A year after Air France Flight 447 crash, victims’ families demand new search for wreckage

Air France crash victims’ families want new search

PARIS — A year after Air France Flight 447 crashed into the Atlantic Ocean, families of some of the 228 victims are demanding a new search for the flight recorders — and for answers.

All 228 people aboard the flight, traveling from Rio de Janeiro to Paris, died when it crashed June 1, 2009, into the Atlantic Ocean after running into a strong thunderstorm.

Jean-Baptiste Audousset, president of the French families association Mutual Aid and Solidarity AF447, said Monday the families need to know what happened.

“Our grief and our distress remain constant,” he said at a Paris news conference. “The trauma is even more terrible because we still do not know how their last moments of life were spent.”

Families from victims’ associations based in Germany, France, Italy and Brazil spoke to the press in Paris as they prepared to mourn the loss of loved ones one year after the tragedy.

The victims will be remembered in religious ceremonies across Paris, including a Monday night service at the Notre Dame, a ceremony at the Paris Floral Park on Tuesday and by a monument in their memory at the Pere Lachaise cemetery in eastern Paris.

A third, €13 million ($15.8 million) search effort ended last week and failed to find the flight recorders. It is not clear whether the French accident investigation agency BEA will conduct a fourth search.

Transport Minister Dominique Bussereau wrote to the families on May 28, promising to do everything possible to find answers, but stopped short of guaranteeing another search.

Initial search efforts found 50 bodies and hundreds of pieces of the plane, including its torn-off tail.

But international search teams using specialized submarines and underwater robots failed to find the “black box” voice and data recorders. Without those, investigators may never learn why the plane crashed in a remote part of the ocean, in depths of up to 4,000 meters (13,120 feet).

Automatic messages sent by the plane’s computers just before it crashed show it was receiving false air speed readings from airplane sensors known as Pitot tubes. Investigators have insisted that the crash was likely caused by a series of failures and not just the Pitot tubes.

Families are also asking to have access to all documents and data concerning the search, and the inclusion of international experts, and not only French experts, in the inquiry.

“We are certainly not satisfied with the speed in which the BEA has gone forward so far,” said Bernd Gans, president of the German families association HIOP.