New Delhi ,June 05: French search teams have so far found no evidence of the Air France plane that vanished over the Atlantic and areurging “extreme prudence” about suspected debris retrieved so far, France’s transport minister said today.
Dominique Bussereau said an earlier announcement by Brazilian officials that they had recovered plane debris from Air France flight 447 turned out to be false.
He told RTL radio that the search must continue and stressed that the priority was finding the flight recorders or black boxes.
The Airbus A330, which was en route to Paris from Rio de Janeiro, went down on Sunday night with 228 people on board, around four hours into the flight.
The Brazilian military said yesterday that it had pulled a cargo pallet from the water where the plane went down off Brazil’s north-eastern coast, in the world’s worst aviation disaster since 2001.
But Brazilian air force General Ramon Cardoso said today that officials now knew the find was not plane wreckage because Air France flight 447 was not carrying wooden pallets. He said ships searching the area had not yet recovered any plane debris.
Air France’s chief executive, Pierre-Henri Gourgeon, told family members at a private meeting yesterday that the plane disintegrated, either in the air or when it slammed into the ocean, and there were no survivors, according to Guillaume Denoix de Saint-Marc, a grief counsellor who is helping relatives.
With the crucial flight recorders still missing, investigators were relying heavily on the plane’s automated messages to help reconstruct what happened as the jet flew through violent thunderstorms on Sunday.
The last message from the pilot was a manual signal at 11pm local time, saying he was flying through an area of black, electrically charged clouds with violent winds and lightning.
At 11:10pm, a series of problems began: the autopilot had disengaged, a key computer system switched to alternative power, and controls needed to keep the plane stable had been damaged. An alarm sounded indicating the deterioration of flight systems.
Then systems for monitoring air speed, altitude and direction failed, as did controls over the main flight computer and wing spoilers.
At 11:14 pm, a final automatic message signalled loss of cabin pressure and complete electrical failure as the plane broke apart.
France’s accident investigation agency established that the series of automatic messages gave conflicting signals about the plane’s speed, and that the flight path went through dangerously stormy weather.
The agency warned against “hasty interpretation or speculation” after the French newspaper Le Monde reported, without naming sources, that the plane was flying too slowly before the disaster.
The paper said Airbus was about to issue recommendations advising companies using the A330 about optimal speeds for difficult weather conditions. Airbus did not comment on the report.
Aviation experts in Paris have suggested that a long slick of petrol found on the water indicated that the plane broke up but did not explode in mid-flight.
The Spanish daily El Mundo reported that an Air Comet pilot flying from Lima to Madrid not far from the crash zone saw “an intense burst of white light” that seemed to drop down vertically and split into six. The French defence minister and the Pentagon have said there were no signs of terrorism.
The French armed forces spokesman, Christophe Prazuck, said: “Everyone has doubts about everything at the moment and we do not have the slightest beginnings of an answer yet.”
Prazuck said the priority was to retrieve debris before it sank. He added that sea currents were dispersing the wreckage.
The Pourquoi Pas, a French research vessel, is heading to the search zone carrying manned and unmanned submarines, including one mini-sub used to explore the wreckage of the Titanic, but will not reach the area until 12 June.
The plane’s flight recorders, which France has already acknowledged could prove impossible to find, emit signals for 30 days.
–Agencies