The pilots of the Air France aircraft that crashed off Brazil might have fought to control their stricken aircraft to the end, because it was not damaged when it hit the Atlantic Ocean, investigators indicated yesterday.
In the first report on the disaster that killed all 228 aboard, the French accident bureau said that the Airbus A330 of Air France Flight 447's had not broken up at altitude as it is reported previously by Brazil.
Neither was it in a nose or tail-down dive but the belly-first drive into the Atlantic Ocean. A study of 660 pieces of debris showed that it had crushed only when it slammed belly-first into the sea, reported the bureau.
“The plane was not destroyed while it was in flight,” said Alain Bouillard, the chief of the investigation into the disaster which happened on 1st June 2009. “It seems to strike the surface of the water in level attitude and with a strong vertical acceleration.”
This could point out that the crew had retained some control after the aircraft plummeted in little over four minutes from its cruising altitude of 35,000ft on its way from Rio to Paris, said the expert investigators. Aircraft diving fully out of control from high altitude generally break up before reaching the ground.
No passengers were wearing their life-jackets so they were not prepared for an emergency, said Mr Bouillard. There was no mean of knowing if they were conscious when the aircraft hit the water. The Brazilian authorities so far have refused the investigators access to post-mortem inspection results from the 51 bodies recovered from the ocean.
The investigators confirmed that the disaster began with faulty readings from the pitot speed sensors and caused the electronic systems to disconnect and left the crew with the task of hand-flying a handicapped airliner.
They said that it was too soon to assign a cause to the crash, but their outline confirmed the sequence of events from a data transmitter on the aircraft that has been analyzed widely by experts. Mr Bouillard said that the airliner was flying at night in a tropical storm zone that was not particularly severe. The pitot speed sensors were the faulty readings fed to the data computers. This caused the automatic pilot and automated flight system to shut down, leaving the pilots to hand-fly the aircraft.
In the first report on the disaster that killed all 228 aboard, the French accident bureau said that the Airbus A330 of Air France Flight 447's had not broken up at altitude as it is reported previously by Brazil.
Neither was it in a nose or tail-down dive but the belly-first drive into the Atlantic Ocean. A study of 660 pieces of debris showed that it had crushed only when it slammed belly-first into the sea, reported the bureau.
“The plane was not destroyed while it was in flight,” said Alain Bouillard, the chief of the investigation into the disaster which happened on 1st June 2009. “It seems to strike the surface of the water in level attitude and with a strong vertical acceleration.”
This could point out that the crew had retained some control after the aircraft plummeted in little over four minutes from its cruising altitude of 35,000ft on its way from Rio to Paris, said the expert investigators. Aircraft diving fully out of control from high altitude generally break up before reaching the ground.
No passengers were wearing their life-jackets so they were not prepared for an emergency, said Mr Bouillard. There was no mean of knowing if they were conscious when the aircraft hit the water. The Brazilian authorities so far have refused the investigators access to post-mortem inspection results from the 51 bodies recovered from the ocean.
The investigators confirmed that the disaster began with faulty readings from the pitot speed sensors and caused the electronic systems to disconnect and left the crew with the task of hand-flying a handicapped airliner.
They said that it was too soon to assign a cause to the crash, but their outline confirmed the sequence of events from a data transmitter on the aircraft that has been analyzed widely by experts. Mr Bouillard said that the airliner was flying at night in a tropical storm zone that was not particularly severe. The pitot speed sensors were the faulty readings fed to the data computers. This caused the automatic pilot and automated flight system to shut down, leaving the pilots to hand-fly the aircraft.
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