The Final Minutes of Air France Flight 447

It looks like the flight into terrible weather conditions compounded by cascading failures led to the disappearance of the Air France flight:

First, the autopilot disengaged, and then an alarm warned passengers that all hell was breaking loose on doomed Air France Flight 447.

It was shortly after 11 p.m. Sunday Brazil time and the Airbus 330-200 was flying through terrifying black clouds packing updraft winds of 100 mph.

All planes -- even military ones -- are at risk when buffeted by winds of such ferocity, experts say. Flight 447 was no exception.

Within a span of 14 minutes, its electrical systems and cabin pressure failed, and the plane broke apart and began its dive of death into the Atlantic Ocean with 228 people on board.

What caused the tragedy of Flight 447 is still a mystery. Its black boxes may never be recovered.

If so, investigators will have to rely on the last messages transmitted by the stricken aircraft. A chronology of those messages was published yesterday by the Brazilian O Estado de S. Paulo newspaper and confirmed by an airline-industry official.

These are the grim facts of the 14 minutes of death:

At 11 p.m. (10 p.m. EDT), pilot Marc Dubois sent a manual signal saying he was flying through an area of "CBs" -- black, electrically charged cumulonimbus clouds that carry violent winds and lightning.

Satellite data show that the thunderheads -- towering up to 50,000 feet -- were sending 100 mph updrafts into the jet's flight path.

"Such an updraft would lead to severe turbulence for any aircraft," AccuWeather said.

"In addition, the storms were towering up to 50,000 feet and would have been producing lightning. The Air France plane would have encountered these stormy conditions, which could have resulted in either some structural failure or electrical failure."

Lightning is not a problem for commercial airlines under normal circumstances. Planes get hit every year and usually end up with a pinhole in the fuselage and a smell of ozone in the cabin. They rarely create more problems than that.

If there's a flaw in the design of the Airbus aircraft that might explain how a set of cascading failures of the airplane's systems could have been caused by the stormy conditions. Once electrical systems started falling offline, including the weather radar, the plane would have been flying blind into severe thunderstorms with no way to identify the areas of the storm they needed to avoid to prevent structural failure.

I hope they find the black boxes because there are a lot of questions that need to be answered. I'm not sure Airbus shares that sentiment, especially if they know some things about the design of the airplane the rest of us don't know. Pilot error makes things a lot easier for them.