Sea debris 'is not from disaster jet'

Reports that debris from lost Air France flight 447 had been found in the Atlantic were wrong, the French transport minister said today.

Dominique Bussereau said he regretted that an announcement by Brazilian teams that they had found wreckage turned out to be false.

The Brazilian air force said yesterday that a helicopter plucked an cargo pallet from the sea that came the Airbus, but then said six hours later that it was not from the plane.

“French authorities have been saying for several days that we have to be extremely prudent,” Mr Bussereau said. “Our planes and naval ships have seen nothing.”

He said the search must continue and stressed that the priority was finding the flight recorders. The plane went down Sunday night with 228 people on board in the world’s worst aviation disaster since 2001.

France’s defence minister and the Pentagon have said there were no signs that terrorism was involved. Brazil’s defence minister said the possibility was never considered.

French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said experts had not found signs that would back up a “terrorism theory”.

“But we cannot discard that for now,” he said. “Nothing leads us to believe that there was an explosion, but that doesn’t mean there wasn’t one.”

“All the paths are open and we will not give priority to a single premise because that would be immoral,” he added.

Investigators are looking into whether malfunctions in instruments used to determine airspeed may have led the plane to be travelling at the wrong speed when it encountered turbulence from towering thunderstorms over the Atlantic Ocean.

Two aviation industry experts said investigators were studying the possibility that an external probe that measures air pressure may have iced over, causing onboard computers to be given incorrect speed and altitude.

If the instruments were wrong, the jet could have been travelling too fast or too slow as it hit turbulence from violent thunderstorms.

Airliners need to be flying at a precise speed when encountering violent weather, too fast and they run the risk of breaking apart. Too slow, and they could lose control.

But Gerard Feldzer, a former Air France pilot who flew A330s from 2000 to 2004, cautioned against drawing conclusions about the cause of the crash.

“We don’t know whether there was depressurisation. Perhaps a quarter of an hour later it was resolved and it (the cause of the crash) was something completely different.”

The Airbus factory has sent an advisory to all operators of the A330 reminding them of how to handle the plane in conditions similar to those experienced by Flight 447, which was an Airbus A330-200 version.

Meteorologists said the Air France jet entered an unusual storm with 100 mph updrafts that acted as a vacuum, sucking water up from the ocean. The moist air rushed up to the plane’s high altitude, where it quickly froze in minus-40 degree temperatures. The updrafts also would have created dangerous turbulence.

The plane’s computer systems ultimately failed, and the plane broke apart, probably in midair, and crashed into the Atlantic on a flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris.