Flight 447 disaster captain named as deep-sea search for black boxes begins

A Brazilian naval ship is tonight searching for bodies among floating debris from the Air France airliner that crashed into the sea early on Monday – even as the chief investigator said that the world might never learn why the Airbus, with 228 people aboard, went down.

The wreckage was found by Brazilian and French spotter aircraft widely scattered over an area about 745 miles northeast of the coastal city of Recife. French authorities confirmed that seats, pieces of plastic and sections of aluminium found floating on the surface were from the Airbus, which vanished while flying through severe storms en route from Rio de Janeiro to Paris.

The captain was named today as Marc Dubois, 58, a veteran pilot with a total of 11,000 hours’ flying time. He was the son of a career Air France pilot who died last March at the age of 89.

As ships steamed to the scene, reports of a recent bomb threat to an Air France South American flight stirred speculation that an explosion could have brought down Flight 447. Airline sources said, however, that the company attached no significance to the false alarm, which involved an airliner at Buenos Aires airport on May 27.

President Sarkozy and Carla Bruni, his wife, attended an all-faiths religious service at Notre Dame cathedral in memory of the victims of the world’s worst air disaster since 2001. Dozens of Air France personnel attended in uniform, mourning their 12 colleagues.

In Paris, Paul-Louis Arslanian, chief of the French Accident Investigation Bureau, said it would take a long inquiry to find a cause for the disaster. The aircraft’s “black box” flight recorders would be invaluable, but it was possible that they might not be found because they could have sunk 12,000 feet (3,700m) to the ocean bed that, in the affected region, resembled an underwater mountain range. A French deep-sea research vessel and robot submarine will try next week to trace and retrieve the recorders, which should be transmitting a homing signal. No black box has ever been recovered from such a depth.

Even with the recorders, investigators might never be able to solve fully the enigma of Flight 447, said Mr Arslanian. “I cannot rule out the possibility that we might end up with a finding that is relatively unsatisfactory in terms of certainty,” he added.

He did promise, however, to report any solid indications as soon as they were found “whatever the consequences”. That was taken as an allusion to suspicions that the accident bureau had come under political pressure in the past.

Speculation continued to focus on theories that severe tropical storms were behind a catastrophic failure in the airliner, which appeared to have broken up before reaching the ocean. Fresh leaks from Air France prompted theories that dense ice could have blocked the aircraft’s external air probes, confusing its computerised flight system. The last word from the pilots, half an hour before the crash, was a routine call to air traffic control, which mentioned heavy weather in the area.

On Monday, Air France and government ministers said the aircraft had been struck by lightning and they ruled out terrorism but later retracted the remarks. Sabotage was not being ruled out, they said today.

Air France said the Buenos Aires bomb threat was of the kind that airlines receive episodically. Last month an Air France Airbus flying from Paris to Marrakech was diverted to Nantes after an anonymous warning call. Bomb threats to airline flights in the West have been reported half a dozen times this year.

Investigators are analysing a stream of data which was sent automatically via satellite from the stricken aircraft to the Air France operations centre over a three-minute period that ended with its crash, Mr Arslanian said. According to leaks from Air France the initial messages reported disconnection of the automatic pilot and severe anomalies in the fight parameters. Some pilots interpreted this as a symptom of icing on the probes that report airspeed and other data. The last message reported the aircraft entering a high-speed dive.

“The A330 is a beautiful aircraft but it has shown, again and again, very susceptible to probes icing, with the de-icing system on automatic,” an airline pilot wrote on one internet forum. “This leads to very rapidly presenting the crew with a very lame aircraft to say the least.” Some experts said icing could have been the consequence of the electrical power failure which was also reported by the airliner.