SPAF Air France Pilots Speak Out
The SPAF union (French Pilots) declared that the BEA’s refusal to assign blame to the speed probes is an attempt to shift focus from its own and Air France’s to address the known risk.
French law requires that serious safety problems be reported and investigated, a mandate with which both the BEA and Air France failed to comply.
On it’s website, SPAF News states:
(posted verbatim)
AF 447 : la contre-enquête dans les médias
Air France pilots warn of risky speed probes
Paris – Air France pilots have criticised investigators of the carrier’s fatal jet crash in June 2009 and warned planes should avoid icy weather until tests prove whether their speed sensors can withstand it, a report said on Sunday.
The weekly Journal du Dimanche cited extracts from a report to be submitted to judicial officials this week by two pilots, one the head of the pilots’ union SPAF, on the crash of flight AF447 from Rio to Paris that killed 228 people.
In a report last month, the French air accident investigation agency BEA said the jet’s Pitot speed probes gave false readings before it crashed into the Atlantic and called for better testing standards for such probes.
Until these are developed, however, “planes are still flying in weather conditions for which the speed sensors are not certified”, which runs “contrary to the safety requirements under current regulations”, the pilots’ report said, according to the newspaper.
Pilots’ unions and some of the relatives of victims of June’s crash have accused Air France and plane maker 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, but they have nevertheless replaced Pitots made by the French electronics company Thales with a different model produced by US firm Goodrich.
The report by the pilots, Henri Marnet-Cornus and SPAF president Gerard Arnoux, said this “would lower the level of risk”, but further faults were possible since the probes had not been tested for the effects of ice crystals.
The pilots had argued in an earlier report that the freezing of the Pitots had caused the Airbus 330 to crash. The BEA has said they were “one of the factors” in the crash, but not the sole cause.
The pilots also criticised what they called “the short-sighted approach of the BEA concerning the faultiness of the Pitot probes”, according to the newspaper.
They said planes should be banned for the moment from flying into patches of icy weather that could cause the speed probes to freeze up and probes should be certified for all weather conditions and all types of plane.
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 in June. It sent a string of automated error messages before plunging into the ocean. – AFP
.
