Air France’s emergency slides failed, investigators say

TWO emergency slides on the Air France jet that crashed last week in Toronto malfunctioned, investigators said as they pored over tire marks to determine why the plane skidded off the end of a runway at Canada’s busiest airport.

The Airbus A340 failed to stop after touching down during a severe thunderstorm on Tuesday, plunging into a ravine and burning to a charred and twisted hulk. All 309 people on board survived.

Investigators are studying data from the two black boxes - flight data and cockpit voice recorders - plucked from the dismembered plane, and are nearly finished combing through the wreckage.

They said four of the plane’s doors and emergency exits were used during the evacuation, and that experts had been brought in - including from Goodrich Corporation, which made the slides - to determine why two of them failed to work properly and why one door was hard to open.

“They are on site presently with the team and they are looking at why these slides and [the door] did not work as advertised,” said Real Levasseur of Canada’s Transportation Safety Board.

On Saturday, he said an expert from the US Federal Aviation Administration was examining tire marks left on the runway.

Mr Levasseur also said he had been going over witness accounts of the crash. He urged people who had taken pictures of the accident to come forward.

“Sometimes you have eight reports who say the same thing and one who says something different, and the one who is different is right,” he said.

He reiterated that so far there was no evidence of a mechanical failure.

Investigators were waiting to interview the pilot, who was injured in the crash.