On the eve of second anniversary of Air France’s Flight 447 tragedy, Air France has issued a statement saying that the carrier and its staff are turning their thoughts to the families of the passengers and crew who were aboard the fight to wish to express their full solidarity. The aircraft crashed over the Atlantic Ocean on a flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris

According to the statement, the perserverance of the authorities, Airbus and Air France has led to the flight recorders and parts of the aircraft being found after a two-year search. The French Accident Investigation Bureau (BEA) is now able to reveal the sequence of events leading to the crash of flight AF447 from Rio to Paris on 1 June 2009.

This description of the facts therefore replaces the assumptions that have been made over the past two years.

Air France said it appears that the flight deck crew was monitoring the changing weather conditions and thus altered the flight path, that the initial problem was the failure of the speed probes which led to the disconnection of the autopilot and the loss of the associated piloting protection systems, and that the aircraft stalled at high altitude. It also appears that the flight captain quickly interrupted his rest period to regain the cockpit. The crew, made up of three skilled pilots, demonstrated a totally professional attitude and were committed to carrying out their task to the very end and Air France wishes to pay tribute to them.

Air France stated that all the data collected must now be analyzed. It will only be at the end of this complex task, which requires patience and precision, that the BEA will be able to establish the causes that led to the disaster.
We can already see that the authorities, the manufacturer and the airline have taken measures to avoid the repetition of such an accident.

Air France hopes that everyone has the patience to wait for the interim report that the BEA will publish in a few weeks, no doubt along with additional recommendations. The safety of the global air transport industry will be even stronger.

Source: BTN

The Air France jet which crashed into the Atlantic en route from Rio in 2009 stalled and fell in three and a half minutes, French investigators report.

The air accident investigations bureau found the crew were faced with contradictory speed readings just before the plane crashed.

At the time, the captain was taking a routine rest, with the two co-pilots in control in the cockpit.

The BEA statement did not look at the causes of the crash. All 228 people on board were killed in the disaster.

The BEA findings were released in an online statement in response to speculation in the media over the findings from the flight recorders, only recovered from the sea this month.

A full report into the disaster is not expected until next year.

Air France said on Friday that it appeared “the initial problem was the failure of the speed probes”.

Since the crash, the air line has replaced the speed, or Pitot, probes on its Airbus fleet with a newer model.

Source: BTN

Deep-sea search parties have found one of two flight data recorders from an Air France plane that crashed off the coast of Brazil in 2009, investigators said, reviving hopes of understanding what caused the crash.

French investigators said in a statement the flight data recorder, or black box, had been hauled up to the deck of a search boat.

The Airbus A330-200 plane crashed into the Atlantic off the northeast coast of Brazil en route to Paris from Rio de Janeiro in June 2009, killing all 228 passengers and crew on board after the flight hit stormy weather.

Officials from France's BEA air accident inquiry office said it was too early to say whether the black box, which records data from the plane's instruments but no voices, would yield any information.

"One thing that's clear is that even if the box does not look damaged on the photograph, we cannot say whether it works until we have opened it up," a BEA spokeswoman said.

"That requires very precise equipment and the analysis can only start in a Paris laboratory." She said search robots had already dived back to the Atlantic sea floor to try to find the second black box, which contains voice and sound recordings from the cockpit.

Pictures on BEA's website of the box before it was pulled to the surface showed an orange cylindrical object half-buried in sand.

The structure housing the recorder appeared to be intact and remarkably free of corrosion. The name of its manufacturer -- US electronics company Honeywell -- was clearly readable on the side as a robot arm was seen plucking the cylinder from the seabed.

The discovery came after long searches of a 10,000 square kilometre area of sea floor.

"This new step in the investigation is very significant as it may provide additional information as to the causes of this accident that remain unexplained to this day," Air France-KLM chief executive Pierre-Henri Gourgeon said.

Speculation about what caused the accident has focused on the possible icing up of the aircraft's Thales speed sensors, which seemed to give inconsistent readings before communication was lost.

Depending on how much data can be retrieved and how clearly it pinpoints the cause of the crash, lawyers say information from the black boxes could lead to a flood of liability claims.

Any fresh conclusions on the cause of the crash will also be fed into an ongoing judicial probe in which Airbus and Air France have both been placed under formal investigation.

Source: Reuters

Flight recorders that could reveal why an Air France plane crashed into the Atlantic Ocean in 2009 killing 228 people are closer to being retrieved after a diving robot found the section of fuselage where they were mounted.

The tail from the Airbus SAS A330-200 jetliner has been discovered, Nelson Marinho, president of an association for families of the crash victims, said today in a phone interview from Paris after meeting yesterday with Jean-Paul Troadec, director of the BEA, France’s air-accident investigator.

The recorders themselves haven’t yet been found, BEA spokeswoman Martine Del Bono said today. Known as black boxes, the devices store detailed technical information and records of cockpit conversations and are designed to survive heavy impacts.

Debris from Air France Flight 447 was located at a depth of 3,900 meters (12,800 feet) earlier this month after a fourth search attempt. The A330 went down on June 1, 2009, after departing Rio de Janeiro for Paris Charles de Gaulle airport.

Another search vessel will leave Senegal on April 21 to head for the site, French Transport Minister Thierry Mariani said yesterday in a statement. Attempts will also be made to recover bodies that have been sighted with the wreckage.

The discovery of the A330 fragments renews hopes that the cause of the crash will be found, Air France-KLM Group Chief Executive Officer Pierre-Henri Gourgeon said on April 3. Both Air France and Airbus have been charged with manslaughter over the accident, the worst in the Paris-based carrier’s history.

Speed Sensors

The BEA has said a contributing factor may have been the icing up of speed sensors, or Pitot tubes, causing unreliable readings. The agency made the suggestion after reviewing data transmitted in the last minutes before the crash.

At least 13,000 photos have been taken of the debris zone, which includes an engine, the fuselage and pieces of wing and landing gear. None of the images gives an initial explanation of why the A330 fell from the sky, according to BEA chief investigator Alain Bouillard, who will lead the recovery effort.

The wreckage is spread over a flat and sandy zone north of the plane’s last known position, Troadec has said. Recorders of the type used on the A330 have never spent so long at depth, he said, raising uncertainty that they will still be readable.

Source:  Bloomberg Businessweek

Parts of the wreckage of an Air France plane found in the Atlantic at the weekend contain the bodies of some of the passengers who died when the aircraft crashed off Brazil in 2009, the French government said on Monday.

Air France flight 447, an Airbus A330 plane, crashed into the ocean en route from Rio to Paris, killing all 228 passengers and crew on board and a long search has so far failed to find flight recorders that could give clues to the cause of the accident.

The latest search, the fourth since the crash, is being carried out using a salvage vessel equipped with unmanned submarines. An initial underwater search had also found parts of wreckage and bodies.

France's BEA accident investigation authority said on Sunday it had found a large part of the plane's wreckage including the engine and parts of the fuselage, and Environment Minister Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet said on Monday there were human remains inside.

"We have more than just traces, we have bodies... Identification is possible," she told France Inter radio.

Transport Minister Thierry Mariani said victims' families would be informed of the findings at a meeting at the end of the week and no further details would be made public before then.

"It's true that bodies have been seen, but given the sensitive nature of the subject we prefer to keep certain details for the families," he told France Info radio.

The discovery of the chunks of the Air France wreckage in a vast search radius of some 10,000 square km, has raised hopes that the aircraft's flight recorders, or black boxes, might now be found.

The aircraft vanished after hitting stormy weather over the Atlantic a few hours into the flight. Speculation about what caused the accident has focused on the possible icing up of the aircraft's speed sensors, which seemed to give inconsistent readings before communication was lost.

Source: Reuters