The spate of automatic messages sent by Air France Flight 447 Airbus A330 minutes before it disappeared included one that indicated that a rudder safety device had disengaged. Photo Credit: Airbus Industires

June 14, 2009, (Sawf News) - The spate of automatic messages sent by Air France Flight 447 Airbus A330 minutes before it disappeared included one that indicated that a rudder safety device had disengaged.

"The message tells us that the rudder limiter was inoperative," Jack Casey, an aviation safety consultant in Washington, D.C., told AP. "It does not give you any reason why it is not working or what caused it, or what came afterward."

The rudder limiter regulates the extent to which rudder can be applied at a given air speed to preclude structural damage to the aircraft.

With the limiter inoperative, excessive rudder inputs at high speed could cause the vertical stabilizer of the aircraft to shear off.

The vertical stabilizer was recovered nearly intact by Brazilian searchers prompting experts to theorize that it may have sheared off.

According to industry sources the rudder limiter locked itself in place because of conflicting air speed indications caused by icing on airspeed sensing pitot tubes.

Meanwhile, Airbus’ parent company, EADS, officials have emphasized the importance of locating the flight data and cockpit voice recorders (Black boxes) for accurately determining the cause of the crash.

"In such an accident, there is not one cause," EADS CEO Louis Gallois said on Sunday. "It's the convergence of different causes creating such an accident."

"It's essential for everybody to know what happened and we know that it's not easy. I hope we will find the black box," he added.

While the exact sequence of events will only be determined if the Black boxes are located there is little doubt the sequence was triggered by the aircraft’s entry into severe thunderstorms, points an Airbus pilot that Sawf News spoke to.

Air France Flight 447, carrying 228 people from Rio de Janeiro to Paris on May 31, crashed after running into fierce thunderstorms.

Brazilian authorities have so far retrieved 44 bodies from the Atlantic ocean; French ships have recovered another six.

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