A Past Flight May Offer Clues to Air France 447
by Mark Thompson / Washington

We’ll never know what it was like to be aboard Air France Flight 447 as it plunged into the Atlantic Ocean on May 31, apparently killing all 228 aboard. For now, the closest we may get is listening to the passengers on a similar Airbus 330 jet whose flight computer put it into an uncommanded dive over northwestern Australia last October.

….The plane abruptly entered a smooth 650-ft. dive (which the crew sensed was not being caused by turbulence) that sent dozens of people smashing into the airplane’s luggage bins and ceiling. …
Following an investigation of the A330′s uncommanded dive, Australian aviation officials, assisted by U.S. and French authorities, blamed a pair of simultaneous failures for the near disaster. …
…”For some reason, the damn computer disregarded the healthy channels,” says Hans Weber, an aviation expert who heads Tecop International, an aviation-consulting firm in San Diego. “Instead, it acted upon the information from the rogue channel.” The computer, responding to the faulty data, put the plane into a dive.  Read the analyses.