AIR FRANCE PLANE FLIGHT 447 CRASH ON THE ATLANTIC CLAIMS 228
Wednesday, July 8, 2009
Air France Flight 447 was a scheduled commercial flight from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to Paris, that on 1 June 2009 crashed into the Atlantic Ocean, killing all 216 passengers and 12 crew members.
The aircraft, an Air France Airbus A330-200 registered as F-GZCP, took off on 31 May 2009 at 19:03 local time (22:03 UTC). The last contact with the crew was a routine message to Brazilian air traffic controllers at 01:33 UTC, as the aircraft approached the edge of Brazilian radar surveillance over the Atlantic Ocean, en-route to Senegalese-controlled airspace off the coast of West Africa. Forty minutes later, a four-minute-long series of automatic radio messages was received from the plane, indicating numerous problems and warnings. The exact meanings of these messages are still under investigation, but the aircraft is believed to have been lost shortly after it sent the automated messages.
On 6 June 2009, a search and rescue operation recovered two bodies and debris from the aircraft floating in the ocean 680 mi (1,090 km) northeast of the Fernando de Noronha islands off Brazil's northern coast. The debris included a briefcase containing an airline ticket, later confirmed to have been issued for the flight. On 27 June the search for bodies and debris was called off, having recovered 51 bodies.
This accident is the deadliest in the history of Air France, surpassing the crash of an Air France charter flight from Paris-Orly Airport to Atlanta on 3 June 1962, and the airline's first fatal crash since the Concorde Flight 4590 in July 2000.Paul-Louis Arslanian, the head of the Bureau d'Enquêtes et d'Analyses pour la Sécurité de l'Aviation Civile (BEA, Bureau of Enquiry and Analysis for Civil Aviation Safety), described it as the worst accident in French aviation history. It is the second fatal accident involving the Airbus A330; the first A330 accident with fatalities was a test flight.
The investigation continues, but is severely hampered by the absence of the flight data recorders, lack of eyewitness accounts or radar tracks, and the BEA did not reach any definitive conclusion in its interim report published on 2 July 2009. 1 JuneApproximate flight path of AF 447. The solid red line shows the actual route. The dashed line indicates the planned route beginning with the position of the last transmission heard. All times are UTC.The aircraft departed from Rio de Janeiro-Galeão International Airport on 31 May 2009 at 19:03 local time (22:03 UTC), with a scheduled arrival at Paris-Charles de Gaulle Airport approximately 11 hours later.
An Air France spokesperson stated on 3 June that “the aircraft sent a series of electronic messages over a three-minute period, which represented about a minute of information. Exactly what that data means hasn't been sorted out, yet.” An aviation safety expert explained a few days later that “complete failure would require 100% failure of the electrical system,” which “did not happen early in the flight, because the system was uplinking data to the maintenance facility, indicating there was some electricity on the airplane.”
The messages, sent from an onboard maintenance system, Aircraft Communication Addressing and Reporting System (ACARS), were made public on 4 June 2009. These transcripts indicate that between 02:10 UTC and 02:14 UTC, 5 failure reports (FLR) and 19 warnings (WRN) were transmitted. The messages resulted from equipment failure data, captured by a built-in system for testing and reporting, and cockpit warnings also posted to ACARS. The failures and warnings in the 5 minutes of transmission concerned navigation auto-flight, flight controls, and cabin air-handling (codes beginning with 34, 22 , 37 and 21, respectively).
Among the ACARS transmissions in the first minute is one message that indicates a fault in the pitot-static system (code 34111506). Sources close to the investigation have confirmed that “the first automated system-failure message in a string of radio alerts from the crashed jet explicitly indicated that the airspeed sensors were faulty”. The twelve warning messages with the same time code indicate that the autopilot and auto-thrust system had disengaged, that the TCAS was in fault mode, and flight mode went from 'normal law' to 'alternate law'. The 02:10 transmission contained a set of coordinates which indicated at that the aircraft was at 2°59′N 30°35′W / 2.98°N 30.59°W / 2.98; -30.59.
The remainder of the messages occurred from 02:11 UTC to 02:14 UTC, containing a fault message for an Air Data Inertial Reference Unit (ADIRU) and the Integrated Standby Instrument System (ISIS). At 02:12 UTC, a warning message NAV ADR DISAGREE indicated that there was a disagreement between the independent air data systems (more precisely: that after one of the three independent systems had been diagnosed as faulty and excluded from consideration, the two remaining systems disagreed). At 02:13 UTC, a fault message for the flight management guidance and envelope computer was sent. One of the two final messages transmitted at 02:14 UTC was a warning referring to the air data reference system, the other ADVISORY (Code 213100206) was a "cabin vertical speed warning".
A meteorological analysis of the area surrounding the flight path showed a mesoscale convective system extending to an altitude of around 50,000 feet (15 km; 9.5 mi) above the Atlantic Ocean before Flight 447 disappeared. From satellite images taken near the time of the incident, it appears that the aircraft encountered a severe thunderstorm, likely containing severe turbulence.
Detailed analysis of the weather conditions for the flight shows it is possible that the aircraft's final 12 minutes could have been spent "flying through significant turbulence and thunderstorm activity for about 75 mi (121 km)", and may have been subjected to rime icing, and possibly clear ice or graupel. Satellite imagery loops from the CIMSS clarify that the flight was coping with a series of storms, not just one.
Commercial air transport crews routinely encounter this type of storm in this area. Generally, when storms of this type are encountered at night, pilots use onboard radar to navigate around them.
In this instance, shortly after the last verbal contact was made with Air Traffic Control about 350 mi (560 km) north-east of Natal, Brazil (station identifier SBNT), the aircraft likely traversed an area of intense deep convection which had formed within a broad band of thunderstorms along the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ). Turbulence in the vicinity of these rapidly-developing storms may have contributed to the accident.According to news sources, 12 other flights shared more or less the same route that Flight 447 was using at the time of the accident.
Colonel Jorge Amaral, deputy head of the Aeronautical Communications Center of the Brazilian Air Force, discussing the search for the aircraft.On June 1 at 02:20 UTC, Brazilian air traffic controllers contacted air traffic control in Dakar after noticing that the plane had not made the required radio call signaling its crossing into Senegalese airspace.The Brazilian Air Force then began a search and rescue operation from the Brazilian archipelago of Fernando de Noronha, and at 19:00 UTC on 1 June, Spain sent a CASA 235 maritime patrol plane in search and rescue operations near Cape Verde. French reconnaissance planes were also dispatched, including one Breguet Atlantic from Dakar, and the French requested satellite equipment from the United States to help find the plane. Brazilian Air Force spokesperson Colonel Henry Munhoz told Brazilian TV that radar on Cape Verde failed to pick up the aircraft over the Atlantic Ocean.
Later on June 1, officials with Air France and the French government had already presumed that the plane had been lost with no survivors. An Air France spokesperson told L'Express that there was "no hope for survivors," and French President Nicolas Sarkozy told relatives of the passengers that there was only a minimal chance that anyone survived.
Also late on 1 June, the deputy chief of the Brazilian Aeronautical Communications Center, Jorge Amaral, confirmed that 30 minutes after the Air France Airbus had transmitted the automatic report, a commercial pilot had reported the sighting of "orange dots" in the middle of the Atlantic, which could indicate the glow of wreckage on fire. his sighting was reported by a TAM Airlines crew flying from Europe to Brazil, at approximately 1300 km (700 miles) from Fernando de Noronha. Another similar sighting of "something flashing brightly over the ocean then taking a descending vertical trajectory" was reported by the Spanish pilot of Air Comet Flight 974 flying from Lima to Madrid. The Brazilian newspaper O Globo reported that wreckage debris was discovered off the Senegalese coast, but that its origin was still uncertain. EarthTimes and news.com.au reported that the crew of the French freighter Douce France spotted debris floating on the ocean in the area earlier indicated by the TAM crew.
The crew of a Brazilian Air Force C-130 Hercules searches for wreckage from the Airbus A330 of Air France Flight 447, while flying at low level 650 km (350 miles) north of Fernando de Noronha islands. (3 June 2009)On 2 June at 15:20 (UTC), the Brazilian Air Force, using an Embraer R-99A Erieye, found wreckage and signs of oil, possibly jet fuel, strewn along a 5 km (3 mi) band 650 km (400 mi) north-east of Fernando de Noronha Island, near Saint Peter and Paul Rocks. Spotted wreckage included a plane seat, an orange buoy, a barrel, "white pieces and electrical conductors". Later that day, after meeting with relatives of the Brazilians on the aircraft, Brazilian Defence Minister Nelson Jobim announced that the Air Force believed the wreckage was from Flight 447. Brazilian vice-president José Alencar (acting as president since Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was out of the country) declared three days of official mourning.
Also on 2 June, two French Navy vessels, Foudre and Ventôse, were en route to the suspected crash site. In addition, other ships sent to the site included the French research vessel Pourquoi Pas?, equipped with two mini-submarines able to descend to 6,000 m (20,000 ft),since the area of the Atlantic in which the plane went down may be as deep as 4,700 m (15,000 ft). A United States Navy Lockheed Martin P-3 Orion anti-submarine warfare and maritime patrol aircraft was also deployed in the search due to its low altitude endurance, patrol capability, search and rescue sonobuoys and magnetic anomaly detector (MAD) sensor suite.
On 3 June, the first Brazilian Navy ship, the patrol boat Grajaú, reached the area in which the first debris was spotted. The Brazilian Navy has sent a total of five ships to the debris site; the frigate Constituição and the corvette Caboclo were scheduled to reach the area on 4 June, the frigate Bosísio on 6 June and the replenishment oiler Almirante Gastão Motta on 7 June.
On 5 June, French defence minister Hervé Morin announced that the nuclear submarine Émeraude was being sent to the area, to assist in the search for the missing flight recorders or "black-boxes" which might be located at great depth. The submarine would use its sonar to listen for the ultra-sonic signal emitted by the black boxes' "pingers". On 10 June, the Émeraude reached the crash zone of Air France Flight 447 with plans to troll 13 sq mi (34 km2) a day, listening for the pingers. The Émeraude was to work with the mini-sub Nautile, which can descend to the ocean floor and was a key part of the search for the RMS Titanic. The French submarines would be aided by two U.S. underwater audio devices, capable of picking up signals even at a depth of 20,000 ft (6,100 m).
Colour bathymetry relief map of the part of Atlantic Ocean into which Air France Flight 447 crashed. Image shows two different data sets with different resolution.
