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[HeliOps Admin]

A MAN celebrating his birthday; a group of workers returning from a vacation award; a woman who had just recovered from a brain injury.

As with any airline disaster, there were stories of cruel coincidences and bright young lives cut short by the crash of Air France flight AF 447, which was confirmed today by Brazil's military.

"My son died on his birthday," said a tearful Diana Raquel, mother of British-based Brazilian dentist Jose Rommel Amorim, who turned 35 on Sunday and had been visiting his family before catching the Rio de Janeiro-Paris flight.

She was among distraught relatives accommodated by Air France at a hotel in Rio, many of whom expressed anger about a lack of information from authorities since the plane vanished in a storm on Monday.

Adding to the anguish, they are likely to face a long wait for answers to how the state-of-the-art Airbus A330 was apparently brought down by a storm that aviation experts said was a routine hazard for pilots.

Finding the "black box" flight data and voice recorders that hold clues to why the plane crashed will be difficult because they have likely sunk to the ocean floor at the crash site about 1200 km northeast of Brazil's coast.

Aldair Gomes, the father of Marcelo Parente, who was the head of the Rio mayor's Cabinet office, said he had been holding out hope for his son until today's announcement.

"The last bit of hope that we had no longer exists," he said. "Before, a lot of us were hoping that the plane could have landed on an island or something like that, but no more.

"I just want to find my son's body so that he can have a dignified burial."

Among the 216 passengers of 32 nationalities were executives from major companies that have ramped up investments in Brazil in recent years and European tourists returning from its famous beaches as well as seven children and one baby.

A 28-year-old Spaniard, Ana Negra, who had just spent her honeymoon in Brazil, said goodbye to her husband at Rio's airport after deciding to take a different flight and visit her family in Spain, Brazil's O Globo newspaper reported. She had changed her flight just days before.

A company that distributes electrical parts in France was hit especially hard. It lost 10 employees who had gone on a short vacation to Brazil as a reward for their strong performance at work. Nine of their spouses also were on board.

"I found out about this on Monday morning. To say it was a shock doesn't remotely describe the emotion," Laurent Bouveresse, head of the CGED company, told French television.

Other French companies lost employees, among them tire maker Michelin. It had three staff aboard the jet, including its head of Latin America, Luiz Roberto Anastocio, and a 28-year-old Frenchwoman, Christine Pieraerts.

Her older brother, Michel, said his sister had recently recovered from a stroke.

"We were happy because she had returned to work and had a normal life again. The fates were against her, and us," he told Le Parisien newspaper.

Three Irish women doctors, who had recently graduated from Trinity College Dublin, were on the plane. One of them, Eithne Walls, 28, was originally a dancer and had spent a year working on the Riverdance show on Broadway before turning to medicine.

"She was very popular and talented member of the troupe," Julian Erskine, the executive producer of Riverdance, was quoted as saying by the Irish media.

In Italy, officials released the names of 10 Italians who had checked onto the flight. They included three politicians from the northern Trentino region who had flown to Brazil to deliver funds raised in their area to help victims of a 2008 flood. (Writing by Stuart Grudgings; editing

There is "no doubt'' that debris spotted by aircraft in the Atlantic Ocean came from a missing Air France flight carrying 228 people, Brazilian Defence Minister Nelson Jobim said today.

Mr Jobim said in Rio de Janeiro today that jet fuel slicks and debris, including a seat from a plane, were from flight AF 447, which had been flying from Rio to Paris on Monday when it went missing.

The debris was scattered over a 5km area, he said, "confirming that the plane fell at this spot.''

Mr Jobim said three merchant vessels were in the debris zone and the first of several Brazilian navy vessels would arrive at the scene later today.

 "They will start the work to recover these items that were spotted'' overnight by Brazilian air force planes, he said.

If any bodies were found, they would be transported by ship to the nearest airport, on Brazil's archipelago of Fernando de Noronha, 460km away.

From there, they would be flown out on air force planes, he said.

[HeliOps Admin]

PARIS (Reuters) - Brazilian navy ships found more bodies from the Atlantic plane crash on Sunday, and Air France said it had been replacing speed sensors at the centre of the investigation into the cause of the disaster.

Air France said late on Saturday it was accelerating the replacement of speed sensors on all its Airbus long-haul planes.

It said it had begun the switchover five weeks before Monday's crash, but only after disagreeing with Airbus over the planemaker's proposal to carry out tests before replacing them.

An Airbus spokesman declined to comment and said it could only discuss the investigation with French air authorities.

"We are fully supporting the investigation with logistics, information and documentation," he said.

Investigators are considering the possibility that the speed sensors on Flight 447 may have iced up, resulting in faulty readings that caused the pilots to set the plane at a dangerous speed as it passed through violent equatorial thunderstorms.

But the head of France's air accident agency BEA said on Saturday it was too soon to say if problems with the speed sensors, known as pitot tubes, were in any way responsible.

The crash of the flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris with 228 people on board was the world's deadliest air disaster since 2001 and the worst in Air France's 75-year history.

Brazilian navy ships found the bodies of two men and debris including a blue seat with a serial number matching the crashed plane, a rucksack containing a vaccination card, and a briefcase with an Air France ticket inside on Saturday, rescuers said.

Three more bodies were found in the Atlantic early on Sunday, they added.

Rescuers face a monumental task in finding the black box flight recorders 4,000 metres under water, and investigators are left with scraps of satellite data sent by the doomed plane in the last few minutes before it is presumed to have crashed.

LOST DATA

France's BEA said on Saturday the A330 had sent out 24 error messages in four minutes including one indicating a discrepancy in speed data. It said similar problems had happened before.

Air France said it had first noticed that ice in the sensors was causing lost data in planes like the A330 in May 2008 but that it failed to agree with Airbus on the right steps to take.

According to Air France, Airbus offered to carry out an in-flight test on new sensors this year but the airline decided to go ahead and started changing them anyway from April 27.

But it acknowledged that it had decided not to carry out an Airbus recommendation in September 2007 that airlines install a new sensor originally developed for the smaller A320.

At that stage, only a "small number of incidents" had been reported on larger planes and the advice was not mandatory, which it would have to be if safety were seen at risk, it said.

Air France did not say whether the crashed plane had the new sensors but its last maintenance hangar visit was on April 16.

Some of the A330's 50 or so other operators defended the plane's safety record at an airlines meeting in Kuala Lumpur on Sunday, saying the crash was an isolated incident.

"It's a safe plane, it's a good plane," Chew Choon Seng, Singapore Airlines chief executive, told Reuters.

Airbus has however faced problems with the speed sensors dating back to at least 2001, forcing changes in equipment as well as the pilot's flight manual, according to online filings.

In 2001, France reported several cases of sudden fluctuation of A330 or A340 airspeed data during severe icing conditions and Airbus was ordered to change the cockpit manual, according to the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration.

[HeliOps Admin]

Air France crash 'less fuzzy'


Autopsies have revealed fractures in the legs, hips and arms of Air France Flight 447 victims, injuries that - along with the large pieces of wreckage pulled from the Atlantic - strongly suggest the plane broke up in the air, experts say.

With more than 400 pieces of debris recovered from the ocean's surface, the top French investigator expressed optimism about eventually discovering what brought down the plane. But he also called the search conditions - far from land in very deep water - "one of the worst situations ever known in an accident investigation."

French investigators are beginning to form "an image that is progressively less fuzzy," Paul-Louis Arslanian, who runs the French air accident investigation agency BEA, told a news conference on Wednesday outside Paris.

"We are in a situation that is a bit more favorable than the first days," Arslanian said. "We can say there is a little less uncertainty, so there is a little more optimism. ... (but) it is premature for the time being to say what happened."

A spokesman for Brazilian medical examiners said on Wednesday that fractures were found in autopsies on an undisclosed number of the 50 bodies recovered so far. The official spoke on condition he not be named due to department rules.

"Typically, if you see intact bodies and multiple fractures - arm, leg, hip fractures - it's a good indicator of a midflight break up," said Frank Ciacco, a former forensic expert at the US National Transportation Safety Board. "Especially if you're seeing large pieces of aircraft as well."

The pattern of fractures was first reported on Wednesday by Brazil's O Estado de S Paulo newspaper, which cited unnamed investigators. The paper also reported that some victims were found with little or no clothing, and had no signs of burns.

"In an in-air break up like we are supposing here, the clothes are just torn away," said Jack Casey, an aviation safety consultant in Washington, DC and a former accident investigator.

Casey also said multiple fractures are consistent with a midair breakup of the plane, which was cruising at about 10,500 metres when it went down.

"Getting ejected into that kind of windstream is like hitting a brick wall - even if they stay in their seats, it is a crushing effect," Casey said.

When a jet crashes into water mostly intact - such as the Egypt Air plane that hit the Atlantic Ocean after taking off from New York in 1999 - debris and bodies are generally broken into small pieces, Ciacco said.

Lack of burn evidence would not necessarily rule out an explosion, said John Goglia, a former member of the US National Transportation Safety Board.

Searchers from Brazil, France, the United States and other countries are methodically scanning the surface and depths of the Atlantic for signs of the Airbus A330 that crashed May 31 after running into thunderstorms en route from Rio de Janeiro to Paris. All 228 people aboard were killed.
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Brazilian Air Force Col Henry Munhoz told reporters Wednesday that several more body parts, as well as pieces of the plane and luggage, were found in the search area by the French amphibian ship Mistral.

Still missing are the plane's flight data and voice recorders, thought to be deep under water.

French-chartered ships are trolling a search area with a radius of 80km, pulling US Navy underwater listening devices attached to 6000m of cable. The black boxes send out an electronic tapping sound that can be heard up to 2km away.

US Air Force Col Willie Berges, commander of the American military forces supporting the search, said the black boxes emit beacons at a unique frequency, virtually guaranteeing that any signal detected would be from the pingers.

"The question becomes if the black box is with the pinger, because they can get separated," Berges said.

Without the black boxes to help explain what went wrong, the investigation has focused on a flurry of automated messages sent by the plane minutes before it lost contact; one suggests external speed sensors had iced over, destabilizing the plane's control systems.

Arslanian said most of the messages appear to be "linked to this loss of validity of speed information." He said when the speed information became "incoherent" it affected other systems on the plane.

The automated messages were not alarm calls and no distress call was picked up from the plane, he said.

Air France has replaced the sensors, called Pitot tubes, on all its A330 and A340 aircraft, under pressure from pilots who feared a link to the accident.