Air France passenger list?

[TonyGosling]

Air France A330-200 goes down
Little more than a day later and the authorities have 'given up' looking for the Black Box and cockpit voice recorder.

also
Downed aircraft are easy to find under the sea as they now have to have a UAB

BEACON DE-CONFUSER
WITH RECENT REGULATORY CHANGES, EMERGENCY BEACONS REALLY NEED EXPLAINING

“Jargon Buster”
http://www.adamsaviation.com/acro/LESummer05.pdf

AF - Automatic Fixed - An installed ELT, often with a remote panel switch for test and activation.

AFH - As above but for helicopter installations.

AP - Automatic Portable - As above but complete with an antenna, so that the unit can be removed from the airframe and still function fully.

AS - Automatic Survival - A survival ELT. Normally supplied with a flotation collar and with an optional water activation switch. Has no G switch.

ELT - Emergency Locator Transmitter - An install type emergency beacon, activated by a G switch. As installed units these must be approved.

EPIRB - Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacon - Conventionally the
marine industry’s phrase for an ELT.

PLB - Personal Locator Beacon - A pocket sized emergency beacon. Arguably more useful than an installed ELT, but not acceptable as a way of
complying with regulatory requirements. Available with or without 406 capability.

SARBE - Search and Rescue Beacon - The military’s phrase for a PLB. Normally encoded or encrypted with a “friend or foe” facility for security.

UAB - Underwater Acoustic Beacon - Provides a signal for the recovery of airframes lost at sea. Not normally an aid in life-saving!

[paul wright]

PARIS (AP) - Three young Irish doctors, all close friends, enjoying a two-week vacation together in Brazil.

That's how their families want to remember Aisling Butler, 26, Jane Deasy, 27, and Eithne Walls, 29 - three of the 228 passengers who met with tragedy as Air France Flight 447 ended up in the Atlantic Ocean.

The women boarded the flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris on Sunday night after a reunion with a larger group of former students who graduated in 2007 from Trinity College medical school.

Aisling's father John Butler paid tribute to his daughter Tuesday from his home in Roscrea, County Tipperary.

"She was a truly wonderful, exciting girl," he told Irish reporters. "She never flunked an exam in her life - nailed every one of them - and took it all in her stride as well."

He initially thought Aisling was booked on Monday's flight and had to retrieve her itinerary from his deleted e-mails to check.

"When I opened it up, a nightmare opened up as well," he said.

Walls, meanwhile, danced around the world with the Riverdance troupe, both before and during her medical studies.

She joined Riverdance in 2000 and performed at Radio City Music Hall until starting Trinity College in 2001. She then danced part-time with the troupe's "flying squad" from Dublin to Shanghai until 2007, and was training at Dublin's Eye and Ear Hospital to be an eye surgeon.

"Eithne, we will miss your easy smile. We will miss your dancing feet," her parents and siblings said in a statement. "Her friends will, we hope, remember their special time together with fondness and joy, despite its tragic end."

Brazilian military pilots spotted an airplane seat, a life jacket, metallic debris and signs of fuel in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean on Tuesday as they hunted for the missing jet, but found no signs of life.

Among the plane's 216 passengers were 61 French citizens, 58 Brazilians, 26 Germans, nine Chinese and nine Italians. A lesser number of citizens from 27 other countries also were on the passenger list, including two Americans.

Those Americans were Michael Harris, a 60-year-old geologist in Devon Energy Corp.'s Rio de Janeiro office, and his wife, Anne, who had moved to Rio from Houston.

The five Britons on the plane included 61-year-old British engineer Arthur Coakley, from near Whitby, North Yorkshire. His wife of 34 years, Patricia, broke down in tears as she described her "fabulous husband," father to their three grown children.

"He worked so hard for his family, that's all he wanted, to retire. It's not going to happen, is it?" she told Britain's Press Association.

Coakley, a structural engineer for PDMS, an Aberdeen-based oil company, was helping with a survey in Brazil. He was booked onto an earlier flight, but was bumped onto the doomed jet after the first flight was full.

Patricia Coakley said her son Patrick raised the alarm, phoning to ask "What flight is Daddy on?"

She tried phoning her husband's mobile on Monday but gave up Tuesday.

"Yesterday I was really optimistic, today maybe more realistic," she said.

Several European businessmen were on the flight, including Canadian Brad Clemes, a 49-year-old Coca-Cola executive working in Brussels. Clemes was born and raised in Guelph, Ontario.

German-based ThyssenKrupp Steel AG said executive board member Erich Heine was on the flight, as was 28-year-old employee Claus-Peter Hellhammer of Duisburg, Germany.

Heine joined ThyssenKrupp Steel's board in 2006, in charge of its steelmaking business unit, and since 2007 was responsible for building steel plants in Rio de Janeiro and in Alabama.

French tiremaker Michelin lost three executives, including two senior Brazilian managers and Christine Pieraerts, a 28-year-old French engineer.

Michelin's president for South America, Luiz Roberto Anastacio, 50, had been promoted May 4 and was traveling to France to meet fellow top executives. He had worked for Michelin for 27 years.

Brazilian information systems director, Antonio Gueiros, with Michelin for over 20 years, was coming to Paris for a computer seminar.

Ten salesmen from CGED, an electrical distributor, were on the plane with their spouses after winning a vacation to Brazil, Europe-1 radio reported.

Stephane Artiguenave, 35, and his wife Sandrine, 34, were one of the couples on the CGED trip, a company official said. The couple, from the village of Saint-Martin-de-Sescas near Bordeaux, is survived by their two children, a 9-year-old girl and a 4-year-old boy.

Christophe Champeaud, Artiguenave's brother-in-law, complained the family had received no support from company officials or Air France.

"We've made lots of calls to the hot line put in place by Air France to get some advice, but we haven't gotten any help. Not even to figure out how to tell the children about their parents' deaths," Champeaud said.

Prince Pedro Luis de Orleans e Braganca, 26, a member of Brazil's now-defunct royal family and a descendent of Dom Pedro II, the nation's last emperor, was on the plane. So was sailor Zoran Markovic, 45, from the village of Kostelji in northwestern Croatia.

Air France said 11 of the 12 crew members were French but did not release their names.

The flight captain, 58, joined Air France in 1988 and had 11,000 hours of flight hours including 1,700 on aircraft of the same type as the A330-200 that disappeared.

The two co-pilots were 37 and 32 and had over 9,000 flight hours between them.

The head of the cabin crew was 49, his deputies were 54 and 46 years old. Of the six flight attendants aged between 24 and 44, one was Brazilian.

http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/rockymounttelegram/obituary.aspx?n=ai r-france-flight--crash-victims&pid=127964555

[TonyGosling]

Technical analysis follows - but what about the bomb threat

Air France bomb threat four days before jet crashed
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/top-stories/2009/06/04/bomb-threat-4-days -before-jet-crashed-115875-21413591/

Air France Flight 447: A detailed meteorological analysis
http://www.weathergraphics.com/tim/af447/

Pprune thread
AF447
http://www.pprune.org/rumours-news/376433-af447.html

Weather Graphics

http://www.weathergraphics.com/tim/af447/

[scienceplease 2]

A single aircraft accident is dismissed, leaving only two theories in the Mirror article:

a) Mid Air Collision with unregistered or recorded Drug Smuggling aircraft (This is a one in billion chance)
b) Bomb

If a bomb then terrorist are always keen to claim credit: after all that is the point of doing these things, isn't it?

So if not terrorists then it was assassination. Great way to hide the crime scene - mid way between Brazil and Africa and under 20,000 feet of ocean... but who was the target?!

[scienceplease 2]

What do you make of this? It may not be very reliable. Unfortunately it does not reference the facts surrounding the previous A300 events. It was certainly interesting referencing the Egyptian pilot that decided to commit "suicide" - I do remember that accident but I don't remember there being military officers on board though.

http://www.daily.pk/world/europe/10390-i-know-what-happened-to-the-air -france-flight-447-.html

[eogz]

Is it not the detriment of this cause that everything becomes conspiracy.

Sometimes planes have accidents......

Its not always an elaborate assassination plot.

I could be wrong, but I hope I'm not.

[scienceplease 2]

I certainly don't want to turn everything into a conspiracy. Mid air crashes over oceans are very, very rare - I think it deserves attention. I just wondered whether the daily.pk was right about the mis-reporting of previous Airbus incidents.

[TonyGosling]

What about lightning strike on a fuel tank?
Such things can happen in the middle of a thunderstorm.

[acrobat74]

[ianrcrane]

http://www.sundayherald.com/international/shinternational/display.var. 2512885.0.0.php

[scienceplease 2]

[eogz]

At risk of being branded a critic here, but the lightning hypothesis is just that a hypothesis.

There could be many reasons why the plane came down, I'm not saying foul play should be ruled out but that an air of open mindedness should prevail for all the reasons why this tragedy occured. Be they natural, unnatural or mechanical.

[fish5133]

Got enough pieces of the plane to be able to determine if an explosion occured? and maybe find explosives residue.
Maybe this is a new type of false flag method. Instead of immediate pointing of the finger we have a slower build up with meticulous analysis suddenly arriving at findings that indeed it was a bomb and the bombs signature is one of Al Qaeda.

Weve all got to used to the shock treatment and the crime being solved straight away. Perhaps the perps will think a slower approach will convince many.

If the mad perps of 9/11 are still around then it could just be a target practise.

[item7]

Don't rule out corporate wickedness. Those European plane makers are a serious threat to what was a virtual American monopoly on large plane manufacture.

[eogz]

I'm not saying I asree with this article, but in the interest of fair representation here it is, also it loves its own speculation.

Terror Link to Air France Crash?

Two passengers' names match those of Al Qaeda suspects, reports say. But experts caution that it's too early to tell if the link is legitimate.

By Alexandra Marks | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

June 10, 2009 "CSM" -- New York - Could it have been terrorists, after all, who brought down Air France Flight 447?

French news reports that Airbus 330-200's passenger manifest contained the names of two people with alleged ties to Al Qaeda has renewed the focus on terrorism as a possible key to the puzzle of what brought the plane down more than a week ago on a flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris.

A French nuclear submarine has now joined the search effort in the Atlantic Ocean for more wreckage and the black boxes, which hold the most crucial clues to the events of that stormy night. Speculation initially centered on lightning or turbulence as the cause of the plane crash, and later, on the potential malfunction of small speed sensors called "Pitot" tubes, which could have iced up leading to improper speed readings.

The focus on technical problems has been, in part, because almost immediately after the plane disappeared with 228 people aboard, the French authorities reportedly ruled out terrorism as a possible cause. That puzzled many aviation analysts, since so little was known at the time about the cause of the disappearance.

Since then, several clues have emerged that have prompted investigators to take another look at terrorism. First, a Spanish pilot flying in the same area reported he saw a "bright white flash" in the sky that evening. That could indicate a midair explosion of some kind. Air France also confirmed that it had received a bomb threat at its offices in Argentina four days before the crash. And now, there are the reports that the passengers included two people whose names match those on France's terrorist watch list.

But terrorism experts warn against jumping to any conclusions.

"Terrorist watch lists are notoriously unreliable. They're broad-brush, they cast a wide net, and we should not automatically conclude because those names popped up [on the passenger list] that those people were on the plane," says Andrew Thomas, an aviation security expert at the University of Akron in Ohio. "We've seen countless cases of mistaken identities, especially with Muslim names."

Mr. Thomas says it's just too early to rule terrorism in or out. No terrorist organization has claimed responsibility for bringing the plane down, and intelligence agencies have not reported any increase in "chatter" from their electronic surveillance of terrorist groups prior to the crash that would have indicated an imminent attack. Prior to 9/11, such chatter had increased significantly.

However, Al Qaeda did not take responsibility for the 9/11 attacks for months afterward. That's not unusual, says Thomas. No one claimed responsibility immediately after the downing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland in 1988. A Libyan national was later convicted of conspiracy to plant a bomb on the plane and is serving a life sentence.

"It's not unusual for their not to be an immediate claim," says Thomas. "Still, I'd temper all speculation until the black boxes are found."

Copyright © 2009 The Christian Science Monitor.

[Contrarian]

[Contrarian]

[fish5133]

One reason other pilot saw flash of white light could be because there was a lightning storm.

[fish5133]

[acrobat74]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindsight_bias

[Contrarian]

[TonyGosling]

All mysteries surrounding Black Boxes too.
Check this utter tosh
Check also the fact that this plane will have been equipped with underwater acoustic beacons
Even once the black boxes stop transmitting they may still be found by remote control - they are not in fact black in colour
So why say it will be almost impossible?
They will almost certainly be in amongst a big chunk of wreckage.

No, not a conspiracy everywhere, but
Yes, this one absolutely stinks.

French sub begins AF 'black box' search
http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=97650&sectionid=351020603
The black boxes are said to able to transmit signals for as long as 30 days and detectable in depths of as much as 20000 feet (6100 meters).
However, should the 30 days pass and the transmission stop, retrieving the data recorders would be almost impossible.

[scienceplease 2]

[scienceplease 2]

This is weird:

http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=97751&sectionid=3510212

[scienceplease 2]