THE AIR France jet that vanished in the middle of the Atlantic with 228 passengers on board did not disintegrate in mid-air but plunged into the water intact and belly first, investigators said yesterday.
Alain Bouillard, leading the preliminary inquiry on behalf of France’s Bureau d’Enquêtes et d’Analyses or BEA accident agency, said examination of wreckage indicated that the A330 Airbus was still in one piece when it crashed, at high speed. “The plane was not destroyed while it was in flight,” he said. “It seems to have hit the surface of the water in the direction of flight and with a strong vertical acceleration.”
Appearing to rule out terrorism, he said “neither traces of fire nor traces of explosives” had been found.
Just over a month since Flight AF447 went down between Rio de Janeiro and Paris, investigators said they were facing one of the most baffling cases in the history of air travel.
The pilots apparently sent no distress calls and a rescue team has been unable to find the flight recorders, or black boxes, in one of the remotest parts of the Atlantic. Investigators have warned that without such crucial information a full explanation will be hard to come by.
“Today we are very far from establishing the causes of the accident,” admitted Mr Bouillard, adding that the blame for the crash could not be pinned entirely on a problem with the aircraft’s speed sensors, or pitot tubes. “[It] is one of the factors but not the only one,” he said. “It is an element but it is not the cause.”
The BEA said it was trying to piece together what went wrong from the series of automated messages, or Acars, sent in the final minutes before the aircraft hit the water and also from the debris recovered from the Atlantic.
About 640 items of furniture, machinery and other material have been examined for clues. Analysis of food trays and shelving in the galley indicated that they had crashed in a way that would suggest a strong vertical acceleration. Part of the aircraft’s floor had been found misshapen to suggest a similar fate.
No inflated life jackets had been discovered, which “obviously shows the passengers were not prepared for a crash landing”, said Mr Bouillard. But experts expressed doubt as to where the investigation could lead without the recovery of the black boxes.
Mr Bouillard said the search for them had been extended for another 10 days in the hope they would continue to emit signals.
Airbus said it was exploring ways to “reinforce” flight data recovery, either by increasing the amount of data sent from the aircraft, or by developing new technology such as black boxes that float or whose signals last longer.
Initial rumours surrounding the aircraft’s airspeed sensors was partially corroborated by investigators yesterday, who confirmed that one of the messages transmitted minutes before the crash showed the pilots were trying to fly through a storm zone with faulty speed information.
Speculation that the monitoring instruments, located on the outside of the plane, could have iced over led Air France to replace the monitors on all its Airbus 330s and A340s this month.
Investigators are also focusing on why air traffic controllers in Brazil failed to pass over control of the flight to their colleagues in Senegal. – ( Guardianservice)