BOAC said
.../..., I now find myself again 'surprised' that with the technology existent in ACARS, with regular position reports, a system of 'Flight Watch' was not apparently present in AF - it may be that no operator does this? We can, I think, safely say that an earlier 'alert' to the crash would not have improved survivability, but in another scenario where a semi-successful forced landing/ditching took place it could well do. As suggested here, it is not difficult to pass or extract reports from the ACARS stream, and AF ops would not be particularly busy at that time of day. AF could well have known something was amiss far earlier, or at least have been alert to watch for the next pos report.
It should be admitted here that the "Flightwatch" that one are referring to, is in France the CCO or, in English, the OCC (Operations Coordination Centre). Other airlines use term "Operations" for the same duty. You call them at any time and they tell you the ins and outs of their flights. Flightwatch means, I would say, in French "Contrôle des vols" or "surveillance des vol". These expressions are not used simply because it would be too long to say and, may be also, a little bit pompous or "m'as-tu-vu" (show-off) in our language. There is also a Law in France that forbids the use of English terms in official and public domains called Law Jacques Toubon. (aka Loi Jacques Allgood...)
Busy or not busy is the question. We don't have the workload of the man/woman in charge of the 447. Was the 447 the only flight under his/her responsibility? Very unlikely but it may be clarified later on. As a matter of fact how the AFR CCO structure works is a mistery.
The AFR CCO started to worry about the lack of informations from the 447 after the AF559 crew contacted them by ACARS (0418z), indicating that the radio contact was lost with flight 447. They send an ACARS message at 0424 to the 447. It was shortly after DAKAR requested the AF559 to contact the 447. (04 11 53/ 04 20 27z, BEA report).
Why SAL did not launched, at least an INCERFA after 0506z is a great interrogation to me. No radio contact, no RADAR contact but nothing is done.