Flight 447 mystery likely to cast shadow over Paris Air Show

The world’s premier air show takes place in Paris next week, with the recent loss of Air France flight 447 over the Atlantic Ocean likely to cast a shadow over the event. The annual Paris Air Show at Le Bourget, which this year celebrates its 100th anniversary, gives the air transport industry the chance to promote the latest innovations in aerospace technology and attract buyers for both commercial and military aircraft. Manufacturing giants Boeing and Airbus are two of the most high-profile organizations at the show as a result of their stranglehold over the commercial airliner market

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Air France CEO: Don’t assume sensors caused crash

There should be no assumed link between on-board speed sensors and the crash of Air France Flight 447 into the Atlantic Ocean last week, the airline’s chief executive said Thursday. “I am not convinced that the sensors are the cause of the accident,” said Air France Chief Executive Pierre-Henri Gourgeon. Still, he said, the airline will continue with a program, begun just days before the crash, to replace the sensors on its Airbus A330s, the same type of plane that crashed June 1.

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‘Black box’ could hold answer to plane crash mystery

The "black box" is actually an orange cylinder — about 13 pounds of metal wrapped around a stack of memory chips and designed to withstand the force of being slammed high-speed into a brick wall. One such device — currently sitting more than two miles below the surface of the Atlantic Ocean — is now the object of a massive international search and could hold the answer to why Air France Flight 447 mysteriously plunged into the sea off the coast of Brazil last week with 228 people on board. “These record many, many parameters of the flight — the aircraft, its altitude, even the amount of force that one of the pilots might put on a pedal,” John Perry Fish, an underwater recovery expert, told CNN

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French sub joins plane crash search

A French nuclear submarine joined the hunt Wednesday for the "black box" flight data recorder and other wreckage of Air France Flight 447 as Brazilian air force and navy crews continued to pull bodies from the Atlantic. France is leading the investigation into what caused last week’s accident when the Paris-bound flight from Rio de Janeiro plunged into the sea off the Brazilian coast with 228 passengers and crew on board. The French nuclear submarine Emeraude began patrolling the area Wednesday morning, the French defense ministry said.

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Pilots’ union: Air France to replace sensors soon

Air France has agreed to replace within days sensors on all of its Airbus A330 and A340 airplanes, parts that are suspected of being involved in last week’s crash, a pilots’ union said Tuesday. Air France said Saturday that it had begun replacing the sensors throughout its fleet in April.

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Unsolved plane crashes carry mystique for years

As the possibility decreases that investigators will learn what happened to Air France Flight 447 on Monday over the Atlantic Ocean, the chances of it entering the folklore of mystery crashes grows. Brazilian air force officials still have not identified debris from the Airbus A330, and a former U.S. National Transportation Safety Board official said currents would be scattering any debris from the flight over an increasing area, reducing the probability of finding the jetliner’s voice and flight data recorders.

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