Doomed Air France flight crashed suddenly, say experts

Posted: 14 June 2009 0420 hrs

A partition with crew seats recovered with other wreckage

RECIFE, Brazil: Debris recovered so far from Air France flight 447 seems to indicate the jet plunged suddenly into the Atlantic Ocean and did not explode in the sky, Brazilian experts said Saturday.

Almost two weeks after the Rio-Paris flight disappeared at sea, former pilot Ari Germano told O Globo newspaper that he was "struck" by at least one of the photographs released Friday by the Brazilian Air Force.

According to Germano, who has written a book about air crashes, the images suggested that the Airbus A330 passengers were caught by surprise and the tragedy unfolded so rapidly that the crew did not have the time to react.

In the photographs, the seats in the crew area were folded with the seatbelts hanging down, which "suggests that the crew was moving about the passenger cabin. If there had been an alert or a warning about a pending risk, the crew would have been seated," he said.

"They did not have the time to do anything," added the former pilot, who also recognized an orange first aid kit that was left intact.

Dozens of pieces of debris recovered by the Brazilian Navy have been brought to an airport hangar in the northeastern city of Recife.

A French navy ship on Friday recovered six more bodies, bringing to 50 the number of bodies found in the wake of the crash of the plane, which went down over the ocean on the night from May 31 to June 1 with 228 people on board.

Captain Ronaldo Jenkins, a security consultant with the National Union of Air Carriers (SNEA), told Globo that he had identified a safety vest and part of the plane's internal covering, which showed no trace of fire or smoke, suggesting no explosion.

"On the photographs published in recent days, where we can see debris from the plane floating in the water and a restroom door, there were also no signs of fire," he added.

- AFP /ls

From ChannelNewsAsia.com; see the source article here.

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