Injured On An Airplane?

.

Written by: NICOLA CLARK

Published by: The New York Times

PARIS — France’s air accident investigators are expected on Thursday to recommend new technical standards for the signal beacons attached to the “black box” recorders of commercial aircraft and to propose requiring real-time transmission of certain flight data that could aid in the search for wreckage in the event of a deep-water crash.

The recommendations are contained in a second interim report on the investigation into the fatal crash in June of an Air France jet. Details of the report, by the Bureau of Investigations and Analyses, were provided by an official who had seen the report.

In the report, the bureau’s investigators call on aviation safety regulators to require that the locator “pingers” attached to the flight data and cockpit voice recorders of any passenger jet flying over water be upgraded to emit a signal for as long as 90 days, rather than the current requirement of 30 days. The report also recommends that additional beacons with a life of at least 30 days be attached to parts of the plane’s fuselage.

The investigators also urge regulators to study the possibility of requiring equipment and software that would enable automatic, real-time transmission of a plane’s position, altitude, speed and direction to a ground station.

The investigations bureau and the European Aviation Safety Agency declined to comment on the report before its publication on Thursday. A spokeswoman for the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration did not immediately return calls seeking comment.

Air France Flight 447, an Airbus A330, went down in heavy thunderstorms more than 1,000 kilometers, or 600 miles, off northern Brazil on June 1, during a flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris. All 228 passengers and crew members were killed. A lengthy search recovered over 600 pieces of floating debris and 51 bodies from the ocean, but the black boxes and the bulk of the wreckage were not found.

Without the flight recorders, investigators have said it may never be possible to determine the definitive cause of the disaster. So far, the main source of information about what happened is a series of messages sent automatically from the plane to a maintenance base, which indicated there was a malfunction of the plane’s air speed sensors.

Investigators have said the faulty speed reading — possibly due to icing — could have contributed to the crash, but was unlikely to be the primary cause.

The report to be published Thursday will propose that new studies be done of the composition of the Earth’s atmosphere at altitudes of 35,000 to 40,000 feet, where most jets spend the cruising phase of their flight. The goal would be to determine whether the effects of climate change should be taken into account when certifying components like speed sensors, which are vulnerable to icing.

France expects to begin a renewed search for the black boxes of Flight 447 in early February. The search, which will last up to three months, will take place with the support of experts and specialized equipment from the United States, Britain, Brazil and Russia.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/17/world/europe/17crash.html

.

Published by The New York Times

Written by CHRISTINE NEGRONI

Wreckage spotted by Brazilian military planes in the Atlantic Ocean is that of missing Air France Flight 447, the Brazilian minister of defense said Tuesday afternoon at a news conference. The jet, bound for Paris from Rio de Janeiro with 228 aboard, disappeared Sunday night without any distress call.

Nelson Jobim, the defense minister, said that “without a doubt” the debris was from the Air France plane. Military planes located the wreckage in a three-mile strip in the ocean, as hope of finding survivors all but vanished. The debris included “an orange life vest, an aircraft seat, a drum, kerosene and oil,” an earlier statement from the Brazilian military said.

Confirmation that the debris, floating 600 miles from the coast of Brazil, is from Flight 447 is sure to help investigators, who have few clues to go on. With no radar information from land and no distress call from the pilots, a series of data messages transmitted by satellite from the plane to Air France’s maintenance office was all the data they had.

Finding the tail of the plane is a high priority for investigators, because that is where the voice and data recorders are located.

The more critical recorder in this crash will be the cockpit voice recorder, said one investigator familiar with flight data devices. “The flight data shows how the aircraft is being operated, but the voice recorder tells you the pilots’ perceptions of what’s happening,” said the investigator, who spoke on condition of anonymity, saying he might be asked to work on the inquiry.

Evidence of a lightning strike — one theory of why the plane went down — would not be recorded on the flight data recorder, he said, but might very well be documented by the pilots’ observations in the cockpit.

The earliest indication of what may have happened on the airplane came 4 hours 11 minutes after the plane departed Rio, when a series of 10 reports transmitted from the Airbus 330 suggests that the flight encountered difficulties with stormy weather and electrical problems. Those issues could be interrelated; a loss of power could set off a catastrophic cascade of events.

The Airbus 330 is a fly-by-wire plane, in which flight controls are activated by electronics. “Very severe lightning may have caused some malfunction in the electronic control system,” said Tom Swift, a former chief scientist for fracture mechanics and metallurgy at the Federal Aviation Administration.

If lightning, turbulence or some other problem caused a malfunction in the electronic control system, pilots might have difficulty flying or the airplane might begin maneuvers without being commanded to by pilots.

Another avenue of interest to investigators may be a special emergency directive to operators of A330 and A340 models issued by European safety authorities this year.

The directive followed several troublesome events in the models’ electronic flight system. More than a dozen people were seriously injured in October on a Qantas flight to Perth, Australia, from Singapore when the heavily loaded airplane, while cruising in level flight, abruptly pitched down. The authorities said the plane had provided random and erroneous information to the pilots, including a loss of altitude readings and warnings that the plane was about to stall.

Whether Air France reported problems with any of its A330s was not clear.

Mr. Jobim said Tuesday that finding wreckage of the plane would ultimately give hope to relatives of the crash victims that they would learn what had happened to their loved ones.

Charlstie Laytin, 31, of Island Park, N.Y., whose uncle and aunt, Michael and Anne Harris, were two Americans on the flight, agreed. “We certainly do hope to see the investigation continue until we know what happened,” she said. “It’s so hard to come to the point of closure when you don’t have your loved ones in front of you to grieve over.”

Air France did not release a passenger list on Tuesday but said that in addition to 2 Americans, it included, among others, 61 French citizens, 58 Brazilians and 26 Germans.