Pilots, Execs Clash Over Air France Crash
Several airline chiefs dismissed safety fears over the Airbus A330 on Tuesday, saying they were confident of the plane's reliability despite last week's Air France jet crash.
Emirates airlines President Tim Clark said the Dubai-based company has a fleet of 29 A330-200 planes that have been flying since 1998.
"It is a very robust airplane. It has been flying for many years, clocking hundreds of millions of hours and there is absolutely no reason why there should be any question over this plane. It is one of the best flying today," he said on the sidelines of a two-day global aviation conference here.
Gulf Air Chief Executive Bjorn Naf said he was "not concerned at all" over the safety of the carrier's fleet of 10 A330-200 planes but would wait for directive from Airbus. Manama, Bahrain-based Gulf has no plans to cancel the 20 A330-300 planes and 15 A320 jets it ordered last year, he said.
Investigators are uncertain what caused Air France Flight 447 to crash in the Atlantic Ocean while flying from Rio de Janeiro to Paris on June 1, killing 228 people on board. It was the worst aviation accident since 2001.
Search crews have recovered 24 bodies so far and found the vertical stabilizer from the tail section of the A330-200 plane, which could help narrow the hunt for the black boxes to determine why the jet went down. The data and voice recorders are located in the fuselage near the tail section of the jet.
For the families of flight 447, the recovery of bodies in the waters 400 miles off the northern coast of Brazil provides a step toward some kind of closure. But the bodies also have the potential to provide valuable clues as to what doomed the massive jet, CBS News chief investigative correspondent Armen Keteyian reports.
"They are important pieces to the puzzle," said Tom Corrigan, a chief investigator into the crash of TWA Flight 800, which exploded over the Atlantic shortly after leaving John F. Kennedy Airport in 1996. "They have to be examined thoroughly."
First medical examiners will attempt to identify every victim from DNA, photographs or dental records. Experts will then likely reconstruct the seating chart of the plane, pinpointing each passenger's location and searching for a pattern of injuries or cause of death, Keteyian reports.
Airbus Chief Operating Officer John Leahy told reporters late Monday on the sidelines of the conference that the A330-200 was a "reliable" plane and that it was too early to conclude otherwise until investigations were completed. Leahy left Kuala Lumpur later Monday and other officials from Airbus, based in Toulouse, France, declined to comment pending investigations.
Investigators are considering the possibility that the plane's external speed monitors - called Pitot tubes - may have iced over and given dangerously false readings to cockpit computers in a thunderstorm.
But some Air France pilots aren't waiting for a definitive answer. With investigators looking at the possibility that external speed monitors iced over and gave dangerously false readings to cockpit computers in a thunderstorm, a union is urging pilots to refuse to fly Airbus A330 and A340 planes unless the monitors are replaced.
An internal memo sent to Air France pilots Monday and obtained by The Associated Press urges them to refuse to fly unless at least two of the three Pitot sensors on each planes have been replaced. The instruments have drawn attention because of other incidents in which the monitors have iced over at high altitudes.
The leader of another pilots' union, however, said Monday that Pitot troubles probably didn't cause the Flight 447 disaster.
David Epstein, Qantas Airways General Manager for Government and Corporate Affairs, said two companies manufacture the external monitors suitable for the A330 planes - France's Thales Group and Charlotte, North Carolina-based Goodrich Corp.
The Air France plane uses sensors made by Thales while Qantas uses those by Goodrich for its 28 A330 planes, he said.
"We are not concerned because it's a different system in our aircraft," he said, adding that Qantas would stick to its scheduled delivery of two more A330-300 planes by the end of the year.
According to the Airbus Web site, total orders for the A330 twin-engine passenger planes so far stood at 956, of which 669 have been delivered. Some 614 jets are operating worldwide - 269 of the larger A330-300 series and 345 of the shorter fuselage A330-200 jets, it said.
India's Jet Airways Chairman Naresh Goyal echoed similar sentiments, saying he was confident of the safety of Jet's 12 A330-200 planes. Eight are operated by Jet, while two are leased out.
Malaysia Airlines Chief Executive Idris Jala said the carrier has changed the speed sensors on its three A330-200 planes in September last year as recommended by Airbus.
"This plane has very good safety record in the past. Let's not jump the gun, we need to wait for the full analysis," he said.
Emirates said it will phase out its 29 A330 jets from September next year to be replaced by the new Airbus A350 long range airliner as part of its fleet modernization.
In Washington, the National Transportation Safety Board opens three days of hearings Tuesday into another Airbus crash, the water landing of U.S. Airways Flight 1549 in the Hudson River. Those hearings will focus on collisions between birds and planes, which some experts consider a growing problem, reports CBS News correspondent Nancy Cordes.