Bodies O Flight 447 Pilot flight Attendant Pulled From The Ocean!

PARIS – Search crews in the mid-Atlantic have retrieved the bodies of the chief pilot of Flight 447 and a flight attendant, Air France said Thursday.
The two are among 50 bodies pulled out of the ocean in the international search for remains of the 228 victims and wreckage of the May 31 crash.
Air France, in a statement on its Web site, said the pilot and male flight attendant have been identified but did not release their names. A pilots' union named the flight captain as Frenchman Marc Dubois.
Earlier this week the international police agency Interpol said 11 of the 50 bodies retrieved had been identified: eight Brazilians, one with joint Brazilian-German citizenship, one Brazilian-Swiss and a Briton.
On Wednesday Germany's Foreign Ministry said three Germans — two men from Bavaria and a woman from Hamburg — have been identified. The ministry did not release their names.
The Airbus A330 plane came down in the Atlantic after running into thunderstorms en route from Rio de Janeiro to Paris. The Brazilian military has led the search and recovery efforts for bodies and debris, while the French are in charge of investigating the crash and the hunt for the flight recorders, or black boxes.
The cause of the crash is unclear. The plane's two black boxes could be key to determining what happened.
But the boxes will only continue to emit signals for a few more days. They send out an electronic tapping sound that can be heard up to 1.25 miles (2 kilometers) away.
French officials said this week that military ships searching for the wreckage have detected sounds in the Atlantic depths but they are not from the flight recorders.
Two French-chartered ships are trolling a search area with a radius of 50 miles (80 kilometers), pulling U.S. Navy underwater listening devices attached to 19,700 feet (6,000 meters) of cable. A French submarine is also searching.

Source: AP

More Bodies Found From Air France Crush!

RECIFE, Brazil (CNN) -- Sixteen bodies have been recovered from last week's crash of an Air France jetliner in the Atlantic Ocean, Brazil's military announced Monday.
The Brazilian navy and air force said they have found nine bodies in the wide search area around where the Airbus A330-200 went down. The crew of a French vessel taking part in the search has found seven bodies, military officials told reporters Sunday evening.
Air France Flight 447 disappeared over the Atlantic early June 1. The jet was en route to Paris, France, from the Brazilian city of Rio de Janeiro with 228 passengers and crew aboard.
The bodies were found floating about 1,100 kilometers (700 miles) from the Brazilian coast. Items found in the same area Saturday were confirmed to have come from the jet, including pieces of the aircraft's wing section, luggage and a leather briefcase containing an airplane ticket with a reservation code for the doomed flight, Brazilian Spokesman told CNN

The exact location of the crash has not been determined, since ocean currents probably caused the bodies and debris to drift in the days since the crash. And two key pieces of evidence -- the flight data and cockpit voice recorders -- remain missing, and could lie on the ocean floor.
The part of the ocean where the debris and bodies have been found ranges between 6,000 and 8,000 meters (about 19,700 to 26,250 feet) deep. The search area covers 124,300 square kilometers (77,220 square miles), an area nearly as big as the country of Romania.
Twelve Brazilian and two French aircraft were participating, along with five Brazilian ships and one French frigate. And in Washington, a U.S. defense official told CNN that the U.S. Navy will contribute two high-tech acoustic devices to listen for emergency beacons still operating in deep water.
The "towed pinger locators," which help search for emergency beacons on downed aircraft to a maximum depth of 20,000 feet, will be placed aboard two French tugs that are part of the search efforts, the official said.
Recovery of bodies and debris is significant not only for families, but also for crash investigators, said Mary Schiavo, a former inspector general for the U.S. Department of Transportation.
"Even if they don't find anything else, they can get some very important clues from the pieces that they do find and from the human remains," she told CNN on Saturday.
She said investigators would be able to tell if there was an explosion from possible residue on the bodies or other items. Or, if water is found in the lungs of victims, investigators would know the plane went down intact, she said.
Investigators in Paris said Saturday that the

Air France flight sent out 24 automated error messages about four minutes before it crashed. The messages suggest the plane may have been flying too fast or too slow through severe thunderstorms it encountered before the crash, officials said.
Schiavo said four minutes "was a very long time" for automated signals to be sent from the plane.
Investigators also reported that the airline had failed to replace a part as recommended by the manufacturer, Airbus.
Airbus had advised airlines to update equipment that monitors speed, known as Pitot tubes. The recommendation was a result of technological developments and improvements, an Airbus spokesman told CNN. The change was not mandatory, and the spokesman would not comment on Air France's failure to follow the advice. Source:CNN.com/world

CNN's Karl Penhaul, Richard Quest and Barbara Starr contributed to this report.

More Bodies Found From Missing Air France Plane!

RECIFE, Brazil (CNN) -- Three more bodies were found Sunday from the Air France plane that went missing off the coast of Brazil nearly a week ago, Brazilian officials said.
The discovery brings to five the number of bodies found from the flight AF447, which was carrying 228 passengers and crew when it vanished on Monday.
On Saturday, a Brazilian navy frigate transported the bodies of two men -- south of Brazil's Fernando de Noronha archpelago.
Brazilian air force and navy officials said it was not possible to identify the sex of the latest three bodies. Asked their condition, the officials declined to describe them, citing good taste and the victims' families.
All the bodies and items are confirmed as being from Air France 447, which vanished over the Atlantic early Monday en route to Paris, France, from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
The items recovered include parts of the plane's wing section and at least two seats from the plane and many more items of luggage, officials said.

Bodies of 2 Air France Passangers Found!

A search vessel steams past a marker and debris in the Atlantic Ocean Saturday

RECIFE, Brazil (CNN) -- A Brazilian navy frigate navigated deep waters of the Atlantic on Saturday, carrying the bodies of two men confirmed as passengers of an Air France plane that crashed nearly a week earlier.
The bodies, discovered along with several items from the plane earlier in the day, were being transported by the Constituicao Frigate roughly 675 kilometers (420 miles) southward to Fernando de Noronha, an archipelago of volcanic islands in the Atlantic Ocean, said Col. Henry Munhoz, spokesman for the Brazilian air force.
From there, they will be flown another 355 kilometers (220 miles) to the northern Brazilian city of Recife, Munhoz said. The bodies will be examined by Brazilian forensics experts for identification.
Air France 447 vanished over the Atlantic early Monday en route from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to Paris, France, with 228 passengers and crew aboard.
The discoveries on Saturday provided new-found hope to anxious relatives awaiting news.
"When I heard about this accident, they told us there were no bodies, no pieces of the plane," Nelson Faria Marinho, the father of a missing passenger, told Globo News television in Rio de Janeiro.
"Now, it's all surfacing," he said. "We have pieces of the airplane. We have bodies. This renews my hope. As a father, I can't think of the worst. I couldn't."

Also found Saturday were a backpack and a leather briefcase containing an airplane ticket with a reservation code, which Air France verified belonged to a passenger on the jet, another air force spokesman, Jorge Amaral, told CNN.
The Brazilian navy and air force officials said the backpack contained a laptop, and an oxygen mask also was discovered.
The serial number on a blue seat is still being cross checked to determine whether it belonged to the Air France plane.
The items were spotted in the Atlantic by a search plane about 4 a.m. (3 a.m. ET). The search area was widened to cover 200,000 square kilometers (77,220 square miles) -- an area roughly the size of Nebraska.

It is not clear where the plane crashed, since ocean currents likely caused the bodies and debris to drift in the six days since the crash.
Mary Schiavo, a former inspector general for the Department of Transportation, said Saturday's findings were "hugely significant" not just for the families desperate to recover their loved ones but also for crash investigators.
"Even if they don't find anything else they can get some very important clues from the pieces that they do find and from the human remains," Schiavo said.
She said investigators would be able to discern if there was an explosion from possible residue on the bodies or other items. Or, if water is found in the lungs of victims, investigators would know the plane went down in tact, she said.
"So this is just a treasure trove of information -- very, very important for the investigation," she said.
Investigators in Paris said Saturday that the Air France flight sent out 24 automated error messages lasting about four minutes before it crashed.
The error messages suggest the plane may have been flying too fast or too slow through severe thunderstorms it encountered before the crash, officials said.
They also reported that the airline had failed to replace a part, as recommended by the manufacturer, Airbus.
Airbus had advised airlines to update equipment that monitors speed, known as Pitot tubes. The recommendation was a result of technological developments and improvements, an Airbus spokesman told CNN's Richard Quest. The change was not mandatory, and the spokesman would not comment on Air France's failure to follow the advice.
Planes have crashed because of faulty or blocked Pitot tubes in the past, Quest said, and there was clearly something wrong with the doomed plane's speed-monitoring equipment.

But it may be a mistake to place too much emphasis on the Pitot tubes, he added, since the jet apparently was experiencing massive system failures.
Even as they analyzed the error messages and satellite images of the doomed flight's path, investigators said they still have a lot of work ahead to determine what caused the plane to go down.

"I would just like to ask you to bear in mind that all of this is dynamic and there are a lot of question marks," Paul-Louis Arslanian, head of France's accident investigation bureau, told reporters.
"We don't know how the aircraft entered the water. We don't know how these pieces of debris entered into the water," he said. "You have to take into account the current ... and the shape of the ocean floor."
Schiavo, the former inspector general, said the four minutes of automated signals sent from the plane "was a very long time."
"And of course, this is very vital information when you don't have the black boxes," Schiavo said.
The four minutes could be the amount of time the plane took to tumble down from an altitude of 35,000 feet, she said.
"So that 4 minutes may have actually been the four minutes the plane was falling and it will give clues -- especially with today's finding -- of where to find the bulk of the wreckage and those all-important black boxes," she said.

Source:www.CNN.com/world
CNN's Karl Penhaul and Helena DeMoura contributed to this report.

Probe: Airline Did Not Replace Instruments On 447

PARIS – Air France had not acted on a recommendation to change airspeed-detecting instruments on Flight 447 before the plane crashed in turbulent weather, the French agency investigating the disaster said Saturday.
The French accident investigation agency, BEA, found the doomed plane received inconsistent airspeed readings by different instruments as it struggled in a massive thunderstorm on its flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris with 228 people aboard.
No debris from the aircraft has been found and without the aircraft's black box recorders, aviation investigators have little information to help them determine what caused the crash.
Airbus had recommended to all its airline customers that they replace speed-measuring instruments known as Pitot tubes on the A330, the model that crashed, said Paul-Louis Arslanian, the head of the agency.
"They hadn't yet been replaced" on the plane that crashed, said Alain Bouillard, head of the French investigation. Air France declined immediate comment.
Arslanian cautioned that it is too early to draw conclusions about the role of Pitot tubes in the crash, saying Airbus had made the recommendation for "a number of reasons."
Investigators are relying on 24 messages the plane sent automatically during the last minutes of the flight to try to locate the wreckage.
The signals show the plane's autopilot was not on, officials said, but it was not clear if the autopilot had been switched off by the pilots or had stopped working because it received conflicting airspeed readings.
In Brazil, visibility and weather conditions improved Saturday in the area searchers are focusing on but debris earlier spotted on the ocean's surface may have sunk by now.
"Debris doesn't indefinitely float, and when it sinks we will not have the means of finding them," Air Force Brig. Gen. Ramon Cardoso told reporters late Friday.
Earlier, Cardoso insisted that the debris spotted — an airplane seat, a slick of kerosene and other pieces — was from the plane. But he confirmed that Brazilian searchers had yet to recovered any of the material.
He said searchers did not pursue the reports of debris — the first sighting was reported on Tuesday — because priority was given to the hunt for survivors or the remains of victims.
Meanwhile, a German government-owned satellite spotted debris in the Atlantic on Wednesday, a German Aerospace Center spokesman said, but he added it was unclear whether the material came from the plane.
BEA chief Arslanian said the crash of Flight 447 does not mean similar plane models are unsafe, he said, adding that he told family members not to worry about flying.
"My sister and her son are going to take an A330 next week," he told a news conference at the agency's headquarters, near Paris.
He says planes can be flown safely "with damaged systems."
The flight disappeared nearly four hours after takeoff, killing all on board. It was Air France's deadliest plane crash and the world's worst commercial air accident since 2001.
The investigation is increasingly focused on whether external instruments may have iced over, confusing speed sensors and leading computers to set the plane's speed too fast or slow — a potentially deadly mistake in severe turbulence.
An Air France memo to its pilots Friday about the crash said the airline is replacing the Pitot tubes on all its medium- and long-haul Airbus jets.
Pitot tubes protrude from the wing or fuselage of a plane and help measure the speed and angle of the flight, along with less vital information like outside air temperature.
They feed airspeed sensors and are heated to prevent icing.
A blocked or malfunctioning Pitot tube could cause an airspeed sensor to work incorrectly and cause the computer controlling the plane to accelerate or decelerate in a potentially dangerous fashion.
On Thursday, European plane maker Airbus sent an advisory to all operators of the A330 reminding them of how to handle the plane in conditions similar to those experienced by Flight 447.
Peter Goelz, a former managing director of the National Transportation Safety Board, said that advisory and the Air France memo about replacing flight-speed instruments "certainly raises questions about whether the Pitot tubes, which are critical to the pilot's understanding of what's going on, were operating effectively."
But questions about speed sensors are only one of many factors investigators are considering. Automatic transmissions from the plane showed a chain of computer system failures that indicate the plane broke apart in midair.
President Barack Obama said at a news conference with French President Nicolas Sarkozy Saturday that the United States had authorized all of the U.S. government's resources to help investigate the crash.
Arslanian said investigators are searching a zone of several hundred square miles (square kilometers) for the debris.
An intensive international effort so far has failed to recover any confirmed wreckage, and concern has grown about whether searchers were even looking in the right place.
It is vital to locate a beacon called a "pinger" that should be attached to the cockpit voice and data recorders, now presumed to be deep in the Atlantic, Arslanian said.
"We have no guarantee that the pinger is attached to the recorders," he said.
Holding up a pinger in the palm of his hand, he said: "This is what we are looking for in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean."
Investigators are trying to determine the location of the debris in the ocean based on the height and speed of the plane at the time the last message was received. Currents could also have scattered debris far along the ocean floor, he said.
"You see the complexity of the problem," he said.
Laurent Kerleguer, an engineer specialized in the ocean floor working with the investigation team, said the zone seen as the most likely site of the debris was 15,112 feet (4,606 meters) at its deepest point and 2,835 feet (864 meters) at its shallowest.
France is sending a submarine to the area to try to detect signals from the black boxes, said military spokesman Christophe Prazuck. The Emeraude will arrive next week, he said.
___ AP Writers Patrick McGroarty in Berlin and Bradley Brooks in Rio de Janeiro contributed to this report.

What European Media are Saying About Air France Accident!

Assuming that the Air France flight is lost at sea, here is what some media are saying about the accident, with translations provided by Google:
Paris Match: Lightning likely cause of the loss of Air France
"...A spokesman for Air France evokes the possibility of lightning: the plane has indeed gone through a thunderstorm with strong turbulence." (Un porte-parole d'Air France évoque l'hypothèse de la foudre : l'avion a en effet traversé une zone orageuse avec de fortes turbulence.)
Le Monde:
"It is not known at this time the causes of this disappearance. The possibility of a detour is 'clearly ruled out,' said Minister for Transport, Jean-Louis Borloo. According to François Brousse, communications director of Air France, the device has probably 'been struck.' But some experts doubt that lightning is the sole cause of the disappearance of the Rio-Paris flight, as Pierre Sparaco Specialist Civil Aviation [says]: 'Normally, lightning can not have serious consequences for an airplane.'
("L'hypothèse d'un détournement 'est clairement écartée', a déclaré le ministre en charge des transports, Jean-Louis Borloo . Selon François Brousse , directeur de la communication d'Air France, l'appareil a vraisemblablement 'été foudroyé.' Mais certains experts doutent que la foudre soit l'unique cause de la disparition du vol Rio-Paris, comme Pierre Sparaco , spécialiste de l'aéronautique civile. 'Normalement, la foudre ne peut pas avoir de conséquences graves pour un avion'.)
Le Parisien:
"Sarkozy does not exclude any hypothesis"
The Times of London:
"Air traffic controllers had their last contact with the aircraft about four hours into the flight, when the pilot said that he had hit severe turbulence. Exactly 15 minutes later, seven hours before it was due in Paris, the aircraft's systems sent automatic error messages reporting multiple electrical faults and, according to a statement from the Brazilian air force, lost cabin pressure.
"The combination of the two implied that the Airbus A330-200 - a plane with an excellent safety record - might have simply broken up in the storm. Officials held out little hope of there being any survivors.
"'The most likely thing is that the plane was hit by lightning. The plane was in a stormy area with strong turbulence, which provoked problems,' said François Brouse, Air France's director of communications.
"'We are probably facing an air catastrophe,' added Pierre-Henri Gourgeon, the airline's chief executive. 'It's certainly no longer in the air now. It would have run out of fuel.''

Source: Airline BIZ Blog