Brazil Airbus crash: pilots accuse investigators of cover up

Air France pilots have accused accident investigators of trying to cover up the cause of the Airbus crash off the coast of Brazil in June that killed 228 people.

Claims of a cover up came after officials appeared to blame the crew for the disaster.

The Airbus 330 plunged into the sea on June 1 after it passed through storms on a flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris. The ‘black box’ flight recorders have not been found but 50 bodies and about a thousand pieces of wreckage were retrieved from the ocean by teams of rescue divers.

“They are trying to blame the pilots. They do not want the truth,” Gerard Arnoux, a spokesman for the Union of Air France Pilots, told The Times.

Mr Arnoux, an Airbus captain, said that the BEA was trying to distract attention from its failure to act on known faults with speed sensors, known as pitot tubes, on Airbus aircraft. “The architecture of the Airbus systems is in question,” he said.

The families have accused Air France and the BEA of dishonesty.

Christophe Guillot-Noël, who heads an association of victims’ families, said that Pierre-Henri Gourgeon, the airline boss, was privately blaming the pilots. The BEA report was shaped by politics, he said.

A new deep-sea search is to start this month for the flight recorders, but data sent in the moments before the aircraft disappeared has offered an outline of the chain of events. Faulty speed readings, apparently caused by ice, prompted erratic behaviour by the automated flight system. Flying by hand, and without key data, the two pilots were unable to keep control.

In a preliminary report in July, the BEA said that the speed sensors were “a factor, but not the cause” of the crash.