Air France A330 vanishes off brazilian coast!

[poden]

iflyfsx wrote:
Can we talk about what we do know about this airplane?

But about 4:15 a.m. Paris time, Flight 447's automatic system began a four-minute exchange of messages to the company's maintenance computers,
indicating that "several pieces of aircraft equipment were at fault or had broken down," he said.

That's pretty cool, so how come this airplane has automatic systems that dial home, but can't relay its location? And if it can, how can it be
"missing"? It seems to me, if the airplane could still communicate automatically, its position would be one of the first things it would
transmit, so
they would have some idea of where to look for it.

Does anyone know how that works?

Also, the redundancy in the all-computerized modern airplanes can take care of single point failures, but what if the electronics are fried? (solar
flare, EM pulse, whatever). Is there a "manual override"?

The data rate for the ACARS can be pretty slow, especially when the aircraft is over the ocean. Sometimes the ACARS uses the aircraft Satcom to send
data, instead of the digital radio, and in that case the data rate is pretty darn slow (I work on Satcom and other avionics s/w). In that time
period, only a very few messages were likely sent. There is currently no FAA or European requirement for aircraft today to encode and send position
and velocity data via something like the ACARS, and if it did, the data rate would still be pretty slow. It is pretty disappointing though, that this
is all that could be achieved with the current technology.