20 JUN 2009 _______________________________________ *Ocean Combed for Jet Data in Biggest Aviation Search *Air France had nine speed probe incidents in past year *Air France pays $24,500 to crash victims' families *Schwarzenegger jet makes "steep" emergency landing *Babbitt Picks Grizzle As FAA Chief Counsel **************************************** Ocean Combed for Jet Data in Biggest Aviation Search RIO DE JANEIRO — Three ships and a nuclear-powered submarine are engaged in the most extensive marine search for black boxes from an airline accident in modern aviation history, air safety experts said Friday. Search teams, with crew and equipment from the French and American navies, continued to scour the deep Atlantic waters on Friday, straining to hear an acoustic ping emitted from the flight data and cockpit recorders of Air France Flight 447, which crashed some 620 miles off the coast of northern Brazil in the early morning hours of June 1. Veteran investigators said they could not recall a similar effort to locate a plane’s recorders; these could contain information that is critical to solving the mystery of the downed Airbus A330. “I can’t think of any one event where there’s been more than one military naval organization out there hunting for them,” said Greg Feith, a former investigator at the National Transportation Safety Board. The boats hunting for pings around the clock make up just part of the armada of sea and air craft involved in the search and recovery effort, which includes at least 11 ships, 10 planes and 2 helicopters from four countries. The Brazilian military has more than 1,000 personnel members devoted to the search. It seems daunting and improbable to find tiny boxes in a huge ocean, especially with the precise crash site still uncertain, but searchers almost always recover them, air safety experts said. Of 20 airplane crashes in water over the past 30 years, in only one case was neither recorder found during the crash investigation, said Curt Lewis, the president of Curt Lewis & Associates, a safety and risk management consulting firm. In one other case, one of the two recorders was recovered, and in two cases he was not able to determine whether they were ever found, he said. But this search is more difficult than most. French investigators are scouring an area with a 50-mile radius and water depths exceeding 15,000 feet. Most airliner crashes over water have been along coastal waters or along the continental shelf, said Paul Hayes, air safety director of Ascend, an aviation consulting company in London. “This is pushing the envelope,” he said. “Because of the depth of the water, this may be the accident where they fail to do it.” Searchers are also pressed heavily for time. The boxes transmit signals for about 30 days before the signals start to fade. The batteries in the boxes on the Air France flight may have less than two weeks of life left before they go silent. As the search for the boxes continued, Brazilian and French ships carried on with their recovery of bodies, debris and baggage. French authorities said Thursday that forensic teams were beginning the process of identifying the 50 bodies found so far. Air France said Friday that it would begin making initial payments of $24,000 each to compensate families of the 228 victims of the accident. Under the terms of the Montreal Convention, relatives of people killed in aviation accidents are entitled to up to $154,000 in damages. Brazilian medical authorities have begun autopsies of some of the crash victims. Some news reports have said that several of the bodies suffered fractures to their legs, hips and arms, leading some experts to suggest that the plane may have broken up in flight rather than when it struck the ocean. But Paul-Louis Arslanian, the head of the French agency investigating the accident, BEA, said this week that it was still too early to draw definitive conclusions from the autopsies. Finding the flight recorders could go a long way toward clearing up such doubts. As the French submarine slithers through the waters, two Dutch ships, contracted to French investigators, are towing a pair of torpedo-shaped hydrophones, essentially underwater ears, listening in stereo to help determine the direction of the pinger signal. United States Navy personnel are assisting in the use of the hydrophones, which are attached by 23,000 feet of cable and on loan from the Navy, said Col. Willie Berges of the United States Air Force, chief of the United States military liaison office in Brazil. The French ship is also equipped with equipment to listen for pings. “We have a grid, and the submarine has a grid, and everybody is looking for that noise,” Colonel Berges said. Once the ping is found, a French ship is set to send a robotic vehicle to the sea bottom to look for the recorders, he said. The French also have a minisubmarine with mechanical arms and a crew of three that can dive to 20,000 feet. The Air France jet was equipped with memory chips, not tape, which are sealed in a hardened shell designed to protect them in crashes at sea. “The whole problem here is, you don’t know where the crash site is,” Colonel Berges said. “Where the debris is is not where the crash site is.” Still, given previous successful efforts, investigators remain hopeful that the recorders can be retrieved, even in the often-jagged ocean bottom. Mr. Feith, formerly of the National Transportation Safety Board, said that if the pingers did not lead the searchers to the boxes, they might later find the wreckage with the boxes inside. “You have to hope the tail section stayed in a clump, rather than sling-shotting the boxes out somewhere,” he said. In previous sea crashes, searchers overcame improbable circumstances to recover the boxes. When an Air-India Boeing 747 was destroyed by a bomb off the coast of Ireland in 1985, searchers found the boxes in about two and a half weeks, in 6,700 feet of water. A Boeing 747 operated by Adam Air crashed in Indonesia in January 2007. Pingers were heard soon after, but recovery of the boxes took until August of that year because the water was more than 6,000 feet deep. The case in which searchers failed to get either black box was that of a Boeing 727 owned by Faucett, a Peruvian airline, that crashed off Newfoundland in 1990, apparently because of lack of fuel, killing all 16 aboard. Some boxes take longer than others to find. Searchers used sonar to recover the cockpit voice recorder from a South African Airlines Boeing 747 that crashed while traveling from Taiwan to Johannesburg in November 1987 — but not until 14 months later, and in 14,000 feet of water. Alexei Barrionuevo reported from Rio de Janeiro, and Matthew L. Wald from Washington. Nicola Clark contributed reporting from Paris, and Mery Galanternick from Rio de Janeiro. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/20/world/20plane.html?ref=world ************** Air France had nine speed probe incidents in past year PARIS (AFP) — Air France Airbus jets experienced at least nine incidents in which airspeed probes iced over in the past year, according to an internal company report obtained by AFP Friday. A probe into the June 1 crash of AF 447, in which an A330 jet flying from Rio to Paris plunged into the Atlantic with the loss of all 228 people on board, has focused on contradictory readings from its "pitot" speed probes. The probes, made by aerospace company Thales, were found to be faulty on flight AF 447. But French aviation investigators have played down the significance of the discovery and insist "there is still no proven link" between the probes and the tragedy. The European Aviation Safety Agency has not asked airlines to replace the sensors, and said on Friday it did not currently have plans to do so. But such a demand could still be made in the future, it added. Air France did not wait for a signal from the aviation safety body. It decided on June 12 to upgrade all sensors on its long-haul fleet as a precaution after protests from pilots. In an internal note sent to Air France pilots on Thursday, the company said it had informed the planemaker Airbus and Thales of eight incidents on A340 jets and one on an A330 over a year-long period. An earlier report seen by AFP recorded five airspeed probe incidents last year, two of which had triggered alerts. According to the latest report, the first incident occurred in May 2008, involving temporary loss of speed data, followed by a second in July 2008 and three others in August 2008. There then followed two operational incidents in September and October 2008, all on A340s. Airbus and Thales were given a full briefing on the incidents, and asked to resolve the problem, according to the Airbus note. "Numerous exchanges took place with the technical teams at Airbus," it said. "No incident of this kind had been signalled previously," it noted. Airbus replied to Air France, saying "the supposed origin of the incidents was icing over, due to the formation of crystals inside the airspeed probes," according to the report. "Faced with our insistence on finding a solution, Thales and Airbus (will) carry out studies" on a new generation of probe, the Air France report says. It said two further operating incidents were recorded at the end of March 2009: one on an Airbus A340 and one on an A330. "Airbus is contacted again several times" and "replies by confirming that it presumes the probes had iced over," Air France said. According to the report, Airbus wrote to Air France on April 15, 2009, to inform it that tests carried out by Thales on new-generation probes showed a "much better response than the older model" to icy conditions. In response, Air France asked Thales to accelerate the delivery of speed probes that were to be supplied from May 26, 2009, at a rate of a dozen a week. French investigators probing the June 1 Air France crash have said that the airspeed sensors had been feeding inconsistent readings to the cockpit. The probes allow a pilot to control the speed of an aircraft, key to keeping a plane stable in flight. Conflicting airspeed data can cause the autopilot to shut down and in extreme cases the plane to stall or fly dangerously fast, possibly causing a high-altitude breakup. The crash is the worst aviation accident since 2001, and unprecedented in Air France's 75-year history. http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5ijQ2XuqVZ94caKa7Dz9gWufrkCtg **************** Air France pays $24,500 to crash victims' families Air France will pay victims' families about $24,500 in initial compensation Airline has been in touch with about 1,800 relatives of people who died in crash PARIS, France (CNN) -- Air France will pay families about €17,500 ($24,500) in initial compensation for each victim of the crash of Flight 447 this month, the company's chief executive says. So far, Air France has been in touch with about 1,800 relatives of the people who died when the Airbus A330 crashed into the Atlantic Ocean on June 1, chief executive Paul-Henri Gourgeon told France's RTL radio Friday. The company is also providing families with counseling, he said. "Of course, this is not always easy, (but) we make up for it," he said. "We have psychologists in each country, in each stop. You know that the passengers were of 32 different nationalities, so all that is of great complexity, but we have the ability to manage this complexity. It's just a question of means and no limits on the means that we put in place." Gourgeon said it has been difficult tracing the relatives of all 228 victims. "The modern world is different and we often have only a cell phone, and as you can imagine, this cell phone is unfortunately in the aircraft," he said. "So we probably put more hours to access all the relatives." The aircraft has not been found, though search teams have found dozens of pieces of debris in the water and think they know the general location of the wreck. The head of the French accident investigation board, Paul-Louis Arslanian, said this week that there is a chance the entire aircraft may never be found. Watch more wreckage recovered from crash » With no wreckage and few clues about what caused the plane to go down, searchers are focused on finding the plane's data recorders, the so-called black boxes. Data from the recorders may be crucial in pinning down a cause. Autopsies conducted on some of the 50 bodies found so far show they suffered broken bones, including arms, legs and hips, Brazilian authorities have told French investigators, Arslanian said. Experts have said such injuries indicate the flight broke apart before hitting the ocean. Asked about that theory, Gourgeon said he would not go that far. "What I know is that the investigators would like to know the causes of death," Gourgeon said. "That knowledge of causes of death will better clarify what exactly happened. Were the victims killed before the impact, or during impact?" There has been difficulty in exchanging information between French investigators and Brazilian coroners, but that is being resolved, he said. Investigators are looking at the possible role of airspeed sensors known as Pitot tubes, among other factors, as a possible cause of the crash. The plane sent 24 automated error messages in the four minutes before it crashed, Arslanian said Wednesday. The error messages all indicate there were problems with on-board information about the plane's speed, which can cause some of the plane's instruments to stop functioning, Arslanian said. http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/europe/06/20/france.brazil.crash/index.html **************** Schwarzenegger jet makes "steep" emergency landing LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's jet made a "quick, steep, but safe" emergency landing in Los Angeles on Friday after the pilot reported smoke coming from the cockpit's instrument panel, his office said. Although there was no visible fire, the pilot diverted the jet to the Van Nuys airport 10 minutes before he was due to land at Santa Monica, near the former actor's home, spokesman Aaron McLear said in a statement. Fire crews met the jet on the runway. "Upon landing the Governor exited the jet and traveled to his house," McLear said. "The NetJets crew did an outstanding job and everyone aboard landed safely and unharmed." http://www.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUSTRE55J0CE20090620 **************** Babbitt Picks Grizzle As FAA Chief Counsel In one of his first personnel moves, new FAA Administrator Randy Babbitt has selected Continental veteran David Grizzle as the next FAA chief counsel. Babbitt was officially sworn in this week, and told FAA employees that the Obama administration has given him "free rein" in making his appointments. While these are typically seen as political assignments, Babbitt stressed he wants to find people who know a lot about the aviation industry and what FAA does. This position must be confirmed by the Senate. Grizzle certainly fits that description. He retired from Continental last year, after 23 years with the carrier. His most recent job was senior VP-customer experience, but he also held various senior management positions, including senior VP-marketing strategy and corporate development. He was VP-legal and corporate affairs for Texas Air Corp., the former parent company of Continental. Grizzle -- who has a law degree from Harvard -- joined New York Airlines in 1984 as general counsel and VP-administration. This carrier later merged with Continental. He took a leave of absence from Continental in 2004 and 2005 to serve in Afghanistan as transportation and infrastructure coordinator for the U.S. State Dept. http://www.aviationweek.com/aw/generic/story_channel.jsp?channel=comm&id=news/GRIZ061909.xml&headline=Babbitt%20Picks%20Grizzle%20As%20FAA%20Chief%20Counsel *************** Curt Lewis, P.E., CSP CURT LEWIS & ASSOCIATES, LLC