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Concorde Crash Veteran Scours Ocean for A330 Clues (Update1)
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By Andrea Rothman and Gregory Viscusi
June 10 (Bloomberg) — Paul-Louis Arslanian must find the reason for the
Air France disaster with 13,000 feet of water and a search zone the size
of Uruguay standing in his way.
His team at the BEA, or Bureau d’Enquetes et d’Analyses, pulls small
details from tons of wreckage. Now they’re looking for signals from a
4-inch "pinger" on the flight data recorder from Air France Flight 447.
After the Concorde’s fiery crash in 2000, the agency helped pinpoint the
17-inch metal strip that caused it.
"There can’t be a better person than Paul to lead this," said Jim Hall,
a former U.S. National Transportation Safety Board chairman who
investigated the deadly crash of a French- built ATR 72 in Indiana with
Arslanian in 1994 and worked with him on the Concorde examination.
The 64-year-old, an engineer who researched helicopter technology at the
French civil aviation agency before joining the BEA in 1986, says ice
damage or obstruction of sensors may have produced faulty speed
readings, contributing to the crash that killed 228 people. Hundreds of
pieces of wreckage have been pulled from the water, and he is
coordinating with Brazilian and U.S. authorities.
"Arslanian is extremely competent, professional and experienced," said
Simon Foreman, a Paris-based lawyer who has represented the French civil
aviation authority in air-crash trials where the investigator has
submitted evidence. "Under him, the BEA has become one of the two or
three best such agencies in the world."
Ranked With NTSB
The bureau, which handles about 100 accidents a year involving planes or
public transport, ranks alongside the NTSB and British Air Accidents
Investigation Branch, he said. The group works under the French
Transport Ministry and is concerned with determining why an accident
happened and how a repetition might be avoided, rather than with
apportioning blame.
Arslanian has his detractors. The French branch of the European Cockpit
Association, which has 38,100 members, says he favors conclusions that
protect manufacturers such as Toulouse, France-based Airbus at the
expense of pilots.
Arslanian isn’t giving interviews, a spokeswoman said. He directs the
agency from his office at Le Bourget airport, the landing site for
Charles Lindbergh’s solo transatlantic crossing in 1927, which is now
used for business aviation and is the site of next week’s Paris Air
Show. The day-to-day technical probe is headed by Alain Bouillard, and
the group has 120 staff, 60 of them investigators.
‘Ends of the Earth’
Key to the inquiry into Flight 447 is finding the cockpit- voice and
flight-data recorders that should contain a detailed record of the last
moments of the Airbus A330 before it crashed into the Atlantic on June
1.
The investigator has gone out of his way to quell expectations that the
so-called black boxes will ever be found, holding up a pinger like the
ones that should be radioing the boxes’ positions and saying: "This is
what we are looking for. At the bottom of the ocean."
David Learmount, a former Royal Air Force pilot and air- safety editor
at Flight International magazine, said Arslanian may be exaggerating his
pessimism to manage expectations among victims’ relatives and the media.
"Do not underestimate the resolve to get the boxes," Learmount said.
"The industry and regulators alike simply can’t stand not knowing.
People in previous events have gone to the ends of the earth to find
out."
Year-Long Search
Learmount cites the example of a South African Airways Boeing Co. 747
that crashed in the Indian Ocean in 1987. A deep- water recovery team
found the voice recorder in 16,000 feet of water more than a year later,
long after the pingers stopped working. The evidence suggested a fire
was to blame.
Brazilian and French ships and planes needed almost a week to locate
debris from Flight 447, which crashed halfway between Brazil and Senegal
en route from Rio de Janeiro to Paris.
Arslanian, who studied at the Ecole Polytechnique, France’s top
engineering school, and took over the top job at the BEA in 1990, has
said the crash may have happened after speed sensors on the Airbus
malfunctioned. That may have prevented the pilots from knowing how fast
they were going as they flew into stormy weather. Air France and other
carriers are accelerating an upgrade of sensors on A330s and A340s.
Even without the black boxes, Arslanian may glean enough evidence to
build a clear picture of what caused the disaster, said John Hansman,
director of the International Center for Air Transportation at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
‘Still Doable’
"The major challenges are the obscure location and limited data, but I
think it’s still doable," he said. "They’ve got the vertical part of the
tail and will be able to determine if it failed in the air or on impact.
By looking at injuries to people you can also get information as to the
velocity of the plane and what was happening."
Airbus spokesman Stefan Schaffrath said today that the stricken A330
hadn’t show any loss of electrical power, given that it transmitted
automated messages until the last minute.
Paul Hayes, a safety expert for the London-based Ascend Online Fleets
database, said Arslanian has a reputation for going beyond basic
explanations for incidents, citing the 2003 crash of a Boeing 727 off
Benin, west Africa, which killed 141 people. The investigation showed
that human error was the primary factor, with the plane severely
overloaded, according to the Flight Safety Foundation’s Web site.
‘Quite Thoughtful’
"The report was quite thoughtful, given the difficulty of the
investigation," he said. "Accident reports are good at identifying what
happened, but they often don’t go far enough into the ‘whys’ as he did.
You don’t always get the same kind of hard evidence about human
factors."
Former NTSB chairman Hall, now managing partner of Washington consulting
firm Hall & Associates LLC, said Arslanian doesn’t let differences come
between people in a probe.
The Roselawn turboprop, flown by AMR Corp.’s American Eagle unit,
nose-dived into an Indiana soybean field after pilots disengaged the
autopilot, unaware that ice had accumulated behind the plane’s de-icing
boots while it was in a holding pattern. The NTSB directed some of the
blame at the French civil aviation agency, Hall recalls. The NTSB report
at the time said there had been "inadequate oversight" of the ATR’s
performance in icy conditions.
"It was a little testy at times during the Roselawn investigation," he
said. "We worked very hard to develop a strong working relationship
between the agencies."
Landmark Inquiry
Hall said he and Arslanian cooperated again during the Concorde
investigation, with the Frenchman demonstrating "a very experienced hand
at coordinating multiple organizations and keeping them focused and
working together."
With Air France facing criticism for operating the supersonic plane
beyond its anticipated lifetime and experts pointing to a maintenance
failure, Arslanian led a 17-month probe that ultimately exonerated the
carrier and put the blame on a metal strip that fell from an earlier
Continental Airlines Inc. flight. The metal burst a tire on the
Concorde, causing fragments to rip off and rupture the fuel tank,
leading the aircraft to crash in a fireball that killed 113 people.
The Flight 447 investigation will become a landmark inquiry,
particularly as there have been only a handful of similar cases over
past decades with a plane going down in mid- flight over the ocean, Hall
said.
Foreman, the lawyer, said he’s never seen Arslanian show any favoritism,
as did Pierre Sparaco, who has written a dozen aviation books, including
histories of Airbus and Concorde.
"The impact of certain accidents is considerable from a commercial and
industry point of view and someone in his job has to be able to resist
enormous pressure to influence his decisions," Sparaco said. "He’s
always managed to do that."
To contact the reporters on this story: Gregory Viscusi in Paris at
[email protected] Rothman in Toulouse, France, at
[email protected].
Last Updated: June 10, 2009 06:59 EDT
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
