Air France Jet - A bomb?

[Jan Klimkowski]

If it's true, rather than disinformation, I wonder what it means:

Air France plane crashed vertically into ocean

Flight 447 went down so quickly that passengers had no time to react, says French head investigator

Matthew Weaver and agencies
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 2 July 2009 15.12 BST Article history
Time is running out to find the Air France plane's black box flight recorder. Photograph: AP

Air France flight 447 did not break up in the air but plunged vertically into the Atlantic Ocean, according to the French head investigator of last month's crash, which killed all 228 people on board.

Alain Bouillard said life vests found among the wreckage were not inflated, indicating the accident happened so quickly that the passengers had no time to react.

Speed sensors on the Airbus A330 flying from Rio de Janeiro to Paris were not to blame, he said, though "we are far from understanding the cause of the crash".

"The plane seems to have hit the surface of the water on its flight trajectory with a strong vertical acceleration," he said, adding that investigators have found "neither traces of fire nor traces of explosives."

One of the automatic messages emitted by the plane indicates it was receiving incorrect speed information from the external monitoring instruments, which could destabilise the control systems. Experts have suggested those external instruments might have iced over.

No information was being given out from autopsies of the bodies found, Bouillard told a news conference at the headquarters of the French air accident agency BEA in Le Bourget, outside Paris.

The chances of finding the flight recorders are falling as the signals they emit fade. Without them, the full causes of the accident may never be known. The automated messages sent by the plane before it fell gave rescuers only a vague location to begin their search. Bouillard said the search for the plane's black boxes has been extended by 10 days and would continue untill 10 July.

Families of the victims had been briefed before the media on the findings so far of the BEA investigation.

Earlier, Christophe Guillot-Noel, head of an association for the crash victims' families said they wanted all the facts, "above all to be able to avoid this eventually happening again".

"We have just one demand: transparency. We have just one expectation: the truth," he said.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jul...vertically

[Peter Lemkin]

I just hear today they found the 'black box'....if true, who knows...if they'll tell us what it really says, who knows...but if so...could be interesting..... I'm not a pilot...Tosh you still here?...but think a plane would likely only go nose first if it lost all power in the engines and was at stall speeds.

[Magda Hassan]

Or is that for the other plane that fell from the sky near the Comoros Islands? So many falling planes these days it is hard to keep up. That's another whole story there. The new lightweight construction of planes.

[Magda Hassan]

A damning report also found that his co-pilots appeared dangerously tired.

Five Britons were among the dead when AF447 plunged into the Atlantic Ocean as it travelled from Rio de Janeiro in Brazil to Paris in June 2009.

The revelations may help shed light on why the pilots took what air accident investigators describe as "inappropriate" action when the Airbus 330 flew into turbulence during a tropical thunderstorm.




Le Figaro said exhaustion after a weekend's romantic break in Rio lay behind the crash.



Co-pilots Pierre-Cedric Bonin, 32, and David Robert, 37, were unable to bring the plane under control as it rolled from side to side.
Black box recorders showed that Captain Marc Dubois, 58, had been asleep when the trouble started and took more than a minute to return to the cockpit when they alerted him.
Analysis of the flight recorders has established that airspeed sensors had malfunctioned probably because they had frozen up.
But a report commissioned by French magistrates investigating the crash said the captain had been recorded as grumbling shortly after take off: "I didn't sleep enough last night. One hour is not enough."
Le Figaro also published a previously unseen email sent by a friend of Captain Dubois' after the crash showing that he had taken Veronique Gaignard, his girlfriend, who was an off-duty flight attendant, to Rio.
"I can tell you that he was happy because he told me that he was leaving (for Rio) with Veronique and he was so happy that she was there and accompanying him," the mail reads.
Le Figaro said Captain Dubois and Ms Gaignard had driven to see friends an hour from Rio and flown by helicopter over the bay during the weekend.
When he reached the cockpit after being roused, Captain Dubois used words that suggested he was not fully awake, according to French press reports.
"Go down," he told a co-pilot. "No go up. You go up. It's not possible."
The pilots ignored normal procedures and raised, rather than lowered, the plane's nose when it lost lift or, in technical parlance, "stalled".
An aerodynamic stall is a loss of lift, and not a stall of the engines, which investigators said had operated and responded throughout.
The terrifying result was a three-and-a-half minute plunge before hitting the ocean.
The French aviation safety authority, the BEA has already released a report which concurs with a 365-page judicial inquiry that the "captain had failed in his duties" and "prevented the co-pilot from reacting appropriately". French judges have launched a criminal inquiry into Air France and Airbus for alleged manslaughter.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnew...sleep.html