Svarin
Why did a stream of messages pointing at some serious failures onboard, followed by lack of automated position reporting, fail to wake someone up in either Maintenance or Operations/Dispatch ?
That is a matter for Air France to address. I am sure the same systemic failure wouldn't or shouldn't happen again in that organisation.
However, there is a curious correlation between the AF on ground failure and what happened in the air that night. Remember at INTOL the crew gave ATLANTICO their times for SALPU and ORARO? They then didn't report at either waypoint, and neither did ATLANTICO attempt to call them.
Was it because they thought that as ATLANTICO had also given them a change to the primary HF frequency after TASIL that they were not expected to report again? No, I suspect that something else happened, because at the least I'd expect they would have called ATLANTICO at ORARO with the estimate for TASIL (FIR boundary).
Possibly AF447 did try calling ATLANTICO and were not heard. I doubt it, there would have been some trace of that call either on ATLANTICO's 6649kHz tape or tapes of any of the other stations sharing the "CAR-A" 6649kHz frequency, i.e. Cayenne, Georgetown, Caracas, Havana, Merida, and New York. On the otherhand, did anyone check?
The BEA in their interim reports have only presented the bare facts surrounding this comms mystery, and I expect that when the final report goes to press, some further observations will be included.
mm43