Air France Jet - A bomb?

[Peter Lemkin]

Air France bomb threat four days before jet crashed

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/top-stories...-21413591/

By Martin Fricker 4/06/2009

Air France received a bomb threat four days before Flight 447 plunged into the Atlantic Ocean, it was revealed yesterday.

An anonymous caller made the threat to a plane heading from South America to Paris - just like the doomed jet.

And the theory that Flight AF 447 could have been downed by a bomb was reinforced last night as it emerged wreckage from the Air France jet has been found spread over 55 miles of the Atlantic.

Following the phone threat, Flight 415 was grounded in Buenos Aires as sniffer dogs made a full search - but no explosives were found and the Boeing 777 was allowed to leave the Argentine capital.

Investigators are examining links with Monday's tragedy, when Flight 447 fell from the sky killing all 228 passengers and crew, including British schoolboy Alexander Bjoroy. Pilots did not even make a Mayday call, which would have taken just seconds.


Tragic victim Alexander Bjoroy, 11, was returning to school in UK

One Air France pilot said he believed the Airbus 330 was blown up by terrorists after leaving Brazilian capital Rio de Janeiro. The long-haul captain, who did not want to be named, said: "It is highly likely a bomb went off. I've flown these jets 10 years. The chances of it being an electrical fault are unfeasible.

"There are five electricity supplies on board and they would all have to fail."

The pilot added the chances of it crashing after being struck by lightning were "extremely rare in modern planes".

He also dismissed the idea the pilot could have tried to land on the sea.

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He said: "That requires electricity. If there was electricity, they could have sent a Mayday, which never happened." He added: "If there was an explosion on board, the wreckage would be spread over a very wide area, as it was.

"In my opinion, the only explanation is a bomb went off on the plane."

Another Air France pilot suggested the aircraft may have hit another plane.

Captain Cedric Maniez said: "Maybe a collision with a drug-smuggling aircraft which nobody reports missing."

French officials have not ruled out terrorism but with no group claiming responsibility they believe it is unlikely.

Investigators may never know why the plane crashed. Its two black boxes could be 20,000ft under water.

Search teams found more debris, including a 23ft chunk, floating 400 miles off the coast.

Families were continuing to grieve for loved ones last night. Parents Robin and Jane Bjoroy, who work for an oil firm in Rio, waved off Alexander, 11, at the airport as he returned to boarding school in Bristol with a chaperone. They confirmed his death "with deep sadness" in a statement, adding: "Alexander was returning to school after half-term in Rio. Naturally, we are deeply upset about the loss."

John Milne, headteacher of Clifton College Preparatory School where Alexander boarded, said: "He will be sorely missed by pupils and staff."

Five Britons were among the dead, which included Brazilian, French, German, Chinese, Italian, Swiss, Lebanese and Hungarian passengers.
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By SLOBODAN LEKIC Associated Press Writer
Posted: 06/03/2009 01:26:59 PM PDT
Updated: 06/03/2009 03:07:45 PM PDT

Click photo to enlarge

In this photo released by Brazil's Defense Ministry, an... ((AP Photo/Brazil Defense Ministry))

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BRUSSELS—The flight recorders from Air France Flight 447 could be scattered nearly anywhere across a vast undersea mountain range that lies as much as four miles below the surface of the Atlantic Ocean.

In those remote, forbidding waters between Brazil and West Africa, variations in temperature and salinity can reduce visibility and obscure homing signals from the devices. And for salvage crews, time is short because the "black boxes" will only emit signals for a month.

Search planes and ships located more debris from the Airbus A330 on Wednesday, but high seas and heavy winds delayed the arrival of deep-water submersibles that could be used to find wreckage on the ocean floor.

The head of France's accident investigation agency, Paul-Louis Arslanian, said he was "not optimistic" that officials would ever recover the flight data recorder or cockpit voice recorder from the plane, which disappeared Sunday night minutes after flying into a dangerous band of storms. The cause of the crash is still a mystery.

Water in the area is said to run as deep as 22,950 feet, possibly prohibiting the use of manned submersibles.

Instead, remotely operated vehicles, or ROVs, will probably be used because they are better equipped to withstand immense water pressures.

"Even ROV equipment can hardly work at those depths, but it remains the best available option," said Tor Norstegard, an investigator with Norway's aviation accident investigation
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board and an expert in recovery of wreckage from the North Sea.

"It's one thing to go down to look at things, but it's a much greater problem to take equipment down in order to bring up pieces of wreckage."

Flight recorders aboard airliners do not float, and the major safety agencies do not require them to do so, but many experts have called for that to change. Some military transports have a secondary, detachable recorder on top of the fuselage that is designed to float.

The underwater locator beacons on the plane's flight recorders are designed to emit continuous "pinging" signals for about a month. That usually gives salvage crews ample time to locate and recover them.

The beacons have a range of about 3.7 miles, which means recovery ships might have to deploy a listening device more than a half-mile below the surface to detect the signals.

Norstegard said the Air France search may take a long time because the deep waters contain layers that vary in temperature and salinity.

Those changing layers "can deflect or block the signals emitted from the pingers, making it virtually impossible to locate them," Norstegard said. "You have to wait for the right water conditions and that can take time."

The cameras aboard ROVs are normally used only when the vehicle is close to wreckage because its lights can only illuminate a few meters in the dark depths. In especially murky water, the cameras become useless.

"In that case, you need to use side-scan sonars, which can give you a lateral picture of what is on the sea floor," said Martin Puggaard, chief inspector of air accidents at the Danish air safety agency.

In either case, surface conditions will also affect the recovery work. In particularly heavy swells, ROVs are difficult to control because the long cables that connect them to surface ships tend to jerk back and forth with the wave action.

Both investigators predicted that search crews would have to focus on recovering the black boxes and not on bringing up all the wreckage, as would be done in shallow coastal waters.

When they find more wreckage, searchers will probably divide the underwater debris field into grids and comb the area box by box as they did when TWA Flight 800 crashed off the coast of Long Island, N.Y., in 1996.

Some experts were more hopeful about the salvage effort.

Bill Voss, president and CEO of the Flight Safety Foundation in Alexandria, Va., said he expected crews to find the flight recorders, which are built to withstand intense water pressure.

"I would expect they'll dedicate the rather substantial resources of the French navy to this," Voss said. "I've got to figure this will go quickly. I'm hoping they'll have stuff up in a month, if not just a few weeks."

France has already dispatched a research ship equipped with unmanned submarines that can explore as deep as 19,600 feet.

On Wednesday, search vessels from several nations pushed toward the floating debris that included a 23-foot chunk of the plane and a 12-mile oil slick. Rescuers have found no signs of life from the jet that was carrying 228 people from Rio de Janeiro to Paris.

Although the crash was in international waters, France—as the nation where the plane was registered—has primary jurisdiction over the investigation, said Daniel Holtgen, a spokesman for the European Aviation Safety Agency based in Cologne, Germany.

The French may also designate other countries, such as Brazil, where the doomed flight originated, to take part. Officials at the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board have said they expect to join the search, too.
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From Scott Bronstein
CNN Special Investigations Unit

(CNN) -- At least 12 airplanes shared the trans-Atlantic sky with doomed Air France Flight 447, but none reported any problems, deepening the mystery surrounding the cause of the plane's disappearance.

Image released by the Brazilian Air Force shows oil slicks in the water near a debris site.

Airlines confirmed that at least a dozen aircraft departed roughly at the same time and traversed approximately the same route, but did not report problematic weather conditions. This has led some aviation experts to suggest that technical problems on the airplane might be the main cause of the crash, though they may have combined with weather conditions to create serious problems.

The new information raises more questions than answers about Air France 447, believed to have plunged into the Atlantic Ocean somewhere between the coasts of Brazil and West Africa on May 31, presumably killing all 228 aboard. The plane's computer system reported a series of technical problems about four hours after takeoff and immediately after entering a large storm system a few hundred miles from the far eastern coast of Brazil.

Severe winds, updrafts and even lightning have been mentioned as possible causes of the crash, potentially triggering a failure of the plane's technical systems.

But aviation experts cautioned that weather alone would not normally cause a crash. Planes routinely fly through large storms, using the sensitive radar on board to navigate through specific storm cells. When conditions are severe enough, planes can easily deviate around or above storms, experts say.

In addition to Flight 447, Air France had four other Paris-bound flights that left in the same broad time frame from that part of the world, according to an airline spokesman. One flight left Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, at 4:20 p.m. At that same moment, another Air France flight left nearby Sao Paulo. A third Air France flight left Buenos Aires, Argentina, at 5:50 p.m., also heading for Paris. A final Air France flight left Sao Paulo at 7:10 p.m., almost exactly when the doomed flight took off from Rio.
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All of these flights took a similar route toward Paris, heading first toward Recife on the east coast of Brazil and then continuing northeast over the Atlantic. None of the other flights experienced anything unusual, the spokesman said. All arrived in Paris the next day, with no significant delays of any kind.

That same evening two Air Iberia flights bound for Madrid, Spain, left Brazil at about the same time as Flight 447; one departed from Rio de Janeiro and another from Sao Paulo, according to officials at Iberia. Those flights also reported no problems.

It was the same story for one British Airways flight and three Air TAM Brazil flights, all of which flew routes similar to the missing plane.
Although none of the other flights are known to have reported weather problems en route, aviation experts said weather can change suddenly and vary over short distances, so one plane might experience conditions far worse than another.