Air France pilots have accused French and European air safety bodies of failing to prevent the crash of Flight 447 off Brazil last month by ignoring a history of dangerous failures in Airbus speed probes.

The Union of Air France Pilots made its charges amid suspicion in parts of the aviation world that French investigators, the airline and the Airbus company may be reluctant to pinpoint a design flaw as the cause of the disaster that killed 228 people.

Their view was reinforced yesterday when Pierre-Henri Gourgeon, the chief executive of Air France, suggested that pilots’ failure to manage weather radar correctly may have led to the June 1 crash of the flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris.

The underwater sonar search for the data and voice recorders from the crashed Airbus A330 is to end today but Mr Gourgeon said that other methods would be used to try to locate the hull and black boxes on the Atlantic floor.

Times Archive 1962: Crash pilot's protest before flight

The two major crashes of Air France airliners last month have aroused deeper than usual anxieties in France

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In a letter to the French Civil Aviation Directorate and the European Aviation Safety Agency, the pilots’ union said that the agencies had failed in their obligation to act to resolve known dangers. They referred to repeated incidents with faulty speed data on the A330/A340 long-range Airbuses over the past two years that were similar to the sequence that hit Flight 447.

In a preliminary report last week, the accident bureau confirmed that faulty speed readings had led the automatic pilot and computerised flight controls to disconnect — as in the other reported incidents.

Data on the failure started a cascade of alerts that the airliner sent to its Paris base automatically. However, the investigators said that the unreliable speed data — apparently from ice on the external pitot sensors — was only an element in, and not the cause of, the disaster. The crew would have retained full control of a “flyable aircraft”.

Mr Gourgeon echoed a theory that the crew erred by failing to divert around storm cells near the Equator. The captain of the Air France São Paolo flight, just behind AF447, had reported steering round a storm zone that he said had been difficult to spot until he turned up his weather radar.

As a result, the airline was reviewing procedures for radar use “whether or not it was the cause of the loss of flight AF447”, he told Le Figaro.

Mr Gourgeon said that after a string of icing incidents starting last year, the airline was replacing the sensors on all its long-range Airbuses when the disaster occurred. “No document from Airbus made replacement mandatory,” he noted.

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