Recovered Debris Not From 447 Crash

June 4, 2009 — -- Despite earlier reports to the contrary, no debris has yet been recovered from the missing Air France plane that disappeared over the Atlantic Ocean Sunday, a Brazilian military official said.

Searchers had picked up standard airplane emergency equipment, a cargo pallet and two buoys, and initial reports suggested the items might have been from the crashed plane.

But later, Brazilian military officials said debris recovered so far was not from the missing Airbus. For one thing, the plane was not carrying wooden luggage pallets, The Associated Press reported.

"No material from the flight was removed," Brazilian Air Force Gen. Ramon Cardoso said. "What we saw was debris that belonged to some aircraft that were left behind because we have a priority on the search [for] bodies. But so far, no piece of the aircraft has been found."

The oil slick spotted yesterday near the wooden pallets was not from the plane either, "So much oil could not belong to the aircraft," Cardoso said.

Brazilian authorities do, however, still believe to have located parts of the plane although they have not yet pulled them out of the ocean.

They spotted Wednesday a 23-foot (seven-meter) chunk of plane, an airline seat and several large brown and yellow pieces that likely came from inside the plane, military officials said.

There is still no clear explanation as to exactly what brought Air France Flight 447 down on its route from Rio de Janeiro to Paris.

"The United States of America, Spain, Canada, all the world is sharing their means which these countries are making available so that we can quickly have some answers" French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner told reporters last night.

"At the moment, in the hour I'm speaking to you right now, there are no answers" he added.

No concrete answers as to the cause of the crash can be given until the plane's voice and data recorders or black boxes are found.

Kouchner did not categorically rule out terrorism as a cause, "Nothing leads us to believe that there was an explosion, but that doesn't mean there wasn't one. Once again, all the paths are open and we will not give priority toa single premise because that would be immoral."

As the search for bodies and debris continued, there were suggestions the speed of the plane may have been a factor in the accident, according to new information released Thursday.

It's too early to know for sure, but the plane's maker, Airbus, is now reminding pilots and crew who fly each and every one of its planes to follow correct procedures if they are facing unreliable speed indications or data.

Airbus issued a statement Thursday reminding airlines that if such a scenario occurs, pilots should maintain their power, level off if necessary and start troubleshooting.

The alert came after French investigators reported that automatic maintenance messages sent from the plane indicated inconsistent airspeeds, which may mean systems that tell the computers how fast the plane was flying weren't all working properly.

The memo went out regarding all types of Airbus planes. Every major U.S. carrier flies Airbus planes except for Southwest and Continental.

The latest development may provide another piece of the puzzle regarding the mystery behind what happened when Flight 447 vanished some 700 miles off Brazil's coast with 228 people on board.

It was initially believed the debris recovered by a helicopter might provide more clues in the mystery, but that debris turned out to be unrelated to the flight.

Officials were trying to get their hands on additional bits of wreckage -- including pieces that appeared to be from the inside of the plane's cabin. More teams with sophisticated equipment to recover underwater remnants are on the way.

Two separate large fields of debris, including what appeared to be a 23-foot-long piece of a plane, were spotted Tuesday about 60 miles apart in the Atlantic. Those two areas of apparent plane remnants caused some to suggest the Airbus broke up in midair.

"It almost couldn't occur unless your plane came apart in flight," said ABC News aviation consultant John Nance today.

"If the plane broke up in midair at altitude, then it's going to be covering a really large piece of real estate," said Robert Ballard, the scientist who discovered the wreck of the Titanic. "So it becomes a strategy of working within a debris field, trying to figure the physics of it."

Flight 447 from Rio de Janeiro to Paris vanished Sunday night, about four hours into its journey.

Before it disappeared, failures in the plane's systems began to generate automated maintenance messages that were sent to the airline 10 minutes after the pilots sent a text message to Air France indicating they were encountering turbulence and thunderstorms.

The automatic messages, received during the course of three minutes, indicated a growing series of electrical and equipment failures just before the plane disappeared, according to published reports. Some reports suggest the aircraft flew through electrically charged clouds and 100-mile-per-hour winds.

"One of the things that puzzle me, and I think a lot of us, is the fact that we have 10 minutes that elapsed between the time the crew reported they were flying around cumulus nimbus buildups and the time this unraveling sequence began," Nance said. "But there's one lesson from a lot of history of aviation accident investigations, and that is: It can look like two things are connected when, in fact, they aren't."

"There's a period where you see many systems degrading very, very quickly, which again starts making you think that there was something major going on with the airplane," said William Voss, director of the Flight Safety Foundation.

"Everything has at least one or two levels of backup and so something had to happen that started pulling these things offline one after the other because otherwise the aircraft would have been able to continue and at least be able to get to a diversion airport," Voss added.