Air France plane hit the sea belly first, investigator says
By The Associated Press
This article was published July 2, 2009 at 11:27 a.m.
LE BOURGET, France — An intact Air France Flight 447 slammed belly first into the Atlantic Ocean at a very high speed, a top French investigator said Thursday, adding that problems with the plane's speed sensors were not the direct cause of the crash.
Alain Bouillard, who is leading the investigation into the June 1 crash for the French accident agency BEA, says the speed sensors, called Pitot tubes, were "a factor but not the only one."
"It is an element but not the cause," Bouillard told a news conference in Le Bourget outside Paris. "Today we are very far from establishing the causes of the accident."
Bouillard said the plane "was not destroyed in flight" and appeared to have hit "belly first," gathering speed as it dropped thousands of feet through the air.
The Airbus A330-200 plane was carrying 228 people from Rio de Janeiro to Paris when it went down just after midnight in a remote area of the Atlantic, 930 miles off Brazil's mainland and far from radar coverage.
The BEA released its first preliminary findings on the crash Thursday, calling it one of history's most challenging plane crash investigations.
Read tomorrow's Arkansas Democrat-Gazette for full details.
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