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martes, 2 de junio de 2009

Brazilian air force reported spotting debris, including floating metallic pieces, a seat and oil slicks

Brazil: Air Force Finds Signs of Plane Wreckage

Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, June 2, 2009; 1:43 PM

PARIS, June 2 -- Brazilian air force planes on Tuesday reported spotting debris, including floating metallic pieces, a seat and oil slicks, that authorities said could be from the Air France flight carrying 228 people that disappeared over the South Atlantic a day earlier during a nasty lightning storm.

The French government has vowed to keep searching for the missing jetliner as long as necessary, and ships and planes from a range of countries have converged on the vast expanse of ocean that constitutes the presumed crash zone.

In a statement posted on its Web site, the Brazilian air force said search planes sighted small pieces of aircraft debris in the ocean, although it was not immediately possible to identify them positively as belonging to the Air France plane. It said "metallic and nonmetallic" debris was found floating in two places about 36 miles apart along the missing plane's flight path, including an airplane seat, an orange buoy, a barrel, "small white pieces" and slicks of oil or kerosene.

A spokesman for the Brazilian air force, Col. Jorge Amaral, said in a televised statement that the debris was found about 390 miles (650 kilometers) northeast of the Brazilian archipelago of Fernando de Noronha. Some of it was white in color, as was the missing plane, Air France Flight 447 from Rio de Janeiro to Paris.

However, Amaral said authorities will need to find a serial number or other identifying information in order to link the debris conclusively to the missing plane.

Before the discovery of the debris was reported, French Defense Ministry officials said a Breguet-Atlantic maritime surveillance plane had left France on Tuesday, along with a Falcon 50 surveillance craft, to join a fleet of Brazilian air force aircraft and a Senegal-based Breguet-Atlantic that have been crisscrossing a vast area between Brazil and West Africa to search for the plane. Two French navy ships, a landing vessel that steamed out of Portugal and a frigate that had been patrolling in the Caribbean, also headed for the zone, the ministry said.

The Brazilian navy said its ships are not expected to arrive on the scene until Wednesday. But it said three cargo ships in the area -- two Dutch-flagged and one French -- had been asked to make detours from their normal routes to assist with the search.

President Obama told French television stations that the United States is prepared to do everything it can to find out what happened to the plane.

Among the passengers on the flight were two Americans: Michael Harris, 60, a geologist for a U.S. energy company, and his wife, Anne Harris, news services reported. The couple, originally from Lafayette, La., had moved to Rio de Janeiro from Houston last year.

The Airbus 330-200 was last heard from early Monday.

France's junior minister for transportation, Dominique Bussereau, warned that the search for the remains of the plane and its passengers could continue for a long time. Wreckage from the twin-engine plane could be deep under the sea, he said, neutralizing any automatically generated emergency signals.

French Prime Minister François Fillon told lawmakers Tuesday that the Atlantic waters in the search zone are up to 23,000 feet deep.

That Atlantic zone falls between normal radar coverage from either Brazil or West Africa, although contact remains via radio, authorities here said. Although the plane's position was known as of the final satellite messages, French officials and airline pilots noted that the plane could have plummeted directly into the water or flown on for hundreds of miles, making the search zone a long, broad path across the ocean between northeastern Brazil and far western Africa.

"This will be a long investigation," Bussereau said in a separate radio interview. "It could be several days, several weeks or several months."

Given the vastness of the ocean and the uncertainty about where the plane went down, the crash site might never be pinpointed, some experts said before the debris was sighted. The Pentagon dispatched a surveillance aircraft and an Air Force search-and-rescue team from a U.S. Southern Command air base in El Salvador.

French officials reportedly asked the Obama administration whether U.S. spy satellites or listening posts might provide clues to the fate of the jetliner.

"If an airplane went down in the mid-Atlantic, it could be very difficult to find any physical wreckage," said John Hansman, an aeronautics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "The mid-oceans are one of the remotest parts of the world. It's like going to the North Pole."

French officials emphasized that they had no clear explanation for what happened to the plane. Bussereau said lightning alone was unlikely to cause such a sudden crash and suggested "a succession of extraordinary events" must have been responsible. "But we can't exclude anything, as we don't have any element at all," he added.

The plane had taken off Sunday night from Rio de Janeiro, bound for Paris. It carried 12 crew members and 216 passengers, a mix of nationalities reflecting the democratization of air travel: 61 French citizens and 58 Brazilians, but also nine Chinese, nine Italians, six Swiss, five British, five Lebanese, four Hungarians, two Americans and others from a total of 32 countries, from Estonia to Gambia to Morocco to the Philippines.

Air France said the plane was commanded by a veteran pilot with 11,000 hours in the air, including 1,700 at the controls of an Airbus A330. The aircraft used for Flight 447, the company said, was put into service in 2005 and had been inspected April 16 without any anomalies.

The A330-200 is a common jet on international routes, particularly transatlantic flights, and analysts said it has an enviable safety record with many of the world's major carriers. Northwest, which recently merged with Delta Air Lines, has 11 A330-200 planes and 21 of the larger A330-300 models. US Airways has nine A330-300s, according to Airbus.

Experts said the best clues to the cause of Flight 447's disappearance undoubtedly would come from the plane's "black box" data and voice recorders -- if they can be recovered.

Typically, the black boxes have tracking beacons that activate when the boxes get wet, and the radio signal works for about 30 days. But search teams have to be within 4,000 to 5,000 feet of the recorders to pick up the signals, so among the key questions are how long the plane kept flying after its last automatic satellite transmission and why no mayday call was received from the pilots.

Hans Weber, an aviation technology consultant, said airplane satellite systems have their limits. "Just like your car, you may have all this information, but if you had a catastrophic accident, the GPS system will not survive," he said.

The most deadly previous incident involving an Air France plane occurred in 2000, when a Concorde slammed into the ground shortly after takeoff in Paris, killing 109 people aboard the supersonic aircraft along with four others in a hotel that was demolished by the crash.

The world's deadliest crash was a 1977 collision between two Boeing 747s at Tenerife in the Canary Islands that killed 583 people.

Freeman reported from Washington. Staff writer William Branigin contributed to this report.

lunes, 1 de junio de 2009

The disappearance of an Air France jet en route from Rio de Janeiro to Paris on Sunday evening left seasoned crash investigators with a mystery to plu

Search Is On for Wreckage of Missing Air France Jet

Ricardo Moraes/Associated Press

Brazil's Vice President Jose Alencar spoke with the media after visiting relatives of missing passengers.

By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr. and CHRISTINE NEGRONI

Published: June 1, 2009

The disappearance of an Air France jet en route from Rio de Janeiro to Paris on Sunday evening left seasoned crash investigators with a mystery to plumb and very little data to work with.

The Airbus A330-200, carrying 228 passengers and crew members, is believed to have vanished in a towering thunderstorm with no word from its pilots that they were in crisis.

The plane had beamed out several signals that its electrical systems had malfunctioned and, according to one report, that it had lost cabin pressure. The signals were sent not as distress calls, however, but as automated reports to Air France’s maintenance system, and were not read for hours, until air traffic controllers realized that the plane’s crew had not radioed in on schedule.

As a search for wreckage began over a vast swath of ocean between Brazil and the African coast, experts struggled to offer plausible theories as to how a well-maintained modern jetliner, built to withstand electrical and physical buffeting far greater than nature usually offers, could have gone down so silently and mysteriously.

There were no suggestions on Monday that a bomb, a hijacking or sabotage was to blame. Whatever of the plane’s final minutes was recorded in its black box may never be known, because it is presumably at the bottom of the Atlantic. As is common with trans-ocean flights, it was too far out over the sea to be tracked on land-based radar from Brazil or Senegal. Whether its location was captured by satellite or other planes’ radar is not known yet.

The plane, Flight AF 447, was scheduled to arrive at Charles de Gaulle airport at 11:10 a.m. local time. Stricken relatives descended on Terminal 2D, where the airline established a crisis center. A black-robed priest was making his way past hordes of police officers and journalists to comfort relatives of those on the flight.

“Air France is extremely distraught, and the whole team of Air France is suffering,” Pierre-Henri Gourgeon, the chief executive of Air France-KLM, told reporters in Paris. “We would like to say to the relatives of the victims that we are totally with them and will make every effort to help them.”

President Nicolas Sarkozy of France said: “It’s a tragic accident. The chances of finding survivors are tiny.”

There were people of 32 nationalities aboard, including 58 Brazilians, 61 French and 2 Americans, Air France said in a statement based on information from Brazilian authorities.

The flight took off from Rio de Janeiro at 7:30 p.m. local time (6:30 p.m. Eastern time), and its last verbal communication with air traffic control was three hours later, at 10:33, according to a statement from Brazil’s civil aviation agency. At that time, the flight was at 35,000 feet and traveling at 520 miles per hour.

About a half-hour later, it apparently encountered an electrical storm with “very heavy turbulence,” Air France said. The last communication from it came at 11:14 — a series of automatic messages indicating it had suffered an electrical-system malfunction. The Associated Press reported that it also suffered a loss of cabin pressure.

Brazilian officials said the plane disappeared over the Atlantic somewhere between a point 186 miles northeast of their coastal city Natal and the Cape Verde islands off Africa. The area is known as the “horse latitudes,” where the tropics of the Northern and Southern Hemispheres mix, sometimes creating violent and unpredictable thunderstorms that can rise to 55,000 feet, higher than commercial jetliners can go.

Experts were at a loss to explain fatal damage from lightning or a tropical storm, both of which jetliners face routinely, despite efforts to avoid them — as much out of concern for passengers’ nerves as for the planes’ safety.

Pilots are trained to go over or around thunderstorms rather than through them. Brigitte Barrand, an Air France spokeswoman, said the highly experienced pilot had clocked 11,000 flying hours, including 1,100 hours on Airbus 330 jets.

“A completely unexpected situation occurred on board the aircraft,” Mr. Gourgeon told France’s LCI television.
“Lightning alone is not enough to explain the loss of this plane, and turbulence alone is not enough,” he said. “It is always a combination of factors.” By some estimates, jetliners are typically hit by lightning at least once a year. But the strike normally travels across the plane’s aluminum skin and out the tail or awingtip. Passengers are insulated in the nonconductive, largely plastic interior, and vital equipment is shielded.

A loss of cabin pressure could suggest a break in the fuselage, but planes are built to withstand buffeting from a storm’s updrafts and downdrafts. It could also be a consequence of an electrical failure, if the plane’s air compressors stop working.

Large hailstones created by some thunderstorms have been known to break windshields or turbine blades, though pilots would be likely to rapidly report something like that.

The missing aircraft was relatively new, having gone into service in April 2005. Its last hangar maintenance check was on April 16, Air France said. No Airbus A330-200 passenger flight ever had a fatal crash, according to the Aviation Safety Network.

Hans Weber, head of the Tecop aviation consulting firm in San Diego, offered a hypothesis about the episode, based on his knowledge of severe losses of altitude by two Qantas jets last year.

The new Airbus 330 was a “fly-by-wire” plane, in which signals to move the flaps are sent through electric wires to small motors in the wings rather than through cables or hydraulic tubing. Fly-by-wire systems can automatically conduct maneuvers to prevent an impending crash, but some Airbus jets will not allow a pilot to override the self-protection mechanism.

On both Qantas flights, the planes’ inertia sensors sent faulty information into the flight computers, making them take emergency measures to correct problems that did not exist, sending the planes into sudden dives.

If the inertia sensor told a computer that a plane was stalling, forcing it to drop the nose and dive to pick up airspeed, and there was simultaneously a severe downdraft in the storm turbulence, “that would be hard to recover from,” Mr. Weber said.

The Qantas flight QF72 which plunged over Western Australia was also an Airbus A330, an incident regarding irregularity with the aircraft's elevator control system.

— scarlett.88, Melbourne, Australia

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June 01, 2009 8:29 am