Word: airbus
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...Brazil What Happened to Flight 447? On June 2, search teams combing the Atlantic Ocean discovered bobbing wreckage from the Air France jet that vanished between Brazil and West Africa two days earlier. But the mystery of why the Airbus A330 went down may endure--a lead investigator suggested that the doomed aircraft's voice and data recorders may never be plucked from the mountainous ocean floor, more than a mile below. Meteorologists suspect the wide-body jet encountered a band of towering thunderstorms packing 100-m.p.h. (160 km/h) winds as it flew from Rio de Janeiro to Paris...
...French nuclear submarine arrived off the coast of Brazil to join the effort to locate the black box from Air France Flight 447 on Thursday, aviation experts stressed the necessity of recovering those cockpit recorders in order to learn what exactly brought down the Airbus A330 and the 228 people on board. In past inquiries into airline disasters, investigators have been able to figure out the cause by piecing together clues from the wreckage itself, sometimes without information from the black box. But after 10 days of searching, the authorities combing what's believed to be Flight 447's crash...
...According to Airbus spokesman Justin Dubon, any comparisons between the Qantas and Air France flights are fundamentally misleading. "One thing that has got to be clear is that there are more than one manufacturer of ADIRUs, and the ADIRU manufacturer for the Qantas case is not the same for the Air France case," he tells TIME. As reported in the aviation trade magazine Air Transport News, manufacturer Northrop Grumman makes the ADIRUs for Qantas, and Honeywell for Air France. "There are no similarities in ADIRUs between the two cases," says Dubon. (Q&A: How to survive a plane crash...
...Qantas 330s and the rest of the Airbus 330 fleet, Dubon says they will continue to fly with their same ADIRUs until directed otherwise by investigative authorities. "The [Qantas] investigation is still ongoing, and we're still involved in giving technical assistance to that, but no final recommendations have been made," he says. "And obviously, when the investigators do, then we will act on those...
...Airbus 330 is not the only model to suffer ADIRU failures. An Airworthiness Directive issued by the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration last year warned airlines of instances of failure in ADIRUs aboard Airbus 319, 320 and 321 models that "could result in loss of one source of critical altitude and airspeed data and reduce the ability of the flight crew to control the airplane." Dubon says these issues are "totally unrelated ... Our safety people have informed me that is not relevant to either the Qantas case or the Air France case...