Posted on 05/11/2011 2:19:51 PM PDT by NCjim
The remains of up to 100 victims of the worst crash in Air France's history must not be recovered from the sea bed because it is too traumatic for their families, judges have ruled.
Two bodies still strapped to their plane seats were last week raised from the wreckage of Air France flight 447, which crashed two years ago killing all 228 people on board.
Experts say the victims have been preserved as 'waxworks' by the extreme cold, darkness and water pressure almost three miles below the Atlantic Ocean.
Robotic underwater cameras have shown many victims still intact in their seats in the smashed fuselage of the Airbus A330 jet from Rio de Janeiro to Paris.
But both those bodies recovered had disintegrated while being raised through warmer water and stronger currents to the surface, rescue officials said.
Now two Paris judges overseeing the recovery operation have said more decomposing bodies should not be brought up from the wreckage.
Judges Sylvie Zimmerman and Yann Danielle told rescuers: "To preserve their dignity and out of respect for the families who mourn them, the remains of those too badly altered should not be recovered.
"While tests are carried out on those two bodies already recovered to see if they can be identified, no others will be raised."
Only 50 bodies floating on the surface were recovered when the plane crashed 1,500 miles off the coast of northern Brazil on June 1, 2009.
Another 178 are still missing and up to 100 of those are thought to be inside or around the wreckage itself.
The raising of the bodies came a week after the two black box cockpit voice recorders were also recovered during a fourth search mission by France's Bureau of Investigation which began a month ago.
(Excerpt) Read more at telegraph.co.uk ...
Maybe France is a different system, but I wonder why it isn’t the French legislature, rather than their court, which is making the policy.
How nice of the judges to determine how a family might grieve, and what is or is not too troubling for them. Did he further order some dietary restrictions and take away a few motorcycles?
The cause has been known for a long time. The plane sent automated messages to HQ while it was in trouble, and the wreckage recovered right after the crash yielded enough information to know that the plane hit the water intact, at a high rate of descent, but essentially level.
The plane didn't have enough fuel to fly around bad weather that other planes did. The bad weather led to the pitot tubes freezing up (a known problem on that type of aircraft), which gave a bad airspeed indication. The plane stalled and within a few minutes crashed into the ocean.
The black boxes were recovered in the past few weeks. If the data in them can be recovered, they'll confirm what's already known. There is no need to recover more wreckage.
Typical idiot judge. Now the salvors will have to raise a fuselage section to shallow water so a diver can go in with a torch & cut the seats out so the bodies don’t ‘beak the surface’. Aside from the horror show inside, an aircraft wreck is a tangled mess & sharp as a razorblade.
Just bring ‘em up & recommit them to the sea. Or turn identifiable remains over to the families who want a burial.
Thanks for that post, Moon. I was under the impression that they needed to physically reconstruct the wreckage and that this would entail raising the fuselage.
"All bodies must be recovered" says head of victims' assciation.
Source:
Queremos o resgate de todos corpos", diz presidente da associação de vítimas do voo 447
We are all impatient, but about a list of knowns and unknowns? (Aside from the obvious, why was AF447 fatal while other similar incidents were survivable - we won't know this one until ABC informs us, probably). I have no interest in clear out assumptions; incorrect and unstated assumptions that hinder understanding and analysis are none of my concern (anything that is not explicitly "known" or "unknown" is an assumption). Who cares? ABC puts out their spiel and so it must be...
ABC knows all, sees all, and are all.
1. The ACARS messages indicate system faults and point out areas for possible maintenance. ACARS messages are not intended to be crash diagnostic. As I understand it, they would not report systems returning to normal.
2. We don't know the activities of the Captain during the incident. He would likely have been in the crew rest area, and he was ejected from the aircraft at impact/breakup. Other than that, nothing.
3. We don't know which pilot was actually flying the aircraft.
4. We don't know when the recorders stopped recording - at impact, or before.
5. We don't know whether AF447 made any course corrections. We have no evidence that they did, but the evidence we have is not conclusive.
6. We don't know exactly how the aircraft struck the water. What was its forward speed? Generally "flat", but belly first, nose first, tail first, wing first?
7. We know that Airbus has issued change notices related to AF447, including pitot tube replacements. The notice published shortly after the recorders were ready was simply "nothing new at this time" and no more than that.
Is there anything else that we really, truly, certainly know?
Oh, wait, we know ABC is golden.
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