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Since the publication of the first Interim Report on 2 July 2009, the investigation has continued, still in close association with foreign investigation organisations and the companies involved and in coordination with those responsible for the judicial investigation. The working groups have continued their work of gathering and analyzing information useful to the investigation. Their activity has focused on * the elements of wreckage recovered, * the meteorological situation, * the maintenance messages transmitted by ACARS, * the certification and the continuing airworthiness of the Pitot probes, * events where speed inconsistencies were encountered in cruise. This second interim report...

PARIS - French investigators are unlikely to establish the exact cause of a fatal Atlantic plane crash in a report this week but may recommend ways to help locate black boxes more easily, sources familiar with the incident said. France's BEA accident investigation authority is due on Thursday to issue its final report into the Air France crash in which 228 people died. Flight AF 447 from Rio de Janeiro to Paris crashed into the Atlantic on June 1 after flying into stormy weather. The ‘black box' flight recorders remain missing and only small parts of the wreckage have been...

In a strongly worded internal memo, Air France has warned its pilots to be more vigilant about safety procedures and upbraided those blaming flight equipment for the crash of Flight 447 into the Atlantic in June. No one knows what caused the accident, which killed all 228 people aboard and was Air France's deadliest crash. Pilots' unions said Saturday the company is trying to distance itself from blame — and shift attention to the possibility of human error — as the investigation drags on. "Enough Scandals and False Debates about Flight Security!" reads the memo, sent to pilots Tuesday and...

Yesterday, Paul-Emic, a conservative French Blogger (Politique, émois et moi) alerted our readers on the below Journal du Dimanche (JDD) articles that were causing quite an stir from Paris to Rio. I have attempted to translate from French to English each of the articles. Please remember Pilots are called “Drivers” in the translation. I have also included a You Tube video for a F14 “Flat Spin” to illustrate a “Flat Spin”. I seriously doubt the FO as well as most pilots would have been able to pull out of a flat spin. The best way to get out of a...

A French oceanographic survey ship has begun scanning the Atlantic Ocean floor, a new phase in the hunt for Air France Flight 447's black boxes now that they are no longer emitting signals, investigators said Thursday.

Crash: Air France A332 over Atlantic on Jun 1st 2009, aircraft impacted ocean The BEA have released their preliminary reports in both English (3MB - without attachments) and French (13MB) reporting, that the airplane had taken off from Rio de Janeiro at 232.8 tons near its maximum takeoff weight (233 tons) at 22:29Z. The airplane was subsequently cleared to FL350. At 01:35Z the crew contacted Brazil's Atlantic air traffic control control on the HF frequency reporting, they had just overflown waypoint INTOL, giving estimates for waypoints SALPU at 01:48Z and ORARO at 02:00Z. The crew also transmitted their SELCAL code...

<p>RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) — An American colonel says two ships searching for the black boxes of Air France Flight 447 are ending their hunt.</p> <p>A French nuclear submarine is continuing to look.</p> <p>U.S. Air Force Col. Willie Berges is the Brazil-based commander of American military forces supporting the effort. He says one ship towing a U.S. Navy listening device stopped searching Friday.</p>

Air France Flight 447 slammed into the Atlantic Ocean, intact and belly first, at such a high speed that the 228 people aboard probably had no time to even inflate their life jackets, French investigators said Thursday in their first report into the June 1 accident. ... Problematic speed sensors on the Airbus A330-200 jet that have been the focus of intense speculation since the crash may have misled the plane's pilots but were not a direct cause, Bouillard said... ;... The plane was flying from Rio de Janeiro to Paris when it went down in a remote area of...

The BEA press conference has finished in Paris. I watched on TV however I don’t speak French and I’m not sure at this time what they have told us. If anything new? I did not hear any mention of the toilet leak? Sounds like total BS out of Air France and BEA? As first reported on this site on June 21, 2009 from Le Post: Was Air France Flight 447 Disaster Caused By Leaking Toilet! As shown below, we need to be careful on translation from one language to another... The aircraft was not destroyed in flight, “said Alain Bouillard,...

PARIS (Reuters) - The state of the wreckage from Air France flight AF 447 from Rio de Janeiro to Paris, which crashed on June 1 with 228 people on board, suggest the plane was not destroyed in mid-air, French investigators said on Thursday. Alain Bouillard, who leads the investigation on behalf of France's BEA air accident board, said the search for the flight recorders, or black boxes, from the Airbus A330 aircraft would continue until July 10.

A Northwest Airlines jet traveling from Hong Kong to Tokyo last Tuesday suffered a series of equipment and computer malfunctions strikingly similar to those encountered by Air France Flight 447 just before it crashed into the Atlantic Ocean on May 31. The Northwest plane and its passengers, however, emerged unscathed. Details of the harrowing incident – described in a memo by one of the Northwest pilots and confirmed Friday by others familiar with the matter – highlight how cockpit crews can safely cope with something that is almost never supposed to happen: a system breakdown that prevented the crew from...

SAO PAULO — A weak signal from the flight data recorders of the Air France jet that crashed into the Atlantic killing all 228 people on board have been located, French newspaper Le Monde reported on its web site Tuesday. According to the report, French naval vessels picked up a weak signal from the flight recorders on Monday and that a mini submarine has been dispatched to try and find the "black boxes" on the bottom of the rugged ocean floor. An Air France spokeswoman told Reuters she could not confirm the report. The Transport Ministry and the air accident...

SAO PAULO (AFP) — Eleven of the 50 bodies recovered from an Air France jet that plunged into the Atlantic three weeks ago have been identified by fingerprints and dental records, Brazilian officials said Sunday. The bodies were identified as "10 Brazilians and one foreigner," officials in the northeastern Brazilian state of Pernambuco said in a statement. Five of the Brazilians were male, the other five were female and the foreigner was male, it added. The officials, part of a task force that also includes Brazilian police and forensic specialists conducting autopsies in the city of Recife, did not give...

Air France Airbus jets experienced at least nine incidents in which airspeed probes iced over in the past year, according to an internal company report obtained by AFP Friday. A probe into the June 1 crash of AF 447, in which an A330 jet flying from Rio to Paris plunged into the Atlantic with the loss of all 228 people on board, has focused on contradictory readings from its "pitot" speed probes. The probes, made by aerospace company Thales, were found to be faulty on flight AF 447. But French aviation investigators have played down the significance of the discovery...

PARIS (AP) — Air France will give about euro17,500 ($24,000) as an advance to the families of the victims of the crash of Air France Flight 447 from Rio de Janeiro to Paris, the company's chief executive said Friday.Air France lawyers are contacting the families of the 228 victims from 32 countries to make sure the money gets to them, Phillipe Gourgeon said in an interview broadcast Friday on RTL radio. Air France also is looking into holding a memorial for all the victims of the May 31 crash, Gourgeon said.Some families of French victims have accused Air France of...

Found: Galley kitchen from doomed Air France flight discovered floating intact in middle of Atlantic By Mail Foreign Service 18th June 2009 [Pics in URL] Floating in the middle of the Atlantic, this galley kitchen is the latest piece of Air France Flight 447 to be recovered by salvage crews. The wreckage is extraordinarily intact despite being part of an plane that experts believe broke apart in midair. Even some of the drawers, containing a selection of ready-meals for passengers, remained wedged securely inside the unit

THE GALLEY kitchen from doomed Air France Flight 447 was recovered from the Atlantic Ocean today. Navy divers hauled large chunks of the wreckage to the surface - and found metal draws containing ready-meals for passengers still securely wedged inside. Many of the dead suffered multiple fractures of the legs, hips and arms leading experts to believe the tragic jet broke up in mid air. Brazil's navy have now recovered 50 bodies from the 228 who perished on board the flight bound for Paris. The bodies have been found in choppy waters more than 50 miles apart. Retrieve ... diver...

Autopsies have revealed fractures in the legs, hips and arms of Air France disaster victims, injuries that — coupled with the large pieces of wreckage pulled from the Atlantic — strongly suggest the plane broke up in the air, experts said Wednesday. With more than 400 bits of debris recovered from the ocean's surface, the top French investigator expressed optimism about discovering what brought down Flight 447, but he also called the conditions — far from land in very deep waters — "one of the worst situations ever known in an accident investigation." French investigators are beginning to form "an...

Autopsies have revealed fractures in the legs, hips and arms of Air France crash victims, injuries that, along with the large pieces of wreckage pulled from the Atlantic, strongly suggest the plane broke up in the air, experts said Wednesday. With more than 400 bits of debris recovered from the ocean's surface, the top French investigator expressed hope that investigators would learn what brought down Flight 447, but he also called the conditions "one of the worst situations ever known in an accident investigation." French investigators are beginning to form "an image that is progressively less fuzzy," Paul-Louis Arslanian, who...

Flight AF 447 on 01 june 2009 A330-200, registered F-GZCP During the third Press Conference that was held on 17 June on the progress of the investigation into the accident to flight AF 447, the BEA presented the sea search operations that are under way. It contains a map of the locations of the airplane debris, including the fin, that were recovered from the surface of the sea. This debris field corresponds to a relatively small area with a drift towards the north. A targeted undersea search area has been established based on the position of the parts recovered –...

Autopsies revealed fractures in the legs, hips and arms of Air France disaster victims, a Brazilian official said Wednesday. Experts said those injuries — and the large pieces of wreckage pulled from the Atlantic — strongly suggest the plane broke up in the air.

SAO PAULO (AP) — Bodies recovered in the Air France disaster show multiple fractures in the legs, hips and arms, a Brazilian official said Wednesday. Experts said such injuries suggest the plane broke up in the air. "Typically, if you see intact bodies and multiple fractures — arm, leg, hip fractures — it's a good indicator of a midflight break up," Ciacco said. "Especially if you're seeing large pieces of aircraft as well." Jack Casey, an aviation safety consultant in Washington, D.C., who is a former accident investigator, said the lack of clothing could be significant: "In an in-air break...

Air France has finished replacing air speed monitors on all its long-haul Airbus aircraft even though the cause of the Flight 447 disaster remains a mystery, a pilots' union official said Monday. The search for the A330's black boxes was reinforced Monday with a high-tech U.S. Navy device that began listening for pings in the depths of the Atlantic Ocean. With the flight recorders still missing, the probe into the disaster that killed 228 people so far has focused on the possibility that external speed monitors iced over and gave false readings to the plane's computers.

Some details of a US carrier running one of the crash cause scenarios through its Airbus A330 flight simulators are being circulated on several private airline forums and on the public Pprune or Professional Pilots Rumour network. It has been a long standing habit of airlines with a serious interest in flight standards to do flight simulations based on probable causes or using factual data as it comes to hand. This is what happening in what is believed to have been a US flight simulator. Dear Ladies and Gentlemen, The scenario was conducted several times and the results at the...

...the bodies of some passengers of flight discovered the emergency services were at a distance of about 100 kilometers from each other...the reanalysis of recent messages sent by air to the automatic mode, showed that the system breaks down alternately, and many were denied long before the plane fell into the ocean.... Pitot tubes used to simultaneously determine the velocity and flight altitude, did not work for several hours until the plane was in the air...The families of the dead want to get answers to their legitimate questions. For example, the last message from the plane was sent in 4.10...

Most of the 16 bodies which have been examined in preliminary stages of the probe were found naked or with minimal clothing, suggesting the wind may have removed the garments.

L’Express is reporting that Brazilian investigators have concluded after the examination of the first bodies recovered on Air France Flight 447 that the aircraft would have broken in two and did not explode...

The U.S. Coast Guard assisted the French authorities with the search for Air France Flight 447 by applying their new, advanced SAR software system called the Search and Rescue Optimal Planning System (SAROPS) that generates optimized search area predictions for objects missing at sea... There is “still no link” between the Pitot probe measures speed equip the A330 and the crash of the aircraft of Air France between Rio and Paris on 1 June, reaffirmed on Thursday a spokeswoman Bureau of Investigations Analysis (BEA)... The drainage of water from Pitot was not properly calibrated. Standing water. Everyone knew the weak...

Air France plane broke up over 'number of minutes' New evidence suggests the Air France jet which crashed into the Atlantic with 228 on-board broke up over a number of minutes, rather than in one catastrophic incident. By Henry Samuel in Paris 11 Jun 2009 The Brazilian Air Force said bodies from flight AF 447 had been picked up from locations more than 50 miles apart – supporting the theory that the plane did not simply plummet into the ocean. A reanalysis of the plane's last automatic transmissions also indicates that many parts had malfunctioned before it disappeared, and that...

Missed Air France Flight, Only to Die in Car Crash After narrow escape, fate catches up with Italian traveler By XANA O'NEILL Jun 11, 2009 Johanna Ganthaler, from Italy, was on vacation in Brazil with her husband missed the doomed jetliner when they arrived late at the airport in Rio de Janerio. A woman who dodged death when she and her husband narrowly missed Air France Flight 447 before it plunged into the Atlantic Ocean, killing all 228 aboard, was killed in a car accident just over a week later. Johanna Ganthaler a retiree from the Bolzano-Bozen province, was on...

As a French nuclear submarine arrived off the coast of Brazil to join the effort to locate the black box from Air France Flight 447 on Thursday, aviation experts stressed the necessity of recovering those cockpit recorders in order to learn what exactly brought down the Airbus A330 and the 228 people on board. In past inquiries into airline disasters, investigators have been able to figure out the cause by piecing together clues from the wreckage itself, sometimes without information from the black box. But after 10 days of searching, the authorities combing what's believed to be Flight 447's crash...

This afternoon I finally had a change to read Obama's Cairo speech and I was dumbfounded to understand why the below was included at the end of the speech: "We see it in the history of Andalusia and Cordoba during the Inquisition. I saw it firsthand as a child in Indonesia where devout Christians worshiped freely in an overwhelmingly Muslim country." "This tolerance is essential for religion to thrive. But it's being challenged in many different ways. Among some Muslims, there's a disturbing tendency to measure one's own faith by the rejection of somebody else's faith." ..."it is important for...

An Italian woman who arrived late for the Air France plane flight that crashed in the Atlantic last week has been killed in a car accident.

The mystery of the cause of the Air France Flight 447 disaster continues to grow each day due to the conflicting Government leaks in Paris. This is what happens when the Government owns part of the Airline. How can the French Government investigate itself? They has lost all credibility into the investigative process. Why is no one investigating the possible Rio airport security breaches and its relationship to this disaster? Is it not time for the NTSB to consider grounding all affected Airbus model flying into US airspace?... ...French investigators suggested that the cockpit was empty when the plane dropped...

PARIS (AFP) — Airbus on Thursday denied a press report that it was considering grounding all long-haul A330 and A340 jets to change airspeed sensors after an Air France plane crashed into the Atlantic. The French newspaper Le Figaro said in its Thursday edition that the aircraft manufacturer "does not rule out grounding its fleet of 1,000 A330s and A340s to change the (speed) sensors." An Airbus spokesman denied the report, telling AFP "This is wrong." The European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) "has issued a press release that all A330s and other aircraft are safe to operate," he said, adding:...

Two radical Muslims identified on crashed Air France flight DEBKAfile Special Repor June 10, 2009, 9:40 PM (GMT+02:00) The day after DEBKAfile's counter-terror sources' revelation of Tuesday, June 9, that French security was going through the doomed Air France flight's passenger list for suspected terror links, the Paris weekly L'Express reported a link had been found. French security DGSE (Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure) agents dispatched to Brazil identified two names on the passenger list which also appear also on highly-classified documents listing radical Muslims considered a threat to France. This link to the air tragedy was described as...

Terror Names Linked To Doomed Flight AF 447 3:58pm UK, Wednesday June 10, 2009 Peter Allen, in Paris Two passengers with names linked to Islamic terrorism were on the Air France flight which crashed with the loss of 228 lives, it has emerged. Debris from Air France flight AF 447 has been recovered from the Atlantic French secret servicemen established the connection while working through the list of those who boarded the doomed Airbus in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on May 31.

Two passengers with names linked to Islamic terrorism were on board the Air France flight that crashed in the Atlantic Ocean, killing all 228 on board, it has emerged. French secret servicemen established the connection while working through the list of those who boarded the doomed Airbus in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on May 31. Agents are now trying to establish dates of birth for the two dead passengers, and family connections. There is a possibility that the name similarities are simply a "macabre coincidence," the source added, but the revelation is still being "taken very seriously." A source working...

Two passengers with names linked to Islamic terrorism were on board the Air France flight which crashed with the loss of 228 lives, it has emerged. French secret servicemen established the connection while working through the list of those who boarded the doomed Airbus in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on May 31st. Flight AF447 crashed in mid-Atlantic en route to Paris during a violent storm. While it is certain that there were computer malfunctions, terrorism has not been ruled out. Soon after news of the fatal crash broke, agents working for the DGSE (Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure), the...

June 10, 2009 -- Two passengers with names linked to Islamic terrorism were on board the Air France flight which crashed with the loss of 228 lives, it has emerged. French secret servicemen established the connection while working through the list of those who boarded the doomed Airbus in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on May 31st. Flight AF447 crashed in mid-Atlantic en route to Paris during a violent storm.While it is certain that there were computer malfunctions, terrorism has not been ruled out. Soon after news of the fatal crash broke, agents working for the DGSE (Direction Générale de la...

New information: An image captured by the Meteosat-9 satellite (Eumetsat) 14 minutes before AF 447 sent the last message, showed that the plane crossed an “agglomeration of clouds” with temperatures as low as -83° C (-117° F)... Based on data collected at the time the flight AF 447 crossed the region of the ocean (about 565 km from Natal-RN), the coordinator of the Ph.D. in remote sensing and the University of Arizona (USA), Humberto Alves Barbosa , meteorologist, suggests a new theory for the accident. He believes that the aircraft may have faced unprecedented conditions in air routes.

Air France scrambled to replace pressure sensors on its A330 Airbuses yesterday after a pilots’ union urged crew to boycott the long-range jets because faulty airspeed readings are suspected over last week’s crash off Brazil. “To prevent a repeat of this disaster we call on flight deck and cabin crew to refuse flights aboard the A330 and A340 series which have not been modified,” said Alter, a union to which 10 per cent of the airline’s crew belong. As salvage teams in the Atlantic recovered more of the 228 bodies from Flight 447, Air France and European aviation authorities sought...

Airline Heads Dismiss Pilot Fears Over Airbus A330 Safety; Controversy Hinges On Speed Sensors. Several airline chiefs dismissed safety fears over the Airbus A330 on Tuesday, saying they were confident of the plane's reliability despite last week's Air France jet crash. Emirates airlines President Tim Clark said the Dubai-based company has a fleet of 29 A330-200 planes that have been flying since 1998. Investigators are considering the possibility that the plane's external speed monitors - called Pitot tubes - may have iced over and given dangerously false readings to cockpit computers in a thunderstorm. But some Air France pilots aren't...

Most websites are focused on the tail section and the vertical stabilizer / rudder because those are the first pictures. It is too easy to jump to conclusions and speculate. The Seattle Post Intelligencer has spoken to Darryl. I have been waiting and watching for comments out of Seattle. The silence has been very telling! After reading this, I now understand why they are going out of business. The SeattlePI should be ashamed to call themselves a newspaper to print something like this... ...It is no secret to anyone, EuroCockpit has always been very vocal on the suspicion we had...

As attention shifts to the pitot tubes that provide air-speed data, Airbus designers must be doing a lot of soul searching right now Engineering design decisions are viewed by the unknowing as precise, no-compromise conclusions. If that were so all of us would feel better about our design choices. But in the real world, decisions are always made under the watchful eye of the accountants. So compromises are made and we live with the consequences. Except when people die. Then the binary nature of designing complex devices hits home: good decision, good result. Bad decision, bad result. Maybe really bad....

I just finished listening to a podcast where an avionics engineer goes over the final messages sent by the Air France Flight 447 plane before it crashed. The error messages sent by the plane show that multiple computer failures happened simultaneously, starting at 02:10 GMT, when a series of 14 warnings and failures emerged at once. Addison Schonland, president of Innovation Analysis Group, and Michael Ciasullo, IAG's managing director of consulting services, led the podcast discussion. The engineer, who went only by Darryl, and his interviewers were careful not speculate. Darryl is introduced as an engineer familiar with the the...

Divers yesterday recovered a large tail section of the Air France jet that crashed off the coast of Brazil nine days ago killing all 228 on board, including five Britons. It is one of the biggest pieces of wreckage yet found as the search continues for the Airbus 330's black boxes to solve the mystery of what brought the plane down en route from Rio de Janeiro to Paris. By yesterday, Brazilian and French military ships had recovered 16 bodies from Flight 447, which is thought to have broken up over the Atlantic after sending messages signalling electrical failures and...

Le Monde is reporting that that Air France Pilot's Union will "refuse" to fly A330/340 The union regrets that, pending the replacement of all defective pitot, management does not “have not taken the decision to stop the A330 and A340 not yet equipped with new models Pitot and whose replacement n ‘ provides that “in the coming weeks.”... ...Back on an historical note, the ocean between Brazil and Africa s a graveyard of French aircraft. Several pioneers disappeared in the same area as the Airbus in the early decades of air transport. The most famous was Jean Mermoz, a colleague...

RECIFE, Brazil – A large tail section of a jetliner bearing Air France's trademark red and blue stripes was recovered from the Atlantic Ocean Monday, helping narrow the hunt for "black boxes" that could explain what brought down Flight 447. And some high-tech help is on the way — two U.S. Navy devices capable of picking up the flight recorders' emergency beacons far below on the ocean floor. What caused the Airbus A330-200 to plunge into the middle of the ocean on May 31 with 228 people on board might not be known until those black boxes are found....

FERNANDO DE NORONHA, Brazil -- Seventeen bodies have been recovered from the Atlantic where an Air France jet came down a week ago as French submarines head to the remote zone in search of the black boxes. The remains, and dozens of structural components from the plane also plucked from the waves, were expected to arrive in the Brazilian archipelago Fernando de Noronha on Tuesday. From there the bodies would be flown to the mainland coastal city of Recife for identification using dental records and DNA from relatives, air force spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Henry Munhoz told reporters late Sunday in...