UK NEWS

CRASH JET PLUNGED 35,000FT IN SECONDS

Alain Bouillard, leading investigation into Air France flight 447 from Rio De Janeiro

Friday July 3,2009

By Peter Allen

A DOOMED jet plunged into the sea so quickly that the 228 passengers and crew did not even have time to inflate their life jackets.

The Airbus dropped out of the sky belly first, falling 35,000 feet in a matter of seconds before hitting the water in its flying position.

Horrific details of the last moments of Air France flight 447 from Rio de Janeiro to Paris emerged in an official report into the disaster released in the French capital yesterday.

The victims aboard the Airbus A330-200 included five Britons. Nobody had the time to follow the most basic safety procedures, even failing to secure seat belts in many cases.

Chief accident investigator Alain Bouillard said: “The plane was not destroyed while in flight. It appears to have hit the surface of the water in its flying position, with a strong vertical acceleration.”

He said there was no information suggesting a need to ground all 600 A330 planes as a result of the crash, adding: “As far as I’m concerned there’s no problem flying these aircraft.”

He added that uninflated life jackets were found all over the crash site in the Atlantic 930 miles off Brazil soon after the disaster on June 1.

Mr Bouillard said the plane’s defective airspeed sensors were a “factor but not the cause” of the crash.

Experts have suggested these external instruments might have iced over.

The remains of 51 people have been recovered. The aircraft’s flight recorders are missing, probably lying on the sea bed.

The preliminary report was presented as the sole survivor of a second Airbus crash this week arrived in France.

Bahia Bakari, 14, was considered well enough to return from the Comoros Islands to Paris where she was greeted by her father, Kassim.