Air France union demands new instruments
PARIS — An Air France union urged pilots Monday to refuse to fly Airbus A330s and A340s unless their external speed and altitude monitors have been replaced.
The instruments, known as Pitot tubes, have drawn attention in the investigation into the crash of Air France Flight 447. Air France has said icing of the monitors at high altitude has led at times to loss of needed flying information.
An internal memo to Air France pilots obtained by The Associated Press urges them to refuse to fly A330s and A340s unless at least two of the three Pitot sensors on the planes have been replaced. The memo was sent by the Alter union, which represents about 12 percent of Air France pilots.
The Alter union memo says that in a flurry of automatic messages sent by the plane before it crashed, the first one indicating a fault or breakdown was a coded message referring to the Pitot tubes.
The role of the Pitot tubes in the Flight 447 crash remains unclear.
An official with the Alter union said there is a “strong presumption” among their pilot members that a Pitot problem precipitated the crash. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because the memo was not publicly released.
But the secretary general of another French pilots’ union, SNPL, said Monday that the tubes were not likely the cause of the crash.
Julien Gourguechon said they could have been “a possible contributing factor.”
Even without the Pitots, he said, “there is a procedure that exists to pilot the plane,” a procedure all pilots are trained in.
“We can make the plane fly” even if “we are not very precise in the piloting,” he said.
Air France issued a statement last week saying it began replacing the Pitot tubes on the Airbus A330 model on April 27 after an improved version became available. The airline said it will finish replacing the instruments in the “coming weeks.”
The monitors had not yet been replaced on the plane that crashed.
The Alter union memo says the airline should have immobilized all A330 and A340 jets pending the replacement, and warned of a “real risk of loss of control” of an Airbus suffering problems with its Pitot tubes.
The L-shaped metal Pitot tubes jut from the wing or fuselage of a plane, and are heated to prevent icing. The pressure of air entering the tubes lets sensors measure the speed and angle of flight.
An iced-over, blocked or malfunctioning Pitot tube could cause an airspeed sensor to fail, and lead the computer controlling the plane to accelerate or decelerate in a potentially dangerous fashion.
Associated Press writer Cecile Brisson contributed to this report.
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