Mr Bussereau said the search must continue and stressed that the priority was finding the flight recorders. -- PHOTO: AFP
PARIS - FRANCE'S transportation minister said on Friday that French forces have found no signs of the Airbus A330 airplane that vanished over the Atlantic and urged 'extreme prudence' about suspected debris taken from the ocean.
Dominique Bussereau said he regretted that an announcement by Brazilian teams that they had recovered plane debris from Air France flight 447 turned out to be false.
TWO aviation industry officials told The Associated Press on Thursday that investigators were studying the possibility that an external probe that measures air pressure may have iced over. The probe feeds data used to calculate air speed and altitude to onboard computers. Another possibility is that sensors inside the aircraft reading the data malfunctioned.
If the instruments were not reporting accurate information, the jet could have been traveling too fast or too slow as it hit turbulence from violent thunderstorms, according to the officials. Jetliners need to be flying at just the right speed when encountering violent weather, experts say - too fast and they run the risk of breaking apart. Too slow, and they could lose control.
PARIS - PLANEMAKER Airbus said on Friday it had sent out a notice to pilots worldwide in the wake of the Air France crash in the Atlantic reminding them what to do when speed indicators give conflicting read-outs.
The alert came after the French air safety investigation agency said that automatic messages broadcast by the Air France Airbus A330 before it disappeared had shown 'inconsistencies between the various speeds measured.'
The Brazilian air force announced on Thursday afternoon that a helicopter plucked an airplane cargo pallet from the sea that came the Air France flight, but then said six hours later that it was not from the Airbus.
'French authorities have been saying for several days that we have to be extremely prudent,' Mr Bussereau told France's RTL radio. 'Our planes and naval ships have seen nothing.'
Mr Bussereau said the search must continue and stressed that the priority was finding the flight recorders. The plane went down on Sunday night with 228 people on board in the world's worst aviation disaster since 2001.
France's defense minister and the Pentagon have said there were no signs that terrorism was involved. Brazil's defense minister said the possibility was never considered. French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner, speaking on Thursday in Rio de Janeiro where he attended a Mass honoring the crash victims, said experts had not found signs that would back up a 'terrorism theory.'
'But we cannot discard that for now,' he told reporters. '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 traveling at the wrong speed when it encountered turbulence from towering thunderstorms over the Atlantic Ocean. -- AP
