopeful, Norbert Hofer, continues to face sharp criticism about his occasional choice of floral decoration. In response to a question last week, he declared that he wanted nothing to do with the Nazis, and wouldn't let them take away things like the cornflower.

The Cornflower

Latin name: Centaurea cyanus, also known as bachelor's buttons
Native to the Mediterranean and Europe
National flower of Estonia
Worn in France as a "le bleuet" a symbol of remembrance akin to the poppy in the UK

The Freedom Party has moved on a long way from the heyday of its firebrand leader, Joerg Haider, who died in a car crash in 2008. Back in the 1980s and 90s, Haider openly praised aspects of the Third Reich. These days, Freedom Party members who veer in that direction are quickly silenced or removed from their posts.

A day or so later I fall into conversation with a young man called Michael, in a park in Vienna.

It's a balmy spring evening, the chestnut trees are in bloom, and in the distance a jazz band is playing a free concert on an open-air podium. "What do you think about the Freedom Party and the cornflower?" I ask.

"I hate those people," he replies. "And the cornflower isn't great. But you know, I'm not quite as worried about their attitude towards the past as I am about their attitude to what's going on now. Their barely-concealed racism, their rhetoric against Muslims and refugees is really wrong."

Demonstration against Norbert Hofer in Vienna — Image captionA demonstrator at an anti-Hofer rally in Vienna holds up an image of the cornflower

He looks around at a family playing with their well-groomed dogs. "And the other thing that bothers me," he says, "is that they are working on people's fears and encouraging our worst instincts. Like Donald Trump does. Austria is better off than most countries in the world. It's safe - and in general life is pretty good here. But to hear the Freedom Party talk, you'd think we were living in some desperately difficult country." He shrugs.

I think back to my conversation with Dieter in the comfortable little town of Untersiebenbrunn. I had asked him if the Freedom Party was deliberately stirring up fears to gain votes.

"We don't create people's concerns, we express them," he had said. "We're worried about our future. When you have a lot, you also have a lot to lose."

(Source : BBC)