Word: airbuses
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...Some families of the 152 victims, 66 of them French nationals, claim their relatives died as a result of sub-standard practices the airline uses once it's beyond the view of European inspectors (Efforts to contact Yemenia officials for comment this week were unsuccessful). The modern Airbus A330 that Yemenia flies from Paris to Sanaa in Yemen, they charge, was systematically swapped for an aging A310 for the final leg to Comoros' capital Moroni. Meanwhile, Transport Minister Dominique Bussereau pointed out that the A310 that crashed Tuesday had been banned in France since 2007 after failing security checks...
...June 1 Air France wreck in Brazil inspired the largest marine search for a black box in aviation history (which so far has turned up nothing), and now another sea crash has experts scanning the Indian Ocean for the flight recorders to the Yemenia Airbus A310 jet that went down near the Comoros Islands in the early morning hours of June 30. (See pictures of the latest clues in the Flight 447 crash...
Both the Air France and Yemenia Airbus flights crashed into the ocean, which makes their black boxes incredibly hard to recover. The devices are built to withstand depths to well more than the 15,000 ft. in which Air France flight 447's boxes probably now find themselves. The boxes send out a homing signal, activated on impact, that lasts for 30 days. The time is pretty much up for Air France's beacons, but it's a good bet they'll turn up eventually; of the 20 airplanes that have crashed into water over the past 30 years, only...
That dearth of data has led to a grab bag of speculation about what doomed the four-year-old Airbus A330. Bloggers and aviation experts flit from theory to theory. A terrorist attack? A lightning strike? Some catastrophic technical failure? The first two explanations have largely been discounted (no terrorist group has claimed responsibility, and planes are built to shrug off lightning strikes). Most aircraft accidents stem from an unfortunate cascade of events rather than from any single system malfunction. It's becoming clearer that some combination of weather, an unknown flight-control failure and perhaps the crew's inability...
Momentum behind the Pitot theory is growing. Airbus, after all, recommended nearly two years ago that airlines replace Pitot tubes like those aboard 447 with an improved model less prone to icing. While aviation authorities in Europe and the U.S. never made the change mandatory, Air France said it had begun replacing the tubes in May - and agreed to speed up the process following the crash at the demand of pilot unions...