By Calvin Palmer
Air France flight 447 from Rio de Janeiro to Paris did not break up in mid-air but plunged “vertically” from the sky and hit the Atlantic Ocean at great speed, according to a report by the BEA accident investigation agency.
The man leading the BEA investigation, Alain Bouillard, said: “The plane was not destroyed while in flight. It appears to have hit the surface of the water in flying position with a strong vertical acceleration.”
He explained that the plane hit the water belly first.
The report also found that life jackets had not been deployed.
The exact cause of the accident, which killed 228 people aboard the Airbus A330-200 on June 1, is still unknown.
Bouillard said control of the flight was supposed to have passed from air traffic controllers in Brazil to their counterparts in Senegal, but that never happened.
He said the pilots of flight AF 447 had tried three times to connect to a data system in the Senegalese capital Dakar, but had failed, apparently because Dakar had never received the flight plan.
“This is not normal,” he said, adding that investigators were also trying to find out why it took six hours after the plane disappeared before an emergency was declared.
He said the search for the flight recorders, or black boxes, from the aircraft would continue until July 10. The recorders emit a signal for a limited time.
[Based on reports by The Daily Telegraph and Reuters.]
2 Comments
July 2, 2009 at 2:50 pm
The acceleration may have been in a “vertical direction” but that doesn’t mean the plane hit the water “vertically” (ie a nose-dive). Indeed, the investigators state it landed belly-first.
July 2, 2009 at 3:12 pm
Fair point. The original headline was misleading. It has been changed.