Air France 447 - Regulators Zero in on Risks of Airbus Sensors
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LE BOURGET, FRANCE — After the deadly crash of an Air France jet this month, Europe’s main air safety regulator is expected to decide by Friday whether to require all airlines to replace the air-speed sensors on Airbus A330 planes, a spokesman for the agency said Wednesday.
If regulators issue the mandatory order, known as an airworthiness directive, it would signal that they believe that a series of speed-sensor malfunctions since 2007 involving several Airbus planes are a legitimate safety concern.
Investigators say they still have no hard evidence that would explain why Air France Flight 447, an A330-200 en route from Rio de Janeiro to Paris, crashed on June 1, killing all 228 people aboard. But they have been looking closely at whether inconsistent speed measurements could have played a role.
“I would expect that toward the end of the week, we will have a pretty clear idea of whether we go down the A.D. route or not,” Daniel Höltgen, a spokesman for the European Aviation Safety Agency, said Wednesday, using an abbreviation for airworthiness directive. Asked whether such a directive was likely, Mr. Höltgen said, “It cannot be excluded.”
His comments followed a briefing by French officials investigating the crash, at which they said they had recovered more than 400 pieces of debris from the plane but nothing yet that allows them to draw conclusions about the cause of the crash.
A spokesman for Brazilian medical examiners told The Associated Press on Wednesday that autopsies on the bodies of victims recovered so far showed that they had multiple fractures of legs, hips and arms. And a forensic expert who once worked at the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board, Frank Ciacco, said those injuries could mean that the plane broke apart in air.
Recovered large chunks of the plane are another clue, Mr. Ciacco said, explaining that bodies and debris would be severely fragmented if the jet crashed intact.
Officials of the European agency, known as E.A.S.A., have been in regular discussions with Airbus and Air France since the accident, trying to determine the seriousness of the safety threat posed by a speed-sensor malfunction. Agency representatives are scheduled to meet again Thursday with Airbus representatives to discuss the matter.
Maggie Bergsma, a spokeswoman for Airbus, declined to comment on the meeting with regulators.
Any mandatory order by the agency to replace the speed sensors would automatically trigger similar orders by regulators in other countries, including the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration.
There are currently about 600 Airbus A330 jets in service, operated by 72 airlines. After Flight 447, many carriers, including Air France, have already opted to replace the speed sensors as a precaution.
The speed-sensing system includes what is known as a Pitot tube, the part Airbus had recommended replacing on some of its planes. The tubes are vulnerable to icing in high-altitude storms, the type of weather the plane may have encountered four hours into the flight.
“From the discussions we have had so far, it already seems clear that a simple technical replacement will not be sufficient in itself,” Mr. Höltgen said. “It would have to be accompanied by additional operational and possibly training measures so that pilots are prepared for the possibility of a failure of these systems.
“The one lesson we can already draw from this is that incident reporting — at least in Europe, between the operators, manufacturers and the air safety authorities — needs to be improved.”
Airbus has said that it issued a recommendation to operators of its smaller, A320 planes in 2007 to replace the speed sensors, made by the French company Thales, because better-performing sensors had become available. The company stressed that the recommendation was not because of any safety concerns. The recommendation was extended to the A330 family of jets in 2008 after pilots reported a series of cases in which icing of the sensors had caused them to malfunction.
At that time, neither E.A.S.A. nor the U.S. agency considered the risks posed by Pitot tube icing to be significant enough to justify making replacement of the sensors mandatory.
At the briefing Wednesday, Paul Louis Arslanian, who is directing the investigation, said searchers were working day and night to find the beacon that would indicate where in the ocean the voice and data recorders ended up.
“Given the work that has been done and what we’ve got, we are getting a little closer to our goal,” Mr. Arslanian said. “It doesn’t mean I can guarantee more than I could a few days ago that we can recover the recorders or the data that are supposed to be in those recorders,” he added. “We are doing our best, and hopefully it will lead to good news as soon as possible.”
So far, 50 bodies have been recovered from the sea, along with the debris, some of it just foam from the aircraft’s seats. The biggest item found in the northward wreckage drift was the tail of the aircraft, numbered 170 on a map of the ocean on which the investigating agency is pinpointing every find.
Olivier Ferrente, who is leading the team looking into the crash, said the search zone had been narrowed considerably from the original area that centered on the aircraft’s last known coordinates — 2.98 degrees north, 30.59 degrees west. He declined to specify the size of the search zone, however.
The area has been divided into a grid with intervals of 10 nautical miles to ensure that it is thoroughly searched, Mr. Ferrente said.
Mr. Arslanian said: “If we limit our search too much, we risk being overoptimistic and missing it; if we search too widely, we risk running out of time.”
