Air France has finished replacing air speed monitors on all its long-haul Airbus aircraft even though the cause of the Flight 447 disaster remains a mystery, a pilots’ union official said on Monday.
The search for the A330’s black boxes was reinforced on Monday with a high-tech US Navy device that began listening for pings in the depths of the Atlantic Ocean.
With the flight recorders still missing, the probe into the disaster that killed 228 people so far has focused on the possibility that external speed monitors iced over and gave false readings to the plane’s computers.
Air France had begun replacing the sensors — Pitot tubes — on its A330 and A340 jets before the accident, but had not yet changed them on the plane that was lost.
After pilot complaints, the airline pledged to speed up the switch and it has now equipped all planes with the new sensors, said Erick Derivry, a spokesman for the SNPL pilots’ union, though he stressed that there is no hard evidence that Pitot problems caused the accident.
The first of two US Navy Towed Pinger Locators was put to work on Monday, pulled slowly in a grid pattern by a Dutch ship contracted by the French government.
The second locator was expected to start operating within hours across the 5,180km² search area, said US Air Force Colonel Willie Berges, commander of the US military forces supporting the search.
A French nuclear submarine is also being used to look for signs of the black boxes.
The pings emitted by the black boxes begin to fade after 30 days.
The plane went down on May 31 while flying to Paris from Rio de Janeiro.
Brazil’s military on Monday located more debris, but found no more remains of the people on board, officials said.
The additional debris was spotted close to the zone where most of the 49 bodies so far recovered have been pulled from the water, air force spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Henry Munhoz told reporters in the northeastern city of Recife.
Munhoz said no date had been set for an end to the search operation, but that it would be re-evaluated every two days.
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