Air France CEO doubts faulty speed sensors caused crash

Last Updated: Thursday, June 11, 2009 | 4:49 PM ET

CBC News

As a French submarine searched the Atlantic Ocean for black boxes belonging to Air France Flight 447 Thursday, the airline's chief executive said he was not convinced faulty speed monitors caused the crash of the plane.

Replacement external speed monitors — or pitot tubes — for the Airbus 330 arrived three days before it flew into heavy storms May 31 off the coast of Brazil and crashed, killing all 228 people aboard.

"I am not convinced that the sensors are the cause of the accident, and we have said it, I had no need to issue a press release the day after the accident," Pierre-Henri Gourgeon told journalists in Paris on Thursday.

"It's perhaps because we spend too much time with the families and not enough [with] the press that you say this," he added, responding to criticism about a lack of transparency.

Investigators have focused on the possibility that the pitot tubes iced over and gave false readings to the plane's computers. The manufacturer Airbus ordered the replacements on April 27 after pilots noted a loss of airspeed data in flight on Airbus A330 and A340 models.

But Gourgeon said the incidents were "not catastrophic" and planes with the old pitot tubes are considered airworthy.

The French nuclear submarine Emeraude and two Dutch ships hunted the data and voice recorders of the jetliner as storms bore down on the crash area Thursday.

A total of 41 bodies had been recovered late Wednesday when Brazil's military announced that it had tentatively set a June 19 deadline to stop looking for bodies.

"We will know much more, I think, after the autopsies allow us to better understand the technical causes of death and when the debris have been examined by experts," Gourgeon said. "In a week there will be a little more information, but the important point will be the recorders."

Meanwhile, the French magazine L'Express reported that French intelligence services had matched the names of two passengers on Flight 447 with those of suspects linked to Islamic terrorism.

However, a senior French internal security official told The Associated Press that French security "didn't find any suspicious names" on the passenger list. "That doesn't mean [they] aren't on a suspect list, but it's not ours," she said.