PARIS, French - Air France flight 447, an Airbus 330-203 plane, plunged 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.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.
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.
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.- The French air accident investigation agency BEA said in a statement Sunday night that a team aboard the expedition ship Alucia “has located pieces of an aircraft ... in the last 24 hours.”
- BEA says its investigators identified the pieces as parts of Flight 447 and searchers are carrying out a fourth effort to find remains of the plane — and especially its flight recorders, in hopes of determining the cause of the crash.
- Finding the cause took on new importance last month when a French judge filed preliminary manslaughter charges against Air France and the plane's manufacturer, Airbus.
Air France and Airbus are financing the estimated US$12.5 million cost of the new search. About US$28 million has already been spent on the three previous searches for the jet's wreckage.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.
Pilots lack of familiarity and training along with system malfunction contributed to this terrible accident.
ReplyDeleteThis Airbus A330-203 did not have multiple independent systems for detecting airspeed such as a GPS based system that would at least cross check the readings being given by the pitot tubes and then provide a cockpit warning that the airspeed could be wrong, or another safety mechanism whereby the pitot tubes are heated (as long as this would not impact the reading) so that ice could not occlude them.
To recover from deep stall is to set engine to idle to reduce nose up side effect and try full nose down input. If no success roll the aircraft to above 60° bank angle and rudder input to lower the nose in a steep engaged turn. Practicing recovery from "Loss of Control" situations should be mandatory part of recurrent training