Accetown.com Blog

All about cool gadgets

Posts Tagged Air France

Plane with 153 crashes off Comoros, child rescued

Jun 30

Posted by sophie in Uncategorized

A passenger jet carrying 153 people from Yemen crashed into the Indian Ocean in bad weather early Tuesday while trying to land at the island nation of Comoros. Search teams rescued a child from the sea, officials said, but there was no word on other survivors.

The Yemeni Airbus 310 was flying the last leg of a journey taking passengers from Paris and Marseille to Comoros via Yemen. Most of the passengers were from Comoros, returning from Paris. Sixty-six on board were French nationals.

The rescued child was 5 years old and the flight also had at least three babies, Yemeni civil aviation deputy chief Mohammed Abdul Qader said.

Three bodies from the flight were retrieved along with debris from the plane, according to Comoros immigrations officer Rachida Abdullah.

Qader said it was too early to speculate on the cause and the flight data recorder had not been found.

“The weather was very bad … the wind was very strong,” he said, adding the windy conditions were hampering rescue efforts. He said the wind was 40 miles per hour (61 kph) as the plane was landing.

The Yemenia (Yemen Airways) plane was the second Airbus to crash into the sea recently. An Air France Airbus A330-200 crashed into the Atlantic Ocean May 31, killing all 228 people on board, as it flew from Rio de Janeiro to Paris.

The Comoros is an archipelago of three main islands situated about 1,800 miles (2,900 kilometers) south of Yemen, between Africa’s southeastern coast and the island of Madagascar.

Gen. Bruno de Bourdoncle de Saint-Salvy, the senior commander for French forces in the southern Indian Ocean, said the Airbus 310 crashed in deep waters about 9 miles (14.5 kilometers) north of the Comoran coast and 21 miles (34 kilometers) from the Moroni airport.

French aviation inspectors found a “number of faults” during a 2007 inspection of the plane that went down, French Transport Minister Dominique Bussereau said on i-Tele television Tuesday.

In Brussels, EU Transport Commissioner Antonio Tajani said the airline had previously met EU safety checks and was not on the bloc’s blacklist. But he said a full investigation was now being started amid questions why passengers were put on another jet in the Yemeni capital of San’a.

An Airbus statement said the plane that crashed went into service 19 years ago, in 1990, and had accumulated 51,900 flight hours. It has been operated by Yemenia (Yemen Airways) since 1999. Airbus said it was sending a team of specialists to the Comoros.

The A310-300 is a twin-engine widebody jet that can seat up to 220 passengers. There are 214 A310s in service worldwide with 41 operators.

Christophe Prazuck, French military spokesman, said a patrol boat and reconnaissance ship were being sent to the crash site as well a military transport plane. The French were sending divers as well as medical personnel, he said.

In Paris, a crisis cell was set up at Charles de Gaulle airport. Most of the passengers on board were from the French city of Marseille, which has a large Comoros community.

“There is considerable dismay,” said Stephane Salord, the consul general of the Comoros in the Provence-Alps-Cote d’Azur region of France. “These are families that, each year on the eve of summer, leave Marseille and the region to rejoin their families in the Comoros and spend their holidays.”

In France, this week is the start of annual summer school vacations.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy “expressed his deep emotion” about the crash and asked the French military to help in the rescue operation, particularly from the French islands of Mayotte and Reunion.

Yemenia airline officials say the 11-member crew was made up of six Yemenis, including the pilot, two Moroccans, one Indonesian, one Ethiopian and 1 Filipino. The officials asked that their named not be used because they were not authorized to speak to the media.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

No Comments

Brazil calls off search for Air France victims

Jun 26

Posted by sophie in Uncategorized

Brazil’s Air Force and Navy on Friday called off the search for additional victims and wreckage from Air France Flight 447, which crashed over the Atlantic on June 1 carrying 228 people.

French officials have given no indication they are ending their own search efforts. To date, authorities have recovered 51 bodies as well as 600 pieces of wreckage from the Airbus A330-200 jetliner.

Brazilian Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Henry Munhoz said the military was unlikely to find additional bodies and wreckage in the search area so many days after the crash.

“It’s already been nine days without seeing any bodies,” Munhoz said in a televised news conference.

Brazilian Navy Captain Giucemar Tabosa said French navy ships will remain in the area looking for beacon signals from the plane’s voice and flight data recorders, the so-called black boxes.

The cause of the crash is unknown, and there is still no sign of the black boxes, which could give vital information about why the plane went down.

Weather and distance from the coast have complicated search efforts from the outset, and officials have said it will be difficult to find the black boxes.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

No Comments

Air France: Flight 447 pilot’s body retrieved

Jun 25

Posted by sophie in Uncategorized

Search crews in the mid-Atlantic have retrieved the bodies of the chief pilot of Flight 447 and a flight attendant, Air France said Thursday.

The two are among 50 bodies pulled out of the ocean in the international search for remains of the 228 victims and wreckage of the May 31 crash.

Air France, in a statement on its Web site, said the pilot and male flight attendant have been identified but did not release their names. A pilots’ union named the flight captain as Frenchman Marc Dubois.

Earlier this week the international police agency Interpol said 11 of the 50 bodies retrieved had been identified: eight Brazilians, one with joint Brazilian-German citizenship, one Brazilian-Swiss and a Briton.

On Wednesday Germany’s Foreign Ministry said three Germans — two men from Bavaria and a woman from Hamburg — have been identified. The ministry did not release their names.

The Airbus A330 plane came down in the Atlantic after running into thunderstorms en route from Rio de Janeiro to Paris. The Brazilian military has led the search and recovery efforts for bodies and debris, while the French are in charge of investigating the crash and the hunt for the flight recorders, or black boxes.

The cause of the crash is unclear. The plane’s two black boxes could be key to determining what happened.

But the boxes will only continue to emit signals for a few more days. They send out an electronic tapping sound that can be heard up to 1.25 miles (2 kilometers) away.

French officials said this week that military ships searching for the wreckage have detected sounds in the Atlantic depths but they are not from the flight recorders.

Two French-chartered ships are trolling a search area with a radius of 50 miles (80 kilometers), pulling U.S. Navy underwater listening devices attached to 19,700 feet (6,000 meters) of cable. A French submarine is also searching.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

No Comments

Air France crash families to get $24,000

Jun 19

Posted by sophie in Uncategorized

Air France said Friday it would give about euro17,500 ($24,000) as an advance to the families of the victims of the crash of Air France Flight 447 from Rio de Janeiro to Paris.

Remains of some of the 228 dead, and hundreds of pieces of wreckage reclaimed from the sea off Brazil are helping experts build a picture of what happened to the Airbus A330.

But much hope still is pinned on the relentless international search for the plane’s missing flight recorders, which should provide vital data. Air France chief executive Phillipe Gourgeon said that finding them was the essential objective now.

In an interview broadcast on RTL radio, Gourgeon also said, “We are going to be very focused on the first advance of about euro17,500 that is paid for each victim.” He added that there were no strings attached to accepting the advance.

Air France also is looking into holding a memorial for all the victims of the May 31 crash, Gourgeon said.

Some families of French victims have accused Air France of a lack of sympathy and of failing to provide them with timely information on the crash investigation.

The airline’s lawyers are contacting the families of the victims, from 32 countries, to make sure the advance money gets to them.

Contacting them is no easy matter, Gourgeon said. Sometimes the only contact number for a victim is from a mobile phone that was lost in the crash.

Searchers from Brazil, France, the United States and other countries are methodically scanning the Atlantic for signs of the plane, which crashed into the sea off Brazil after flying into thunderstorms.

Investigators are beginning to form “an image that is progressively less fuzzy,” Paul-Louis Arslanian, head of the French air accident investigation agency BEA, said Thursday.

The investigation has focused on a flurry of automated messages sent by the plane minutes before it lost contact; one suggests external speed sensors had iced over, destabilizing the plane’s control systems.

Arslanian said most of the messages appear to be “linked to this loss of validity of speed information.” He said when the speed information became “incoherent” it affected other systems on the plane that relied on that speed data. But he stressed that not all the automated messages were related to the speed sensors.

Air France has replaced the sensors, called Pitot tubes, on all its A330 and A340 aircraft, under pressure from pilots who feared a link to the accident.

French and U.S. officials have said there were no signs of terrorism, and Brazil’s defense minister said the possibility was not considered. But France says it has not been ruled out.

More than 400 pieces of debris have been recovered, Arslanian said earlier this week. He also called the search conditions — far from land in very deep water — “one of the worst situations ever known in an accident investigation.”

Autopsies have revealed fractures in the legs, hips and arms of victims, injuries that — along with the large pieces of wreckage pulled from the Atlantic — strongly suggest the plane broke up in the air, experts have said.

Gourgeon said the difficulties that had emerged in the exchange of information between representatives of BEA and Brazilian medical authorities conducting autopsies on recovered bodies were being resolved.

French-chartered ships are trolling a search area with a radius of 50 miles (80 kilometers), pulling U.S. Navy underwater listening devices attached to 19,700 feet (6,000 meters) of cable. The black boxes send out an electronic tapping sound that can be heard up to 1.25 miles (2 kilometers) away, but these locator beacons will begin to fade in less than two weeks.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

No Comments

Boeing upbeat, Airbus wins order at Paris Air Show

Jun 15

Posted by sophie in Uncategorized

A defiant Boeing said Monday the aviation industry’s troubles may be ending, while Airbus kicked off the race for plane orders at this year’s Paris Air Show, clouded by rainy skies, recession and the unexplained crash of Air France Flight 447.

With the global aviation industry facing unprecedented losses and falling revenue, no one attending the 100th anniversary of the world’s first and largest air show was expecting Airbus or Boeing to unveil the raft of new jet orders that have been a staple of the event over the past four years.

But some airlines were still willing to get out their checkbook, including Gulf-based carriers such as Qatar Airways and Gulf Air. Airbus scored its first order of the Paris Air Show from Qatar Airways, which wants 24 jets from the Airbus A320 family.

Qatar Airways’ head, Akbar al-Baker, announced a firm order for 24 of the planes, including 20 single-aisle A320s and firming-up of orders for four A321 jets announced last year at the Farnborough Air Show.

He said the deal announced Monday is worth $1.9 billion, which is about the same as the list price. Airlines, however, usually negotiate steep discounts to the list price, particularly during grim economic times.

Meanwhile, Rolls-Royce PLC signed a $1.5 billion order with Gulf Air to supply engines for the Bahrain-based airline’s new Airbus A330 long-haul aircraft. The British aircraft engine manufacturer will supply Trent 700EP engines to power 20 Airbus A330 aircraft, with deliveries beginning in 2012.

Canada’s Bombardier announced it had won, confirmed or converted a total of 35 firm orders for its CRJ1000 NextGen jets by Spanish regional carrier Air Nostrum, in deals worth a total of $1.75 billion.

Boeing set the tone for its air show last week, when its vice president for marketing of commercial aircraft Randy Tinseth warned not to expect a flurry of orders.

Still, Boeing Co. sought to strike a positive tone in face of the ambient gloom surrounding the show, saying key programs such as its 787 remain on track and that the industry’s long-term prospects are strong.

“Are we down in the dumps about the status of this industry? Have we allowed the current economic situation to overwhelm us and discourage us from the path ahead? The answer is absolutely no,” Scott Carson, president and chief executive of Boeing’s commercial aircraft division, said Monday.

“At this point it appears to us that the economic conditions have bottomed,” Carson said. “If they have bottomed and a recovery comes next year, I think we have a shot at getting through.”

Boeing recently cut its outlook for the commercial aircraft market for the first time in at least a decade, which Carson said was mainly driven by the drop in freight traffic due to the global recession.

Carson said long-term prospects for the industry “are as robust as they have ever been.”

However, in answer to some hopeful attendees who thought Boeing might spring a surprise first flight during the show, Carson had disappointing news.

“If you were expecting the 787 to fly during the air show you will be disappointed,” said Carson. “If it had happened during the air show it would have been great, but It was never our intention.”

“The airplane will fly when it is completely ready,” he said.

Already reeling from the global recession, the industry gathering near where Air France Flight 447 should have landed only two weeks ago has been shaken by the still-unexplained crash. Investigators have only two more weeks to find the flight data and cockpit voice recorders before the signals emitted by small beacons on the so-called black boxes start to fade. Without them, the cause of the May 31 accident may never be fully known.

“The aviation community is still under some shock with the severity of this accident,” Airbus CEO Tom Enders said.

France’s prime minister, Francois Fillon, formally opened the show, touring Airbus displays with French CEOs under a pelting rain. Industry executives from around the world sloshed their way through muddy lots to the Le Bourget airfield, and rain tangled transport to the crowded event, delaying many visitors.

The Paris Air Show is marking its 100th anniversary. It opened to industry on Monday, and then to the public Friday to Sunday. Organizers expect around 300,000 visitors this year, about the same as the last show in 2007. More than 2,000 exhibitors from 48 countries are taking part.

The traditional dogfight over orders between rival planemakers Boeing Co. and Airbus SA has been tempered as the world economic crisis forces airlines to cancel or delay plans to buy planes. Tight credit markets have made it more difficult for potential customers to secure financing.

The International Air Transport Association has warned that the world’s airlines will collectively lose $9 billion this year.

So far this year, Boeing — which is cutting 10,000 jobs — has taken orders for 73 planes, but with cancellations of 66, the net order intake is only 7 jets.

Airbus — which hasn’t announced extra job cuts but had already been cutting payroll in a restructuring program launched in 2007 — has booked fewer orders at 32, but with fewer cancellations has a better net balance of 11 jets.

Still both plane makers are cushioned by order backlogs of around 3,500 planes.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

No Comments

Air France switches to new plane speed sensors

Jun 15

Posted by sophie in Uncategorized

Air France has replaced the air speed sensors on its entire fleet of Airbus A330 and A340 long-haul aircraft, a pilots’ union official said Monday. The company had been under pressure from pilots who feared the devices could be linked to the crash of Flight 447.

In the deep waters of the mid-Atlantic, a Dutch ship towing a high-tech, U.S. Navy listening device was to begin trolling Monday in search of the flight data and voice recorders that investigators say are key to determining what caused the Air France jet to crash into the ocean with 228 people on board.

Investigators looking into the May 31 crash of Air France Flight 447 have so far focused on the possibility that external speed monitors — called Pitot tubes — iced over and gave false readings to the plane’s computers.

In the weeks before the accident, Air France had begun replacing the tubes on its A330 and A340 jets, but not yet on the plane that crashed. After the accident, the airline pledged to speed up the switch and complete it by the end of this month, after pilots complained that the change was not proceeding quickly enough.

The whole fleet “is equipped since the end of last week with Thales’ BA sensors,” said Erick Derivry, a spokesman for the SNPL pilots’ union. The crashed jet was equipped with the older AA model sensors, which Airbus has recommended airlines replace.

Despite questions about the performance of the Pitot tubes on the disappeared jet, Derivry stressed, “Today it is not proven or established that the AA model probes are at the origin of the accident.”

Air France officials were not immediately available to confirm that the sensors had been replaced.

Concern about the crash clouded the Paris Air Show, where aviation industry officials, jetmakers and airline executives gathered Monday amid bleak prospects for the sector. Qatar Airways’ head, Akbar al-Baker, said his airline was in the process of replacing its Pitot tubes before the accident.

An official of the French accident investigation agency, BEA, arrived in the Brazilian city of Recife on Sunday to begin examining some of the debris retrieved from the ocean. It was unclear whether the BEA would continue analyzing the pieces in Brazil or have them shipped to France.

French Ambassador Pierre-Jean Vandoorne, who is liaising between the families of the victims and the authorities, said Monday he met in Recife with those in charge of the Brazilian search, said that the search teams are not scaling back.

“No date has yet been fixed regarding an eventual halt to the search at sea,” he said on France-2 television. He said Brazilian and French aviation have already spent 1,000 flight hours looking for victims and debris.

He would not comment on the nationality of the bodies found so far. Coroners have said victims’ dental records and DNA samples from relatives will be necessary to confirm the identities of the 16 bodies that have been examined so far.

Brazilian authorities say they have recovered 43 bodies and another six have been pulled from the Atlantic by French ships.

The U.S. Navy device, called a Towed Pinger Locator, will try to detect emergency audio beacons, or pings, from Flight 447’s black boxes, which could be lying thousands of feet (meters) below the ocean surface.

The initial search area spans a 2,000-square-mile (5,180-square-kilometer) area of the Atlantic, said U.S. Air Force Col. Willie Berges, commander of the American military forces supporting the search operation.

The ship was set to embark on a grid pattern search after receiving instructions from French military officials also using a nuclear submarine to search for the black boxes, Berges said. A second Dutch ship carrying another pinger locater was expected to arrive in the area Monday afternoon.

Without the recorders, it may be impossible to ever know what caused the Airbus A330 to crash several hundred miles off Brazil’s northeastern coast on May 31 en route from Rio de Janeiro to Paris.

Thus far, there is no evidence of an explosion or terrorist act, just clues that point to systemic failures on the plane. Experts say the evidence uncovered up until now points to at least a partial midair breakup of the plane.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

No Comments

Brazil flies bodies to mainland; Pitot tubes eyed

Jun 9

Posted by sophie in Uncategorized

Two Brazilian helicopters took off Tuesday morning from the islands of Fernando de Noronha to pick up 16 bodies of Air France crash victims, as airline chiefs at a conference insisted the Airbus A330 was one of the safest planes in the world to fly.

The bodies of those on Flight 447 were being brought in by a Brazilian navy ship, then were being flown by helicopter to Fernando de Noronha and by plane to the northeastern coastal city of Recife, where experts will try to identify them.

At an industry conference in Kuala Lumpur, Emirates Airlines President Tim Clark said the Dubai-based company has a fleet of 29 A330-200 planes that have been flying since 1998.

“It is a very robust airplane. It has been flying for many years, clocking hundreds of millions of hours and there is absolutely no reason why there should be any question over this plane. It is one of the best flying today,” he said.

In a video posted Monday on a Web site, Brazil’s air force revealed that search crews had recovered the vertical stabilizer from the tail section of Flight 447 — which could provide key clues as to why the airliner with 228 people on board went down in the Atlantic and where best to search for the black boxes.

The tail section includes the vertical stabilizer — which keeps the plane’s nose from swinging back and forth — and the rudder, which controls the side-to-side motion of an aircraft. The data and voice recorders are also located in the fuselage near the tail.

Eight more bodies also were found, bringing the total recovered to 24, Air Force Col. Henry Munhoz said. The plane disappeared during a flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris on May 31 amid strong thunderstorms.

Peter Goelz, a former managing director of the National Transportation Safety Board, said if experts can determine the identity of a body and know where that person was sitting, their injuries could offer clues into the crash.

The Air Force video showed the piece being tethered to a ship. The part had Air France’s blue-and-red stripes, was still its original triangular shape and was not visibly burned.

William Waldock, who teaches air crash investigation at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Prescott, Arizona, said the damage he saw looks like a lateral fracture.

“That would reinforce the idea that the plane broke up in flight,” he said. “If it hits intact, everything shatters in tiny pieces.”

Crash theories being considered by investigators include the possibility that external speed monitors — called Pitot tubes — iced over and gave dangerously false readings to cockpit computers in a thunderstorm.

The L-shaped metal Pitot tubes jut from the wing or fuselage of a plane, and are heated to prevent icing. The pressure of air entering the tubes lets sensors measure the speed and angle of flight. An iced-over, blocked or malfunctioning Pitot tube could cause an airspeed sensor to fail, and lead the computer controlling the plane to accelerate or decelerate in a potentially dangerous fashion.

Eric Derivry, a spokesman for the SNPL union, the main union for Air France pilots, told France-Info radio that all jets taking off on Tuesday would be equipped with two of the new Pitot sensors.

A memo sent to Air France pilots by the Alter union Monday and obtained by The Associated Press urges them to refuse to fly unless at least two of the three Pitot sensors on each planes have been replaced.

An official with the Alter union, speaking on condition of anonymity because the memo was not publicly released, said there is a “strong presumption” among its pilot members that a Pitot problem precipitated the crash. The memo says the airline should have grounded all A330 and A340 jets pending the replacement, and warns of a “real risk of loss of control” due to Pitot problems.

Air France said it began replacing the Pitot tubes on the Airbus A330 model on April 27 after an improved version became available, and will finish the work in the “coming weeks.” The monitors had not yet been replaced on the plane that crashed.

David Epstein, Qantas Airways General Manager for Government and Corporate Affairs, said two companies manufacture the Pitot monitors for the A330 planes — France’s Thales Group and Charlotte, North Carolina-based Goodrich Corp.

The Air France plane uses sensors made by Thales while Qantas uses those by Goodrich for its 28 A330 planes, he said.

Goelz said the faulty airspeed readings and the fact the vertical stabilizer was sheared from the jet could be related.

The Airbus A330-200 has a “rudder limiter” which constricts how much the rudder can move at high speeds. If it were to move too far while traveling fast, it could shear off and take the vertical stabilizer with it.

“If you had a wrong speed being fed to the computer by the Pitot tube, it might allow the rudder to over travel,” Goelz said.

Asked if the rudder or stabilizer being sheared off could have brought the jet down, Goelz said: “Absolutely. You need a rudder. And you need the (rudder) limiter on there to make sure the rudder doesn’t get torn off or cause havoc with the plane’s aerodynamics.”

The discoveries of debris and the bodies also are helping searchers narrow their hunt for the cockpit voice and flight data recorders, commonly known as the “black boxes,” perhaps investigators’ best hope of learning what happened to the flight.

The wreckage and the bodies were found roughly 400 miles (640 kilometers) northeast of the Fernando de Noronha islands off Brazil’s northern coast, and about 45 miles (70 kilometers) from where the jet was last heard from.

Searchers must move quickly to find the recorders because acoustic beacons, or “pingers” on the boxes begin to fade 30 days after crashes.

Some high-tech help is on the way for investigators: two U.S. Navy devices capable of picking up the pingers to a depth of 20,000 feet (6,100 meters).

The listening devices are 5 feet (1.5 meters) long and weigh 70 pounds (32 kilos). One will be towed by a Brazilian ship, the other by a French vessel, slowly trawling in a grid pattern across the search area. The devices will be dropped into the ocean near the debris field by Thursday, Berges said.

The French nuclear attack submarine Emeraude, arriving later this week, also will try to find the acoustic pings, military spokesman Christophe Prazuck said.

France’s defense minister and the Pentagon have said there were no signs that terrorism was involved in the crash.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

No Comments

Air France says no hope of survivors in Atlantic

Jun 4

Posted by sophie in Uncategorized

Air France has told families of passengers on Flight 447 that the jetliner broke apart and they must abandon hope that anyone survived, a grief counselor said Thursday as military aircraft tried to narrow their search for the remains of the plane.

Air France’s CEO Pierre-Henri Gourgeon, speaking to families in a private meeting, said the plane disintegrated either in the air or when it slammed into the ocean and there were no survivors, according to Guillaume Denoix de Saint-Marc, who was asked by Paris prosecutors to help counsel relatives. The plane, carrying 228 people, disappeared after leaving Rio de Janeiro for Paris on Sunday night.

Investigators were relying heavily on the plane’s automated messages to help reconstruct what happened to the jet as it flew through towering thunderstorms. They detail a series of failures that end with its systems shutting down, suggesting the plane broke apart in the sky, according to an aviation industry official with knowledge of the investigation. He spoke on condition of anonymity Wednesday because he was not authorized to discuss the crash.

“What is clear is that there was no landing. There’s no chance the escape slides came out,” said Denoix de Saint-Marc, who heads a victims’ association for UTA flight 772, shot down in 1989 by Libyan terrorists.

No survivors makes Flight 447 Air France’s deadliest plane crash and the world’s worst commercial air accident since 2001.

Military rescue planes were trying to narrow the search zone Thursday as ships headed to the site to recover wreckage. The “extreme cloudiness” in the search zone also prevented U.S. satellites scanning the area from providing any useful leads, according to French military spokesman Christophe Prazuck.

Brazil’s Defense Minister Nelson Jobim said debris discovered so far was spread over a wide area, with 140 miles (230 kilometers) separating pieces of wreckage. The overall zone is roughly 400 miles (640 kilometers) northeast of the Fernando de Noronha islands off Brazil’s northern coast, where the ocean floor drops as low as 22,950 feet (7,000 meters) below sea level.

The floating debris includes a 23-foot (seven-meter) chunk of plane, but pilots have spotted no sign of survivors, according to Brazilian Air Force spokesman Col. Jorge Amaral.

Brazilian military planes located new debris from Air France Flight 447 Wednesday, after seeing an airline seat and oil slick a day earlier. But Prazuck said Thursday that French planes had made six missions over the area and have yet to spot any wreckage.

“As of today French planes have not found any debris that could have come from the Air France Airbus that disappeared,” he said. “There have been radar detections made by the AWACS (radar plane) … and each time these signals have not corresponded to debris.”

He said, however, French teams have been searching in different places and at different times than the Brazilian search teams.

Three more French overflights were planned for Thursday, Prazuck said. A U.S. Navy P-3C Orion surveillance plane also joined Brazil’s Air Force in trying to spot debris.

Heavy weather delayed until next week the arrival of deep-water submersibles considered key to finding the black box cockpit voice and flight data recorders that will help answer the question of what happened.

The Pourquoi Pas, a French sea research vessel carrying manned and unmanned submarines, is heading from the Azores and will be in the search zone by June 12, Prazuck said. The equipment includes the Nautile, a mini-sub used to explore the undersea wreckage of the Titanic, according to French marine institute Ifremer.

“The clock is ticking on finding debris before they spread out and before they sink or disappear,” Prazuck said. “That’s the priority now, the next step will be to look for the black boxes.”

The lead French investigator has questioned whether the recorders would ever be found in such a deep and rugged part of the ocean.

Families of those aboard mourned worldwide. A Mass was being held in Rio for the victims of the crash and French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner was among those attending.

The plane’s last automated messages detail a series of failures that end with its systems shutting down, suggesting the plane broke apart in the sky, according to the aviation industry official.

The pilot sent a manual signal at 11 p.m. local time Sunday saying he was flying through an area of black, electrically charged cumulonimbus clouds that come with violent winds and lightning.

Ten minutes later, a cascade of problems began: Automatic messages indicate the autopilot had disengaged, a key computer system switched to alternative power, and controls needed to keep the plane stable had been damaged. An alarm sounded indicating the deterioration of flight systems.

Three minutes after that, more automatic messages reported the failure of systems to monitor air speed, altitude and direction. Control of the main flight computer and wing spoilers failed as well.

The last automatic message, at 11:14 p.m., signaled loss of cabin pressure and complete electrical failure — catastrophic events in a plane that was likely already plunging toward the ocean.

Patrick Smith, a U.S. airline pilot and aviation analyst, said the sequence of messages strongly indicated a loss of electrical power, possibly as the result of an extremely strong lightning bolt.

“What jumps out at me is the reported failure of both the primary and standby instruments,” Smith said. “From that point the plane basically becomes unflyable.”

“If they lost control and started spiraling down into a storm cell, the plane would begin disintegrating, the engines and wings would start coming off, the cabin would begin falling apart,” he said.

The pilot of a Spanish airliner flying near where the Airbus is believed to have gone down reported seeing a bright flash of white light that plunged to the ocean, said Angel del Rio, spokesman for the Spanish airline Air Comet.

“Suddenly, off in the distance, we observed a strong and bright flash of white light that took a downward and vertical trajectory and vanished in six seconds,” the pilot wrote in his report, del Rio told the AP.

The Spanish plane was flying from Lima, Peru to Madrid. The pilot said he heard no emergency calls from the plane.

The accident investigation is being done by France, while Brazil is leading the recovery effort.

France’s defense minister and the Pentagon have said there were no signs that terrorism was involved, and Jobim, the Brazilian defense minister, said “that possibility hasn’t even been considered.”

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

No Comments

Debris possibly from Air France plane found

Jun 2

Posted by sophie in Uncategorized

BRASILIA, Brazil — Brazil’s Air Force says it has found airplane seats and other debris floating in the Atlantic Ocean along the path that a missing Air France jet was flying.
Air Force spokesman Jorge Amaral says the seats were spotted by search planes early Tuesday morning but that authorities cannot immediately confirm they were from the plane.
Also spotted were small white pieces of debris, material that may be metallic and signs of oil and kerosene, which is used as jet fuel.
The debris was found about 390 miles (650 kilometers) northeast of the Brazilian archipelago of Fernando de Noronha.
The plane disappeared with 228 people aboard.
THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP’s earlier story is below.
RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) — Brazilian media are reporting that search planes may have spotted some signs of debris from the Air France jetliner missing in the Atlantic Ocean. But the air force isn’t immediately confirming the reports.
Brazil’s Globo TV quoted a ham radio operator who reported hearing air force radio traffic that debris possibly from the plane had been spotted about 700 kilometers (435 miles)north of the Brazilian archipelago of Fernando de Noronha.
AP - Plane Vanishes Off Brazil; 228 Aboard

And the Web site of the Folha de S. Paulo newspaper says air force radar has detected signs of oil and metal in the same area.
An air force spokesman says authorities cannot immediately confirm the reports. He spoke on condition of anonymity, in keeping with department policy.

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

No Comments