Yemeni plane crashes off Comoros, 150 on board

An airliner with 150 people on board belonging to Yemeni state carrier Yemenia crashed into choppy seas as it came in to land on the Indian Ocean archipelago of Comoros on Tuesday, officials said.

“The plane has crashed and we still don’t know exactly where. We think it’s in the area of Mitsamiouli. There were 150 passengers on board,” Comoros Vice-President Idi Nadhoim told Reuters from the airport at the main island’s capital Moroni.

A Paris Airport spokeswoman said a Yemenia flight left Paris on Monday morning before landing in Yemen and then taking off for Moroni.

Ibrahim Kassim, a representative from regional air security body ASECNA, said the plane had probably come down 5 to 10 km (3 to 6 miles) from the coast, and civilian and military boats had been mobilized to start searching.

“We think the crash is somewhere along its landing approach,” Kassim told Reuters. “The weather is really not very favorable. The sea is very rough.”

ASECNA — the Agency for Aviation Security and Navigation in Africa and Madagascar — covers Francophone Africa.

The town of Mitsamiouli is on the main island Grande Comore.

“There is a crash, there is a crash in the sea,” said an unnamed official who answered the phone in the Yemenia office in Moroni. He declined further comment.

An airline official in Yemen declined to comment.

COMING TO LAND

Interior Minister Hamid Bourhane told Reuters the army had sent small speedboats to an area between the village of Ntsaoueni and the airport.

“At the moment we don’t have any information about whether there are any survivors,” he told Reuters.

A medical worker in Mitsamiouli said he had been called in.

“They have just called me to come to the hospital. They said a plane had crashed,” he told Reuters.

A United Nations official at the airport, who declined to be named, said the control tower had received notification the plane was coming into land, and then lost contact with it.

Yemenia, which is 51 percent owned by the Yemeni government and 49 percent owned by the Saudi Arabian government, flies to Moroni, according to flight schedules on its Web site.

Yemenia’s fleet includes two Airbus 330-200s, four Airbus 310-300s and four Boeing 737-800s, according to the site.

The Comoros covers three small volcanic islands, Grande Comore, Anjouan and Moheli, in the Mozambique channel, 300 km (190 miles) northwest of Madagascar and a similar distance east of the African mainland.

A hijacked Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 767 crashed into the sea off the Comoros islands in 1996, killing 125 of 175 passengers and crew.

(Reporting by Ahmed Ali Amir; Additional reporting by Richard Lough in Antananarivo; Pascal Lietout in Paris; Writing by Andrew Cawthorne and David Clarke; Editing by Jon Hemming)

Air France flight recorders located in Atlantic

Signals from the flight data recorders of the Air France jet that crashed into the Atlantic killing all 228 people on board have been located, a media report said Tuesday.

The Le Monde newspaper said French naval vessels had picked up a weak signal from the flight recorders at the site of the June 1 crash. The paper did not give the source of the information.

The report said a mini-submarine had been dispatched Monday to try to find the black boxes on the ocean floor. The devices may contain information on what caused the crash of the Airbus A330 en route from Rio de Janeiro to Paris.

‘The search effort has been complicated by the uneven surface of the ocean floor. The depth at the site is almost 5,000 meters (16,400 feet),’ the paper said.

Air France said it could not confirm the report.

Beacons on the recorders send an electronic impulse every second for at least 30 days. The signal can be picked up from two kilometres away.

French vessels involved in the search operation include a nuclear submarine with advanced sonar equipment and a research ship equipped with mini submarines.

Ten of the 50 bodies recovered from the plane have been identified as Brazilians.

New Signs That Air France Jet Broke Up in Flight

Two pieces of evidence have emerged that lend new credence to the theory that the Air France jet that crashed more than a week ago broke up in flight.

The Brazilian Air Force released information on Tuesday night showing that bodies from Flight 447 had been recovered from locations that were more than 50 miles apart. And Airbus, the plane’s manufacturer, sent its airline customers a bulletin saying a re-analysis of the stricken plane’s last automatic transmissions reinforced the idea that many parts malfunctioned, but that the parts that measure air speed may have failed first.

A faulty air speed indicator could mislead pilots into flying faster than the aircraft could withstand, or faster than it should be flown into turbulence — two circumstances that could lead to the craft coming apart in flight.

The theory will remain just that, however, until more evidence is collected. The black boxes that contain data and voice recordings are likely to be the key to resolving the mystery of what happened to the plane, which was carrying 228 people. According to news service reports, the French nuclear attack submarine Émeraude, with a crew of 72 men, has joined two sonar-detecting surface vessels in the search for the boxes. Each vessel is able to sweep a narrow strip of ocean for the “pings” emitted by the boxes and audible for a distance of no more than three miles under ideal conditions.

In its message sent to airlines this week, Airbus said that no data was available beyond the automatic transmissions from the Air France jet, but it appeared that the manufacturer was fitting those messages into a scenario that began with the air speed problem. It said those messages “indicate that there was unreliable air speed indication” and that that situation was “consolidated” by messages indicating other failures that would be consequences of such a failure.

The Web site of The Wall Street Journal, WSJ.com, first reported on the Airbus bulletin.

Airbus evidently did not fit all the messages into a clear sequence. It said one message showed a change of cabin pressure equal to an altitude change of greater than 1,800 feet per minute “which remains to be explained.” One explanation would be cabin depressurization.

Perhaps to reassure airlines, Airbus said the data did not suggest a loss of the computerized instrument display, or the Air Data Inertial Reference Unit, which helps planes locate their positions and which has had problems on other A330s.

Long before the crash, Airbus had recommended that airlines replace parts, called Pitot tubes, that scoop in air to help planes measure their air speed. The company said in its new message that for now, airlines could continue flying with older Pitot tubes.

The Federal Aviation Administration sometimes makes such manufacturer recommendations mandatory, as air worthiness directives, but Laura J. Brown, an agency spokeswoman, said “we don’t think we’re at the point where we can issue an air worthiness directive.”

“We don’t have data to indicate an unsafe condition exists,” she said.

A Delta Air Lines spokeswoman, Betsey Talton, said Delta had replaced the tubes on some models and was replacing them on its A330s, the model in the accident.

Flying behind doomed jet, a Spanish aircraft avoided disaster

A Spanish plane bound for Madrid on Monday was closely following the Air France aircraft when it disappeared with 228 people on board. The Iberia flight crew tried to contact their French colleagues, in vain. s the doomed Air France jetliner plunged into the storms above the Atlantic Ocean, Flight IB 6024, bound for Madrid, decided to change its itinerary to avoid the ominous clouds. As they circled the storms, its pilots heard the last messages emitted by Brazilian air traffic controllers to the jetliner, the Spanish press reports.

The Iberia aircraft took off from Rio de Janeiro at 00:07am (Madrid time – GMT+2), seven minutes after the Air France jetliner, according to the website of the Spanish daily ABC.

Silence

The IB 6204 crew members — who prefer to remain anonymous — explain that they were flying in the same air corridor as the French aircraft, ten minutes behind it, at a distance of about 128 km.

Facing difficult weather conditions, much like the AF 447, the captain and co-pilot decided to reroute 56 km to the east. “That’s how we navigated the storm, in order to avoid turbulence and electrically charged clouds,” says one of the Spanish pilots.

The Spanish pilots never saw the Air France jet, but they did hear the unanswered messages sent by Brazilian air traffic controllers trying to establish contact with the French pilots.

Worried, the IB 6024 pilots tried to contact their French colleagues, without success. They also tuned into the aircraft emergency frequency, but heard no distress messages.

The Air France jet stopped emitting automatic messages at 3:33 am on Monday morning.

False readings

French air safety investigators said that automatic messages broadcast by the Rio-to-Paris flight just before it plunged into the Atlantic had shown that the plane’s systems were giving false readings.

“Airbus sent a reminder overnight to all the companies using its planes about procedures to follow in the case of inconsistency in speeds measured,” a spokesman for the French-based manufacturer told AFP.

The French daily Le Monde reported Thursday that the pilots of the Air France jet — which is still missing, along with the 228 people on board — may not have been flying at the right speed for dangerous weather.

Airbus declined to comment on the report.

The Iberia jet was an Airbus A340-300.

Plane crashes in Kyrgyzstan;leaves 68 dead

A passenger jet carrying 90 people, including a Kyrgyz high school sports team, crashed shortly after takeoff Sunday near the Kyrgyz capital, killing 68.  
The Boeing 737 was headed to Iran when it crashed near Bishkek’s Manas International Airport, said government spokeswoman Roza Daudova. Twenty-two people, including two crew members, survived the accident.

An airport official said the crew reported a technical problem about 10 minutes into the flight and that the plane was returning to the airport when it crashed. The official said she was not authorized to give her name.

Officials said the crash followed the sudden decompression of the jet, which came down in a field near a village.

Daudova said the people on board the plane included 24 Kyrgyz citizens, 52 Iranians, three Kazakhs, two Canadians, one citizen of Turkey and one Chinese.