Air France flight that was lost over the Atlantic...

[BeardedOne]

This disturbing snippet comes from the most recent AP update:

In Brazil, Air Force Col. Henry Munhoz said nine bodies have been recovered by Brazilian authorities: four men, four women and one that was impossible to identify by gender.

[mikejones]

They´ve found 5 corpses so far. The cause will be known when they find the black box. Everything else is speculation.

True, but I suspect that they will now perform the pitot tube modification on the rest of their fleet regardless of the outcome here.

A terrible tragedy irrespective of the cause.

[thx1138]

http://www.sundayherald.com/internat...ance_crash.php

[JamesHunt]

one thing that worries me about these airlines is that they know there is certain mechanical situations with aircraft, but after a disaster, they say there is no need to worry. The DC-10, and its dodgy cargo bay door, the 737's rudder problem. It's a classic problem of huge profit over human life. Grounding hundreds of aircraft costs millions of dollars, saying sorry to hundreds of victims costs nothing.

[praetor]

Prateor,

As a Brazilian, don't you find it scary and puzzling that the last 3 major air disasters in the world (Gol in 2006. Tam in 2007, and now this) all have a brazilian connection ? I do.

Air France said, that Airbus Industries had issued a recommendation to retrofit the pitot tubes in September 2007, giving the operators full freedom to decide about the implementation of the recommendation. Air France had implemented the recommendation to their A320 fleet, but did not retrofit the long range A330s and A340s due to the absence of incidents. Starting May 2008 Air France however observed the loss of air data on their A330 and A340 fleet. These incidents were discussed with Airbus Industries, who identified the problems as icing related and suggested that the modification implemented on the A320 would not resolve the icing issue. In the first quarter of 2009 laboratory tests however proved, that the new pitot tube design establishes a significant improvement over the previous design. Following a test flight Air France began to implement the retrofit of the new design pitot tubes onto their A330 and A340 fleet on April 27th 2009. Without prejudice Air France has now decided to accelerate that program to retrofit the pitot tubes on the A330/A340 fleet.


http://avherald.com/h?article=41a81ef1/0022&opt=0