Air France plane 'hit sea vertically'

LE BOURGET, France: Air France Flight 447 plunged vertically into the Atlantic Ocean intact at a very high speed, a top French investigator said yesterday, adding that problems with the plane's speed sensors were not the direct cause of the crash.

Alain Bouillard, who is leading the investigation into the June 1 crash for the French accident agency BEA, says the sensors, called Pitot tubes, were "a factor but not the only one."

"It is an element but not the cause," Bouillard told a news conference in Le Bourget outside Paris. "Today we are very far from establishing the causes of the accident."

The Airbus A330-200 plane flying from Rio de Janeiro to Paris went down with 228 people on board in a remote area of the Atlantic, 1,500 km off Brazil's mainland.

The BEA released its first preliminary findings on the crash yesterday, calling it one of history's most challenging plane crash investigations.

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

Bouillard said the plane "was not destroyed in flight."

"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."

Bouillard said life vests found among the wreckage were not inflated, suggesting the passengers were not prepared for a crash landing in the water. The pilots apparently also did not send any mayday calls.

AP

(China Daily 07/03/2009 page16)