A burst of automatic messages sent by Air France Flight 447 before it crashed includes one about a problem with a rudder safety device, but lacks decisive clues as to what sent the jet plunging into the Atlantic Ocean two weeks ago, an aviation expert said on Saturday.
The industry official, who has knowledge of the Air France investigation, said that a transcript of the messages posted on the Web site EuroCockpit was authentic but inconclusive.
One of the 24 automatic messages sent from the plane minutes before it disappeared on May 31 with 228 on board points to a problem in the “rudder limiter,” a mechanism that limits how far the plane’s rudder can move. The flight was headed from Rio de Janeiro to Paris through an area of fierce thunderstorms.
The nearly intact vertical stabilizer — which includes the rudder — was fished out of the water last week by Brazilian searchers.
“There is a lot of information, but not many clues,” the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to discuss the matter.
The official said jets like the Airbus A330 that crashed automatically send such maintenance messages about once a minute during a plane’s flight. They are used by the ground crew to make repairs once a plane lands.
Martine del Bono, spokeswoman for the French investigative agency BEA, which is in charge of the crash probe, and Airbus spokesman Stefan Schaffrath declined to comment on the transcript.
If the rudder were to move too far while traveling fast, it could shear off and take the vertical stabilizer with it, which some experts theorize may have happened based on the relatively limited damage to the stabilizer.
The industry official, however, said the error message pertaining to the rudder limiter did not indicate it malfunctioned, but rather that it had locked itself in place because of conflicting speed readings.
Investigators have focused on the possibility that external speed monitors — called Pitot tubes — iced over and gave false readings to the plane’s computers.
“The message tells us that the rudder limiter was inoperative,” Jack Casey, an aviation safety consultant in Washington, said last week when the existence of the automatic messages was first divulged. “It tells us that for some reason it was no longer functioning. That is all the message means.”
“It does not give you any reason why it is not working or what caused it, or what came afterward,” Casey said.
Unless the plane’s flight data and cockpit voice recorders — the so-called black boxes — are found, the exact cause of the accident may never be known.
A French nuclear submarine is scouring the search area in the hopes of hearing audio pings from the black boxes’ emergency beacons.
Archeologists in Peru on Thursday said they found the 5,000-year-old remains of a noblewoman at the sacred city of Caral, revealing the important role played by women in the oldest center of civilization in the Americas. “What has been discovered corresponds to a woman who apparently had elevated status, an elite woman,” archeologist David Palomino said. The mummy was found in Aspero, a sacred site within the city of Caral that was a garbage dump for more than 30 years until becoming an archeological site in the 1990s. Palomino said the carefully preserved remains, dating to 3,000BC, contained skin, part of the
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to
TRUMP EFFECT: The win capped one of the most dramatic turnarounds in Canadian political history after the Conservatives had led the Liberals by more than 20 points Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney yesterday pledged to win US President Donald Trump’s trade war after winning Canada’s election and leading his Liberal Party to another term in power. Following a campaign dominated by Trump’s tariffs and annexation threats, Carney promised to chart “a new path forward” in a world “fundamentally changed” by a US that is newly hostile to free trade. “We are over the shock of the American betrayal, but we should never forget the lessons,” said Carney, who led the central banks of Canada and the UK before entering politics earlier this year. “We will win this trade war and
Armed with 4,000 eggs and a truckload of sugar and cream, French pastry chefs on Wednesday completed a 121.8m-long strawberry cake that they have claimed is the world’s longest ever made. Youssef El Gatou brought together 20 chefs to make the 1.2 tonne masterpiece that took a week to complete and was set out on tables in an ice rink in the Paris suburb town of Argenteuil for residents to inspect. The effort overtook a 100.48m-long strawberry cake made in the Italian town of San Mauro Torinese in 2019. El Gatou’s cake also used 350kg of strawberries, 150kg of sugar and 415kg of
RSS