Air France jet was intact before crash, reports say
PARIS - French crash investigators said yesterday that they have determined that an Air France jetliner that plunged from a stormy sky on June 1 was intact when it smacked belly-first into the Atlantic Ocean at high speed, killing all 228 people aboard, but acknowledged they have no clear idea what caused the disaster.
Alain Bouillard, who is heading an inquiry by the French Investigation and Analysis Bureau, told a news conference that findings so far indicate the four-year-old Airbus A330-200 apparently broke into a number of pieces only when it hit the surface of the water. No inflated life jackets have been found in a month of searching, he added, indicating the 216 passengers and 16 crew on AF447 from Rio de Janeiro to Paris were probably unaware during their final minutes that they were speeding from 35,000 feet toward the deadly crash.
But the key question - what happened to cause the plane to plummet without any known warning - was left wrapped in mystery and conjecture, offering nothing to reassure the thousands of summer holiday travelers scheduled to board one of hundreds of similar Airbus A330 long-haul passenger jets in use by airlines around the world.
“Today we are indeed far from establishing the causes of the accident,’’ Bouillard said at the bureau’s headquarters on the outskirts of Paris.
The apparent failure of small devices affixed to the plane’s skin to gauge air speed, called Pitot tubes, were “a factor,’’ Bouillard said, but only one of several, including high winds, thunder, lightning, and other possible equipment failures or human errors that remain unknown. The devices had given trouble, principally by icing up, on a number of Airbus planes, and Air France has since the crash updated all its A330 fleet with a newer model.
