by Leonard Berberi
The plane, which left New York for Paris, aborted the first landing: the pilots had complained about a problem with the controls. However, the first data seem to refute them
Air France’s Boeing 777300ER was reported to have landed at Paris airport on April 5. In fact, the aircraft one of the busiest and safest in the world would have behaved exactly as dictated by the helmsmen of the time. And so the problems reported to the control tower whose audio has gone around the world could have been caused by miscalculation or carelessness on the part of the pilots. This is explained by two technical sources, one French and one American, the Courier, who had the opportunity to read the first data and which confirm the expectation of the transalpine newspaper La Tribune.
The investigation
The sources stress that the information is still preliminary and needs to be crosschecked with that obtained from Boeing’s two black boxes the Cockpit Voice Recorder (Cvr) and the Flight Data Recorder (Fdr) at Boeing’s offices downloaded French investigative authority Bea. The latter in particular, who started an investigation by classifying the incident as a “serious accident”, state that it is still too early to come to a conclusion. “The flight data is still being analyzed is the official position : a communication will be made when we understand the event in its entirety.” No comment from the NTSB, the US law enforcement agency involved in the investigation, and the manufacturer Boeing.
The sound
On the morning of April 5, Air France flight AF11, which had taken off from New York the day before, had to abort the landing process, make a tour of Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris and descend safely at a later time. The pilots reported to the tower Pilot “flight control problems”. “The plane didn’t answer,” they explained from the cockpit. Shortly before, in the audio recorded by enthusiasts around Paris airport, the commander and first officer felt they were in trouble piloting the plane and with multiple alarms active in the background. The Boeing 777300ER then landed smoothly and has been stationary ever since.
The Role of the “Qar”
If the data from the two black boxes is confidential and only known to a few investigators, the “Quick Access Recorder” (Qar) has provided some details just a few hours after the investigation was opened: It is a small device that is usually located in the avionics compartment of the aircraft (i.e. in the nose, under the cockpit) which acts as a flight recorder (stores up to 3,000 hours) and is intended to quickly provide basic information of a single voyage. It was developed and is also mainly used to study aircraft behavior and performance, to understand if there are any trends to study, and to optimize maintenance. Each plane equipped with a Qar, the sources told the courier, sends the raw data to two monitoring bureaus that operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week: one is that of the airline, the other that of the manufacturer.
The first results
Just the Qar would have shown a different version of the final phase of the flight than communicated by the pilots. The Boeing 777300ER would not have had any failures. Indeed, the manufacturer, in exchanges with Air France and the investigative authorities Ntsb and Bea, put on paper the sources reveal that “based on the results of the quick access recorder, the aircraft examined responded appropriately to the commands of the crew “. The Boeing technicians in the update message do not go so far as to draw a conclusion, but would have highlighted the possibility of the pilots misapproaching the runway, which would have pushed the aircraft to the left of the glideslope.
the hypothesis
what could have happened One of the privileged hypotheses among insiders is a series of causes: the Air France pilots would have deactivated the autopilot, piloting the plane manually, but activated it, according to the alarms, at too high a speed and with an incorrect landing gear configuration. Some have suggested that those who were behind the controls at the time might have, on the one hand, set the wing flaps in the correct mode for landing, without realizing that they hadn’t lowered the wheels their way. However, it is only a hypothesis worth investigating.
The Last Moments
What is certain is that about 3 kilometers from the runway at an altitude of 350 meters and a speed of 226 kilometers per hour the Boeing clearly moved to the left, as shown by the tracks of Flightradar24, forcing the plane to ” hang up » , that is, regaining altitude and speed, attempting the landing again, but on the other side of the airport.What happened shortly before will only be clarified in the preliminary (and final) report of the French investigators.
April 11, 2022 (Change April 11, 2022 | 09:43)
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