Brazil and France in row over ‘wreckage find’ from disaster jet

AS Brazil and France disagreed last night about whether pieces of a downed Air France jet have been found in the Atlantic, investigators used the last messages from the plane to try to avoid future disasters.

Brazilian officials have insisted for three days that military pilots have spotted wreckage from Flight 447 scattered across the ocean’s surface. Air Force Brig Gen Ramon Cardoso again expressed confidence yesterday that at least some of the objects – an airplane seat, a slick of kerosene and other pieces – are from the plane that vanished with 228 people on board, including three Irish women.

“This is the material that we’ve seen that really was part of the plane,” he said.

But ships guided by planes in the search area have been hampered by extremely poor visibility, and have recovered no wreckage. “We don’t have any information yet that any of the ships are near any of the objects,” Cardoso said.

The only piece retrieved so far, a cargo pallet, turned out to be sea garbage. Like other suspicious objects, it had to be hauled up and checked out, said Brazilian Navy Adm Edson Lawrence.

“There is a lot of garbage in the sea, and sometimes what might seem to be wreckage is actually trash,” Lawrence said yesterday.

French officials stopped short of criticising their Brazilian counterparts, but France’s Transportation Minister Dominique Bussereau said his own country’s searchers have found no signs of the Airbus A330.

“French authorities have been saying for several days that we have to be extremely prudent,” Bussereau told France’s RTL radio.

“Our planes and naval ships have seen nothing.”

A French Defence Ministry official, speaking on condition of anonymity, also questioned the Brazilian claims, saying French teams “cannot precisely confirm the zone where the plane went down”.

Prosecutors in Paris opened a manslaughter probe, a routine step whenever French citizens die overseas.

Bussereau said the priority is finding the flight voice and data recorders that could help explain the cause of the world’s worst civilian aviation disaster since 2001.

Since these “black boxes” may be miles below the surface, investigators are looking for clues in the messages sent from the plane’s computers just before it disappeared. One theory is that outside probes that feed speed sensors may have iced over, giving incorrect information to the plane’s computers. The autopilot may have then directed the plane to fly too fast or too slow when it encountered turbulence from towering thunderstorms.

Airbus sent an advisory to airlines on Thursday reminding them how to handle the A330 in similar conditions.