Air France boss denies faulty sensors to blame for crash

AIR FRANCE received replacement airspeed sensors for its Airbus 330s three days before the fatal crash of Flight 447, but the airline’s chief executive said that he is not convinced faulty monitors were the cause.

As storms bore down on the crash zone off Brazil, a French submarine searched the depths of the Atlantic Ocean for the black boxes that hold the best hope of finding out what did happen to the plane when it flew into heavy storms on May 31 with 228 people aboard.

So far, investigators have focused on the possibility that external speed monitors — Pitot tubes — iced over and gave false readings to the plane’s computers.

Replacement monitors for jet models of the same type as the crashed plane arrived three days before the fatal accident, airline chief executive Pierre-Henri Gourgeon said yesterday.

Air France ordered the replacements on April 27 after pilots noted a loss of airspeed data in flight on Airbus A330 and A340 models, he said.

The incidents were “not catastrophic” and planes with the old Pitots are considered airworthy, Gourgeon said.

“Because I am not convinced that the sensors are the cause of the accident, and we have said it, I had no need to issue a press release the day after the accident,” Gourgeon added, responding to criticism that there was a lack of transparency.

“It’s perhaps because we spend too much time with the families and not enough with the press that you say this,” he told an association of aerospace journalists in Paris.

Brazilian teams warned they might end the hunt for floating bodies and wreckage next week. They found no bodies on Wednesday, the first unsuccessful search day since Saturday, despite widening the search into the waters off the West African nation of Senegal.

Strong ocean storms were forecast to push into the area, making it even tougher to track down remains that currents have scattered over a vast stretch of water.

Brazil’s military announced late on Wednesday that it tentatively has set a June 19 deadline to stop looking for bodies. A total of 41 bodies had been recovered.

Air France hopes that the flight recorders will be recovered, but even without them examinations of the debris and bodies recovered from the crash are expected to shed new light on what happened to the plane.

“We will know much more, I think, after the autopsies allow us to better understand the technical causes of death and when the debris have been examined by experts,” Gourgeon said.