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.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver
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