curious statement about dropping 5,000FT (i dont get whats curious about it though)
Air France jet plunges 5,000ft in same spot as doomed flight from Brazil
Air accident experts have launched an investigation into why an Air France jet dropped 5,000 feet last month at the precise spot where an airliner plunged into the Atlantic in June, killing 228 people.
By Henry Samuel in Paris
Published: 12:58PM GMT 10 Dec 2009
Brazilian Navy divers recovering a huge part of the rudder of the Air France A330 that plunged in to the Atlantic in June 2009 Photo: AFP/GETTY IMAGES
They believe it may provide clues as to what caused flight AF447 to fall out of the sky on June 1 en route from Rio de Janeiro to Paris.
Bodies and wreckage were found but the crucial black boxes are still missing.
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Flight AF445, which replaced the ill-fated AF447, took off from Rio on Nov 29 at 5.20pm universal time and hit massive turbulence four hours later.
Air France said in a statement that the pilots "carried out a normal descent to avoid a zone of severe turbulence and to reach a less turbulent flight level".
According to French media reports, the pilots issued a mayday message while carrying out the manoeuvre as they were unable to receive air traffic authorisation for the procedure.
But instead of descending by the 300 ft that is standard procedure to avoid turbulence, the plane plunged from 33,000 feet to 28,000 feet – a drop of 5,000 feet, according to the newspaper Le Figaro.
One passenger recounted in a blog how the plane "was no longer under control", and said that cabin crew were panic-stricken. There were no reported injuries.
The incident took place around 10 nautical miles from where AF447 is thought to have gone down, in an area known as "le pot au noir", or murky cauldron, due to the frequency of tropical storms there.
Both planes came from the same Airbus A330 family and were on night flights.
Investigators believe that faulty air speed sensors may have played a role in causing the June crash. Since then all such "pitot tubes" have been changed on Air France planes. The speed sensors on AF445, however, showed no signs of malfunctioning.
France's air accident investigation bureau, the BEA, said: "The flight data could provide us with new information. We cannot pass up [looking into] such a coincidence."
The BEA is due to provide an update on the investigation into the AF447 crash next week, and the search for the AF447 black boxes is due to resume in February.