The inquiry into the loss of an Air France jet that crashed into the Atlantic killing 228 people has called for better standards for air speed probes, which it said ice up at high altitude.
Aisling Butler, of Roscrea, Co Tipperary, Jane Deasy from Dublin and Eithne Walls, originally from Belfast, were among the dead.
In an interim report on the 1 June crash of flight AF447 from Rio to Paris, the French air accident investigation agency BEA said that, while it has yet to confirm the cause of the accident, the jet’s Pitot probes gave false readings.
‘We’ve always said that the Pitot probes were one of the factors in the chain of events that led to the accident, but they can’t be the sole cause,’ BEA director Jean-Paul Troadec said.
The BEA report said Airbus, which built the missing A330 jet, had identified 32 cases between November 2003 and the date of the crash in which two or more of these air speed monitors had iced up on its planes.
‘The recommendation that we are making today is the need to once more improve the certification process of the Pitot probe,’ Troadec said, adding that in cases other than the loss of AF447 pilots had retained control of their planes.
When Pitots are blocked by ice they send false speed measurements to the plane’s onboard flight computers, as was the case on the missing flight, which sent a string of automated error messages before plunging into the ocean.
Modern airliners are controlled by a computerised fly-by-wire system that relies on accurate airspeed data to maintain its course on autopilot.
In June’s crash the autopilot cut out shortly before the jet went into the sea.
A spokesman for Airbus said that the European planemaker would update its Pitot designs if and when new certification standards are introduced.
Pilots’ unions and some of the relatives of victims of June’s crash have accused Air France and Airbus of ignoring longstanding problems with air speed monitors on its jets in the run up to the June disaster.
The companies insist that their jets met all safety standards.
Crash investigators have not been able to recover the AF447’s black box flight data recorders from the ocean off Brazil, despite finding floating wreckage, and the inquiry into the accident is continuing.
Troadec confirmed that a study of the debris that has been recovered, along with some of the bodies of the dead, confirmed the plane had not depressurised in flight and was probably intact until it hit the water.
Maritime salvage experts are to launch a third series of searches in the Atlantic in February in the hope of finding the wreck, the remaining bodies and the missing black boxes, which could explain the mystery crash.
