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Air France jet was intact when it crashed
12:00 AM CDT on Friday, July 3, 2009
PARIS – An Air France jetliner that plunged from a stormy sky June 1 was intact when it smacked belly-first into the Atlantic Ocean at high speed, killing all 228 people aboard, French investigators said Thursday, but they acknowledged that they still have no clear idea what caused the disaster.
Alain Bouillard, who is heading a probe by the French Investigation and Analysis Bureau, said that findings so far indicate the 4-year-old Airbus A330-200 broke into a number of pieces only when it hit the surface of the water.
No inflated life jackets have been found in a month of searching, he added, indicating the 216 passengers and 16 crew on Flight 447 from Rio de Janeiro to Paris were probably unaware during their final minutes that they were speeding from 35,000 feet toward the deadly crash.
But the key question – what happened to cause the plane to plummet without any known warning – was left wrapped in mystery.
"Today we are indeed far from establishing the causes of the accident," Bouillard said at the bureau's headquarters on the outskirts of Paris.
The apparent failure of small devices affixed to the plane's skin to gauge air speed, called Pitot tubes, were "a factor," Bouillard said, but only one of several, including high winds, thunder, lightning and other possible equipment failures or human errors that remain unknown. The devices had given trouble, principally by icing up, on a number of Airbus planes. Since the crash, Air France has updated all its A330 fleet with a newer model.
A group of victims' families, dissatisfied with the flow of information from Air France, issued a letter to the French carrier's management, seeking answers to a series of questions centered on a burst of automatically generated messages from the aircraft's computers during the final minutes of flight.
According to Air France, the alerts reported failures in several systems, including speed readings, suggesting that the pilots may not have known their true speed as the plane was being buffeted by the storm.
Bouillard presented what was described as a report on the first stage of the investigation. But with the plane's flight recorders still not found, he added, it will be difficult if not impossible to gain a clear picture of what happened during the critical last minutes high over the Atlantic.
French, U.S. and Spanish ships, including a French submarine, have continued to sweep the ocean for signals from the black boxes.
Edward Cody,
The Washington Post
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