Comments:Passengers on Air France Flight 447 sent text messages to family members before plane disappeared

Comment deleted. I have found confirmation in a Portuguese-language article.

I'm sorry but this sounds very fishy to me. Is it usual to find GSM coverage 30,000 feet over international waters?

Good Cell Reception
Must have powerful cell towers out over the middle of nowhere.

Please note that the first 3 to 4 hours of the flight are along coastline. --SVTCobra 01:43, 2 June 2009 (UTC)

Truly a tragedy, hopefully they find the wreckage and survivors.

SMS from a plane
I though it was almost impossible to text from a plane, esp one that is far from mobile phone towers over the Atlantic ocean?

Have to think the messages were sent long before the accident
You have to think that either the SMS messages were sent long before the accident while the plane was still over Brazil or just before take off or that they were much closer to land than they should have been when the accident happened.

I can't believe their cell phones were still working that far out to sea.

SMS over the ocean?
How should people be able to send SMS 1000km into the Atlantic ocean of a normal mobile phone tower can only reach maybe a dozen of kilometres? This news seems to be a hoax!

"I love you" seems kind of a common message to me. Anyone could have sent it to someone even if there was no emergency. The same with "I'm afraid" And I know a bunch of people that has aerophobia, so maybe those SMSs were sent before take off.

why dont you use Submarines??? thhey could be useful

impossible
according to this the airplane was well over 1000km from any body of land at the time of the crash. It is very hard to get cell phone reception in an airplane when it is OVER land, but it is scientifically impossible to get cell phone reception when land is not even theoretically visible.

If the powerful airplane radios and ground radars cannot get any contact to land, these passengers cannot have sent text messages (SMS).

It is possible that before and during takeoff, passengers may have sent these messages, as is normal before any flight.

I cant believe a text message could have been sent just before the disappearance because they would have been hundreds of miles from any cellphone network... Ralph
 * Not all cell phones operate off towers. Has everyone forgotten satellite phones? Not to mention that planes have phones too, which are not connected to a wire trailing behind a plane. DragonFire1024 (Talk to the Dragon) 10:19, 2 June 2009 (UTC)
 * How many people do you know that have satellite phones? Also if in-flight phones work, one would expect that the far more advance communication equipment the pilots have access to would work as well, but they were never heard from.

WE CAN PRAY FOR THEM TO GOD PROTECT THEM FROM ANY HARM.

More R & D required.
It is a learning experience and planes should be made less prone to natural calamities like lightening / catastropes

Another one of those unexplained plane crashes due to lack of forecast reports or sufficient information about militarily active zones in the area. No one will ever know the reason.

Possible
Emirates has in flight SMS (texting) service, even in Economy - Air France does not have that service as far as I know, however they do have in flight phones in first and business class - http://www.airfrance.us/US/en/common/guidevoyageur/classeetconfort/premiere_confort.htm - which implies at least the possibility of text. That having been said, conventional cell phone usage would have been all but impossible; there were some trials from memory of essentially installing low power cellphone 'towers' in aircraft, and routing though a communications satellite, however I don't recall Air France being on the trial list (on and to the obvious objections to the last comment - cell signals are only a hypothetical danger to aircraft as they run on comparatively VERY high power when there is no station nearby and installing one in the plane would dramatically reduce potential interference from cell signals).

Philo-Sofa


 * Air France seems to test an in flight SMS service since December 2007 and an in flight call service (by personal cell phone) since April 2008. The service is installed by a company called OnAir. Here is a joint press release from the two companies : []. Now one interesting thing, as many press release of December 2007 stated, Air France put the system on only one Airbus A318 for various destinations in Europe. The system was intended to be tested for six months and I couldn't find any press release or informations about the outcome of the test. And last but not least, Air France does not appear anymore as a customer of OnAir ([]). --Fib2004 (talk) 13:01, 2 June 2009 (UTC)

love you too

Wow —84.82.103.107 (talk) 12:35, 7 June 2009 (UTC)

Sending a text message form the sugested location would have been impossable due to the distance from a cell site!