Subscribe to RSSAir France Flight Recorders May Never be Recovered
French officials have no hope that anyone survived the Air France crash off the coast of Brazil May 31, 2009; and they fear that they may never find the jet’s flight data recorders. The Airbus 330 was carrying 216 passengers and 12 crew members on board when it disappeared from radar, three hours after it left Rio de Janeiro en route to Paris.
The plane carried 2 Americans and citizens of 28 other countries. This would be the worst commercial plane disaster since 2001, assuming all 228 passengers died. A memorial for the victims was held at the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris at 10 a.m. ET, and Brazil has declared three days of mourning.
Air France CEO, Pierre-Henri Gourgeon, stated in a press conference that the plane encountered significant turbulence at 2:15 a.m. local time on Monday. The plane’s automatic system allowed a 4-minute message to the company’s maintenance computers reporting electrical failure caused by a fierce storm.
France’s Accident Investigation Bureau will be examining what debris is left and trying to locate the recorders, but officials are concerned because the locator signal will only work for up to 30 days. French officials have a deep-diving research vessel but the weather conditions are difficult, and the plane went down in an extremely deep and mountainous part of the ocean. The causes for the crash could take a long time to solve, because the recorders may never be found.
It is a tragedy when something like this happens, and it is something you can never prepare for. The pilots were well trained and had flown thousands of miles on Airbus 330/A340, the plane only had 18,000 flight hours on it, and everything appeared fine. You can never predict the weather or what is going to happen in your life.
In the movie ‘Hitch,’ the character said, "Live each day as if it were your last day." I can only imagine the thoughts and feelings running through these victims’ minds when they realized the plane was going down. I’m sure that they were wishing they could say goodbye to their loved ones.
I’m also going to assume that they replayed their lives in their mind and some were content, while others were not. Many probably wished they could change certain parts of their life, but knew deep down they would never have the chance. What we should learn from this lesson is that we never know when our time is up and we should ask ourselves daily, "This is my life, am I who I want to be?"
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