Killer ice
An invisible enemy lurks in the skies. Many of them have fallen under mysterious circumstances. Scientists want to track and defeat the threat.
It was July 24, 2014, two in the morning local time. As the Washington Post reported at the time — “Roughly 30 minutes after taking off from the airport in Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso, an Air Algérie plane taking flight 5017 disappeared from radar. On board, there were 110 passengers and 6 crew members”.
It was heading north. It was supposed to fly over Sahara and land in Algiers 4 hours later. However, it did not make it. It crashed south of Timbuktu, Mali.
Initially, it was thought that the jet MD-83 had run into a desert storm, but a two-year investigation revealed that the cause was different, more insidious. From analysis of the black boxes, investigators learned that 22 minutes after takeoff, the plane reached a cruising altitude of about 10 kilometers, but began to lose speed soon after. Eventually it went into corkscrew and hit the ground. The final report identified many causes of the tragedy. Among them were the erroneous reactions of the pilots, who, had they acted correctly, could perhaps have remedied the unexpected situation. However, one thing was clear: the drama did not start with them.
The culprits turned out to be ice crystals no bigger than grains of flour, which led to the…
