FLY400, thanks for the clarification and the link. As I read the description, the first step is that the crew of the plane must first logon to the system, and after logon is successful, then contact is initiated by the ground station, which can query the plane periodically without further involvement of the crew.
If so, my sense is that the crew tried to logon with Dakar three times, and each time the logon failed because Dakar had no flight plan filed for AF447. I would not think the system would allow Dakar to initiate these three contacts if Dakar had no AF447 flight plan within its system. (Though I would expect that the system at Dakar would record logon failures, and that is where the record originates.)