Episode
NOVA: Crash of Flight 447
Overview
On June 1, 2009, Flight AF447, an Air France Airbus A330 flying from Rio de Janeiro to Paris, disappeared over the Atlantic Ocean with the loss of all 228 lives. How could a state-of-the-art airliner with elaborate electronic safety and navigation features and a faultless safety record simply fall out of the sky? NOVA assembles a team of seasoned pilots, engineers, and safety experts to examine the evidence that emerged in the weeks following this horrific disaster. What led Flight 447's crew to fly straight into a towering thunderstorm? With expert testimony, satellite weather images, and messages transmitted by the doomed plane's computer system, NOVA pieces together the fatal chain of events.
Details
- Series
- NOVA
- Season
- Season 38
- Episode
- Episode 14
- Air date
- 2011-02-16
- Runtime
- 55 min
Episode context
Crash of Flight 447 is Episode 14 in Season 38 of NOVA. It aired on 2011-02-16. The runtime is 55 min.
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Episode 13: Smartest Machine on Earth
Augmenting human intelligence is a lot tougher than it looks, and the promise of "Hal" from 2001: A Space Odyssey is still just a fantasy. But scientists are edging closer with machines like "Watson," an IBM computing system that is gearing up for a first-of-its-kind challenge: taking on human contestants on the game show Jeopardy! With a brain the size of 2,400 home computers and a database of about 10 million documents, will Watson be able to compute its way to victory? Given the complexity of human language, could any computer truly understand it? It remains to be seen if this amalgam of circuits and silicon can really take us closer to the dream of a fully developed artificial intelligence, a truly "conscious" machine. Win or lose, the difficulty of mimicking the human thought process with software is showing artificial-intelligence researchers that there's more than one way to be "intelligent."
Episode 15: Venom: Nature's Killer
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Episode 18: How Smart Are Animals?
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Episode 8: Deadliest Earthquakes
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Episode 7: Secrets Beneath the Ice
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