French investigators are supposed to release their initial report into what caused the crash of Air France flight AF447 today.
The French accident investigation agency, the BEA, will present its preliminary report to reporters today at its headquarters in Le Bourget, France.
According to Christiohe Guillot-Noel, the head of an association for victims of Air France flight 447, the families of the victims will meet with the BEA and Air France officials at the French Transport Ministry just beforehand.
“The families are hoping to have all the facts, above all to be able to avoid this eventually happening again,” he said.
“We have just one demand: transparency. We have just one expectation: the truth,” he said.
The BEA’s initial findings will be based on the automatic messages that were sent by the air craft moments before it lost contact, along with clues from the recovered wreckage and the remains of the 51 people who have so far been recovered.
One of the automatic messages indicated that the aircraft was receiving incorrect speed information from the Pitot tubes, which could destabilize the aircraft’s control system. Experts believe that the Pitot tubes might have iced over.
Without the black boxes, we might never know exactly what happened on that tragic day. The emergency beacons on the black boxes are built to emit strong pings for 30 days after a crash. Although the 30 day period has passed, searchers are still trying located the device.
The search for more bodies and debris was ended by Brazil on June 27.
Source: AP
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
Jonathan,
Eurocockpit (www.eurocockpit.com) have disseminated the report, as far as I can make out from my rather clunky translation. In addition to being an excellent source of meaningful and highly-technical discussion and debate, they also speculate about the politics and commercial interests of the parties tasked with analysis and reporting, and how this might bias the outcome. This seems all the more relevant with the unfortunate unlikelihood of the black box now being retrieved. As I understand it, Airbus interfered with the findings of the A330 non-commercial pilot test crash, which killed all 7 people onboard.