Pilots union called on Air France crew on Tuesday to refuse to fly long-range Airbus jets until the airline replaced unreliable speed sensors that are believed to have led to the crash of Flight 447 off Brazil last week. Air France, however, assured all its flights using long-haul Airbus jets will be equipped immediately with new speed sensors after last week's disaster over the Atlantic. The pitot tubes that gauge speed have become the focus of an investigation into the crash after messages showed they provided “inconsistent” data to the pilots and might have played a role in the June 1 crash. “To prevent a repeat of this disaster . . . we call on flight deck and cabin crew to refuse all flights aboard the A330 and A340 series which have not been modified,” said Alter, a union to which 10 per cent of the airline's crew belong. Brazilian searchers have so far retrieved the bodies of 24 of the 228 on board the Airbus A330 that came down in the Atlantic 600 miles off northeast Brazil. Submarines are now hunting for signals from the black box flight recorders that lie on the ocean floor. The recovery of the aircraft's vertical tail on Monday has strengthened suspicions among experts that the aircraft went out of control and broke up as a result of flying either too slowly or too fast in severe turbulence on its flight from Rio to Paris on June 1. Air France promised Tuesday morning to complete the replacement within days of all pitot tubes – external speed sensors – on its 35 long-haul Airbuses. No flights were cancelled and other pilots' unions said they did not plan to boycott the aircraft. Alter accused the airline of covering up its actions over the airspeed problem. The charge added to pressure on the airline and the Toulouse-based Airbus company to explain why it had not taken faster action to remedy equipment that its pilots were told was potentially dangerous last November. In a November 6 circular to pilots that surfaced Monday, Air France reported “a significant number of incidents” in which false speed readings had upset the computerised flight system – in exactly the way that appears to have happened on Flight 447. These incidents, from which the crew were able to recover, had occurred at cruising altitude in zones of turbulence and freezing conditions, it said.As a result of the false readings – apparently caused by ice in the pitot tubes – the automatic pilot disconnected. Four minutes of data messages from the doomed Airbus last week reported the same sequence but the pilots were unable to regain control. Airbus had been in discussion with its client airlines about unreliable pitot probes for several years and was reccommending their replacement. The replacement was not mandated by any authority as an or auronautical directive. Airline executives and aviation experts cautioned against haste in attributing blame for the crash, especially since the only evidence comes from the sequence of 24 messages from the aircraf'ts final four-minutes. Tim Clark, the president of Emirates Airlines, which has a fleet of 29 A330-200 planes, said: “It is a very robust airplane. It has been flying for many years, clocking hundreds of millions of hours.”
