don't kill the messenger.....
.....just relaying what the Times online reports today:
"Air France pilots yesterday accused accident investigators of trying to cover up the cause of the Airbus crash off the coast of Brazil in June that killed 228 people after officials appeared to blame the crew for the disaster.
The airline also provoked anger after it emerged yesterday it has ordered special training for all flight crew that operate Airbus aircraft, to teach them to manage a high-altitude system failure of the kind experienced by the crew of flight AF447.
Families of the victims as well as pilots’ unions are upset at what they see as obfuscation by the state Bureau of Investigation and Analysis (BEA) and Air France over what caused the crash.
On June 1 the Airbus 330 plunged from altitude as it passed an area of storms on a flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris. The flight recorders have not been found. Fifty bodies and about a thousand pieces of wreckage have been retrieved.
"They are trying to blame the pilots. They do not want the truth,” Gerard Arnoux, a spokesman for the Union of Air France Pilots, told The Times.
Mr Arnoux, an Airbus captain, said that the BEA was trying to overcome its previous failure to act on known faults with speed sensors, known as pitot tubes, on Airbus aircraft. “The architecture of the Airbus systems is in question,” he said.
The families have accused Air France and the BEA of dishonesty. Christophe Guillot-Noël, who heads an association of victims’ families, said that Pierre-Henri Gourgeon, the airline boss, was privately blaming the pilots. The BEA report was shaped by politics, he said.
A new deep-sea search is to start this month for the flight recorders, but data sent in the moments before the aircraft disappeared has offered an outline of the chain of events. Faulty speed readings, apparently caused by ice, prompted erratic behaviour by the automated flight system. Flying by hand, and without key data, the two pilots were unable to keep control.
In a preliminary report in July, the BEA said that the speed sensors were “a factor, but not the cause” of the crash.
In late July, the European Aviation Safety Agency ordered replacement of the French-made pitots with American ones on all long-range Airbuses.
On Monday, Paul-Louis Arslanian, the head of the BEA, blamed the crew. He said that flight crew had for decades been taught to manage faulty airspeed readings. In the case of the Air France aircraft, “certain of these fluctuations in speed [data] were perhaps not sufficiently taken into account in the training of the pilots”, he said. The BEA does not expect to reach a conclusion for 18 months.
Argument over the crash has focused on whether the crew — probably the two juniors of the three pilots on board — made errors or, as the pilots’ unions maintains, were dealing with an unflyable aircraft. “There is no doubt there was a loss of control, but the Airbus system is not supposed to let this happen,” said Mr Arnoux. “There would have been no accident without the failure of the pitot probes.” Air France’s pilots had not previously been given simulator training in speed problems at cruising altitude, where the aircraft is more prone to stall. This is now being done, at the request of all airlines’ unions. Suspicion has fallen on the highly automated design of the Airbus flight systems.
Stewarts Law, a London firm representing more than 30 of the victims’ families, said that Air France is likely to face a compensation claim of about $450 million (£278 million). “It was a prevent- able accident,” said James Healy-Pratt, a lawyer with Stewarts who is also a pilot. “It was a mix of Airbus and Air France.” "'
Until so far, DB