Divers Recover Telling Debris From Air France
Published: June 8, 2009
SÃO PAULO, Brazil — Brazilian divers have recovered a distinctive red- and blue-striped section of the tail of the Air France jetliner that crashed in the Atlantic Ocean last week, a find that may help investigators narrow the hunt for the plane’s voice and data recorders.
Also on Monday, Brazilian military lowered its count of the number of bodies recovered so far to 16 from the 17 it had announced on Sunday. All 228 people who were aboard the plane are presumed dead.
Photographs released Monday by the Brazilian military showed a team of divers and sailors on a rubber dinghy tying a rope around what appeared to be the vertical stabilizer from the tail section of the plane. The part, which bears the trademark stripes and logo of Air France, bore no evident burn marks and retained its triangular shape, save for a chunk missing where it appeared to have been torn from the body of the plane.
Another photograph of recovered debris released by the military showed chunks of orange, white and cream-colored wreckage amid a tangle of wires and crushed tubes.
The flight recorders are generally kept in the tail section of the plane, so the finding of the tail section may help to narrow the search in the ocean’s deep waters. The flight recorders represent investigators’ best hope for discovering why the plane went down on May 31, in stormy, turbulent weather.
A team of American Navy searchers is being flown in along with two devices that can detect emergency beacons to a depth of 20,000 feet, according to the Pentagon, The Associated Press reported. They will be delivered to ships that will then listen for transmissions from the black boxes, which are programmed to emit signals for at least three more weeks.
The Brazilian frigate Constituição was carrying the recovered remains, officials said, and was scheduled to arrive Tuesday on the island of Fernando de Noronha, a few hundred miles from where officials are centering the search for wreckage. From there, the remains will be flown to Recife to be examined by forensic and medical experts. Wing fragments and hundreds of personal items believed to be from passengers have also been found.
France is leading the investigation into the cause of the crash, while Brazilian officials are focusing on the recovery of victims and wreckage. Officials said that five ships from the two countries are combing a defined search area, and 14 airplanes are scouring that area and adjacent ones.
“The government is going to continue with its efforts, via the navy and via the air force, to find, if possible, all the bodies, because we know what it means for a family to receive the remains a missing loved one,” Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, said Monday in his weekly radio address. “At this painful time it won’t solve the problem, but it is an immense comfort to a family knowing that is burying its loved one.”
On Sunday, Dominique Bussereau, the French secretary of state for transportation, told RTL radio that the authorities were focusing on a transmission from the plane, during the last minutes of flight, indicating that airspeed readings on its onboard systems were inconsistent.
“The series of readings represent the only real element for investigators at this moment,” he said. In particular, they were reviewing the performance of a Pitot tube, part of the speed measurement system.
“There have been situations on Airbus planes, and perhaps on others, where these tubes no longer indicated the airspeed because it entered a humid area, a low-pressure area, an area of turbulence,” he added. If the Flight 447 pilots could not read the correct speed, the plane could have been flying too slowly or too fast, with deadly results.
French investigators announced Saturday that the plane had been scheduled to have its Pitot tube replaced, but it remained unclear whether the part had malfunctioned or had anything to do with the crash.
The ocean floor where the debris is being recovered is a tangle of mountains towering two miles above ocean valleys, which will make the recovery of the flight recorders — or black boxes — very difficult. The recovery, however, is paramount for investigators, as without them, said James T. Francis, a member of the National Transportation Safety Board, the Air France case will be “a tough, tough cookie.”
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