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Jet crash victims' bodies flown to mainland
(China Daily)
Updated: 2009-06-10 07:59
RECIFE, Brazil: Brazilian helicopters began ferrying bodies of Air France crash victims to shore for identification yesterday while a pilots' union said the airline was rapidly replacing speed sensors like those suspected of feeding false information to the doomed jet's computers. Soldiers and medical personnel in surgical gowns carried body bags on stretchers off of helicopters that flew the first recovered bodies from ships at sea to the island of Fernando de Noronha yesterday. Officials said they would then be taken by plane to the northeastern coastal city of Recife, where experts will try to identify them. Brazilian officials said searchers had found 24 bodies by yesterday morning. Peter Goelz, a former managing director of the National Transportation Safety Board, said that identifying the bodies, knowing where people were sitting and studying their injuries could give clues to causes of the May 31 crash that killed 228 people. New Pitot sensors With the plane's data recorders still apparently deep in the ocean, investigators have been focusing on the possibility that external speed monitors - called Pitot tubes - iced over and gave dangerously false readings to the plane's computers in a thunderstorm. The L-shaped metal Pitot tubes jut from the wing or fuselage of a plane, and are heated to prevent icing. The pressure of air entering the tubes lets sensors measure the speed and angle of flight. A malfunctioning Pitot tube could mislead computer controlling the plane to accelerate or decelerate in a potentially dangerous fashion. Air France said it began replacing the Pitot tubes on the Airbus A330 model on April 27 after an improved version became available, and said it will finish the work in the "coming weeks." The monitors had not yet been replaced on the plane that crashed while on a flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris. Eric Derivry, a spokesman for the SNPL union, the main union for Air France pilots, told France-Info radio that all jets taking off yesterday would be equipped with two of the new Pitot sensors. A memo sent to Air France pilots by the Alter union on Monday urges them to refuse to fly unless at least two of the three Pitot sensors on each planes have been replaced. An official with the Alter union said there is a "strong presumption" among its pilot members that a Pitot problem precipitated the crash. The memo says the airline should have grounded all A330 and A340 jets pending the replacement, and warns of a "real risk of loss of control" due to Pitot problems. In a video posted on Monday on a website, Brazil's air force revealed that search crews had recovered the vertical stabilizer from the tail section of Flight 447 - which also could provide key clues as to why the airliner went down in the Atlantic and where best to search for the black boxes. The tail section includes the vertical stabilizer - which keeps the plane's nose from swinging back and forth - and the rudder, which controls the side-to-side motion. The data and voice recorders are also located in the fuselage near the tail. AP (China Daily 06/10/2009 page12) |
