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Until debris from the missing aircraft began to surface on June 6, Air France Flight 447 and its 228 passengers and crew seemed to have vanished into thin air. There were no last-minute distress calls from the cockpit; just 24 automatic satellite messages--some indicating major system failures - relayed from the stricken plane to Air France maintenance headquarters. Even now, as recovery teams retrieve flotsam and victims' bodies, the black boxes that recorded the flight's final moments remain as much as 2 miles (3.2 km) deep. (See pictures of the search for Flight...
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...
...Reporting from one area, the twitter feed is hardly a complete service, but its popularity underscores some shortcomings in the official daily reports. Chinese environmental officials don't regularly release PM2.5 data, and it isn't used to calculate the daily air pollution index. Instead the government figures rely on measurements of larger PM10 particles, sulfur dioxide and nitrogen dioxide. Several cities including Beijing and Shanghai are already measuring PM2.5, the state-run China Daily reported earlier this month, and the government is now considering what standards to set for the finer particles and ozone...
...under harsh criticism that they were tweaking pollution data to artificially raise the number of so-called "blue sky" days when emissions fall below official targets. American environmental consultant Steven Q. Andrews accused the government of switching to monitoring stations in lower pollution areas, changing the makeup of the air pollution index to focus on less prevalent pollutants, and reporting a disproportionately large number of days with pollution measurements just below the "blue sky" cutoff. Du Shaozhong, the deputy head of the Beijing Environmental Protection Bureau, denied the allegations. In a recent paper, Andrews reported on similar "blue sky" biases...
...past year, the proportion of days just under the "blue sky" cutoff has decreased in Beijing. Whether that's a sign that the numbers are more accurate, or merely better gamed, is still unclear. The city's hot, humid summers and occasional sandstorms mean that air quality can turn bad with surprising speed. Without real-time reporting, the official data are more a matter of historical interest. This afternoon the Ministry of Environmental Protection reported the air pollution index for the 24 hours ending at noon on Friday was 159, or "slightly polluted." That's still pretty...