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Chocoholic wrote:Where did the rest of this thread go?

Chocoholic wrote:er yes

At 09:32 local time (01:32 UTC) on 7 October 2008, an Airbus A330-303 aircraft, registered VH-QPA, departed Singapore (SIN) on a scheduled passenger transport service to Perth (PER), Australia. On board flight QF72 were 303 passengers, nine cabin crew and three flight crew. At 12:40:28, while the aircraft was cruising at 37,000 ft, the autopilot disconnected. That was accompanied by various aircraft system failure indications.

Examination of flight data recorder information indicates that, at the time the autopilot disconnected, there was a fault with the inertial reference (IR) part of the air data inertial reference unit (ADIRU) number 1. From that time, there were many spikes in the recorded parameters from the air data reference (ADR) and IR parts of ADIRU 1. Two of the angle-of-attack spikes appear to have been associated with the uncommanded pitch-down movements of the aircraft.

Airbus had recommended to all its airline customers that they replace speed-measuring instruments known as Pitot tubes on the A330, the model used for Flight 447, said Paul-Louis Arslanian, the head of the agency.

"They hadn't yet been replaced" on the plane that crashed, said Alain Bouillard, head of the French investigation. Air France declined immediate comment.