Could Severe Turbulence Cause A Plane To Crash? | Mysteries of the Missing

The sudden disappearance of Air France Flight 447 shocks the world. Debris shows the aircraft hit the water with its nose up, an extremely unusual position for a plane crashing or ditching in the ocean. When the plane goes missing, it's traveling through an area infamous for turbulent skies, the Intertropical Convergence Zone. Investigators rule out lightning, but could turbulence have caused the plane to crash? There's a huge amount of humidity that builds up in massive billowing thunderstorms that reach up even higher than the jet aircraft can fly. Nobody wants to fly right through the middle of a towering thunderhead. Climatologist Jeff Weber believes that weather conditions on the day of the crash would have made flying extremely difficult. They had this huge convective cell that they had to fly through. This developed dramatically and very quickly after they had taken off. So there was no way for them to know the intensity of this convective tower prior to their departure. It's not a weakening system, it's a strengthening system. By the time the plane hits the weather system, it is a major storm. These cloud tops have reached 45, 50, possibly 55,000 feet. There's probably frozen precipitation inside this cloud structure as well. You would know you were flying through some weather. There would be a lot of turbulence. In some rare cases, extreme turbulence has brought down planes. In 1997, turbulence contributed to the crash of an Austral Airlines flight in Uruguay with 74 fatalities. Could the same have happened to Air France 447? Turbulence can knock around an airplane so much that the movement of the aircraft exceeds its structural limits and they've been known to come apart. Some wonder if this could have caused the compression of the wreckage and the nose up position. But on the night flight 447 disappeared, 12 other planes flew through the same weather system with no safety concerns.