RECIFE, Brazil — Search crews recovered the vertical stabilizer from the tail section of an Air France jetliner that went down in the Atlantic, Brazil’s air force said Monday — a key item in finding the cause of the crash.
Eight more bodies also were found, bringing the total recovered to 24 since Air France Flight 447 disappeared May 31 with 228 people on board, according to Col. Henry Munhoz.
The discoveries of debris and bodies are all helping searchers narrow their search for the jet’s black boxes, perhaps investigators’ best hope of learning what happened to the flight.
Brazilian military officials have refused to detail the large pieces of the plane they have found. But a video on the Brazilian air force website titled “Vertical Stabilizer Found” shows video of the piece — which keeps the plane’s nose from swinging from side to side — being located and tethered to a ship. The part had Air France’s blue-and-red stripes, retained its triangular shape and bore no evident burn marks.
Investigators are looking at the possibility that external speed monitors — Pitot tubes — iced over and gave dangerously false readings to cockpit computers in a thunderstorm.
Need for stabilizer data
Peter Goelz, a former managing director of the National Transportation Safety Board, said the faulty airspeed readings and the fact the vertical stabilizer was sheared from the jet could be related — though he cautioned it would need to be determined if the stabilizer was torn off in flight or upon impact in the ocean.
The Airbus A330-200 has a “rudder limiter” that constricts how much the rudder can move at high speeds — if it were to move too far while traveling fast, it could shear off and take the vertical stabilizer with it, as they are attached.
“If you had a wrong speed being fed to the computer by the Pitot tube, it might allow the rudder to over-travel,” Goelz said. “The limiter limits the travel of the rudder at high speeds and prevents it from being torn off.”
Asked if the rudder or stabilizer being sheared off could have brought the jet down, Goelz said: “Absolutely. You need a rudder. And you need the (rudder) limiter on there to make sure the rudder doesn’t get torn off or cause havoc with the plane’s aerodynamics.”
The wreckage and the bodies were found roughly 400 miles northeast of the Fernando de Noronha islands off Brazil’s northern coast, and about 45 miles from where the jet was last heard from on May 31.
U.S. help on the way
High-tech help is on the way for investigators — two U.S. Navy devices capable of picking up the flight recorders’ emergency beacons far below on the ocean floor. Searchers must move quickly to find answers in the cockpit voice and data recorders, because acoustic pingers on the boxes begin to fade 30 days after crashes.
Ocean currents since the disaster have pushed floating wreckage far and wide, complicating the search, said U.S. Air Force Col. Willie Berges, chief of the U.S. military liaison office in Brazil and commander of the American military forces supporting the search operation.
The U.S. Navy has helped locate black boxes in difficult situations before: Pings from an Adam Air jet that crashed Jan. 1, 2007, off Indonesia’s coast were picked up 25 days later.
