Air France has replaced two of three airspeed sensors on its entire fleet of Airbus A330 and A340 jets, the daily La Tribune reported yesterday on its Web site.
The carrier replaced two out of three Pitot tubes on each of the planes early yesterday after a trade union urged pilots not to fly the planes until the changes had been carried out.
The Pitot tubes apparently malfunctioned before an Air France Airbus A330-200 plunged into the Atlantic on June 1 with 228 people aboard. The sensors provide information over ambient air pressure and therefore aid in measuring the airspeed of an aircraft
La Tribune reported that the third sensor would be replaced on each of the planes within 10 days. Air France has not commented on the issue.
Although no link between a malfunction of the Pitot tubes and the crash has yet been made, investigators are concentrating on their functioning in the final minutes of the flight, when the doomed aircraft sent out a series of inconsistent airspeed readings.
Meanwhile, a French nuclear submarine was to begin a painstaking undersea search yesterday for the black box flight recorders that could hold the key to the mystery behind the crash.
“The Emeraude will begin its patrol this morning, in a first search zone measuring 20 nautical miles by 20, that is to say 36 kilometers by 36, which it should cover in a day,” military spokesman Captain Christophe Prazuck said.
“It will change zone each day and no time limit has been set,” he said, adding that the Emeraude would be joined in the area by the Mistral, a naval command and control vessel equipped with helicopters.
The vessels will be scouring a vast area 1,100km off Brazil’s northeast coast in order to locate the homing beacons from the data and voice recorders of flight AF 447, which plunged into the ocean en route from Rio de Janeiro to Paris.
Brazil already has a large naval and air force contingent in the area, and it has recovered some debris and at least 41 bodies.
Elsewhere, Spain’s airport authority AENA said yesterday that an Airbus A320 experienced engine trouble shortly after taking off from the Canary Islands en route to Oslo, Norway, and was forced to turn around and make an emergency landing.
AENA spokeswoman Karen Martel said no one was hurt and the plane was in the air a total of 10 minutes. She denied news reports that an engine caught fire, saying only it had undisclosed trouble.
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