Air France Recovery Update | More Bodies found!

After searching the open seas for days , the Brazilian Navy found part of the Air France tail, which is the vertical stabilizer that went down in the atlantic. The Brazilian navy is finding more and more victims of the fatal Air France flight 447 in the Atlantic. Six dead passengers had been recovered from the by water Sunday afternoon, 17 by evening.

Vertical Stabilizer, part of the Air France tail that crashed was found by authorities during the airfrance recovery.

According to the Brazilian Navy, the discovery of debris and the bodies are all helping searchers narrow their search for the jet’s black boxes, perhaps investigators best hope of learning what happened to the flight.

Investigators are looking at the possibility that external speed monitors called Pitot tubes iced over and gave dangerously false readings to cockpit computers in a thunderstorm.

Former managing director of the National Transportation Safety Board, Peter Goelz, said the faulty airspeed readings and the fact the vertical stabilizer was sheared from the jet could be related though he cautioned it would need to be determined if the stabilizer was torn off in flight or upon impact in the ocean.

The Airbus A330-200 that crashed has a “rudder limiter” which constricts how much the rudder can move at high speeds. If it were to move to far while traveling fast, it could shear off, and take the vertical stabilizer with it as they are attached.

“If you had a wrong speed being fed to the computer by the Pitot tube, it might allow the rudder to over travel,” Goelz said. “The limiter limits the travel of the rudder at high speeds and prevents it from being torn off.”

Asked if the rudder or stabilizer being sheared off could have brought the jet down, Goelz said:

“Absolutely. You need a rudder. And you need the (rudder) limiter on there to make sure the rudder doesn’t get torn off or cause havoc with the plane’s aerodynamics.”

The wreckage and the bodies were found roughly 400 miles (640 kilometers) northeast of the Fernando de Noronha islands off Brazil’s northern coast, and about 45 miles (70 kilometers) from where the jet was last heard from on May 31.

Some high-tech help is on the way for investigators — two U.S. Navy devices capable of picking up the flight recorders’ emergency beacons far below on the ocean floor. What caused the Airbus A330-200 to plunge into the middle of the ocean on May 31 with 228 people on board might not be known until those black boxes are found.

An internal memo sent to Air France pilots Monday urges them to refuse to fly unless at least two of the three Pitot sensors on each planes have been replaced.

The leader of another pilots’ union, however, said Monday that Pitot troubles probably didn’t cause the Flight 447 disaster.

Searchers must move quickly to find answers in the cockpit voice and data recorders, because acoustic pingers on the boxes begin to fade 30 days after crashes.

While large pieces of plane debris along with 24 bodies has helped narrow the search, it remains a daunting task in waters up to 1.5 miles (2.5 kilometers) deep and an ocean floor marked by rugged mountains.

U.S. Air Force Col. Willie Berges, chief of the U.S. military liaison office in Brazil and commander of the American military forces supporting the search operation said:

“Finding the debris helps because you can eliminate a large part of the ocean.”

But ocean currents over the eight days since the disaster have pushed floating wreckage far and wide, complicating the search. Berges said.

”In the sense that as the debris drifts away, you’re not sure exactly where the black boxes or other parts of the aircraft are on the bottom of the ocean.”