The statistics of flight AF447 have become individual human tragedies, the difficulty of the recovery operation is heartbreakingly obvious and the paradoxes and contradictions surrounding the aircraft’s disappearance are confounding French authorities
AT FIRST, there were only numbers: 216 passengers, 12 crew. A total of 228 souls missing on Air France flight 447. Next we learned the breakdown of the passengers by age and gender, categories that convey next to nothing about the human lives lost: 126 men, 82 women, seven children, one baby.
Then there were the nationalities, 32 in all, reflecting the globalisation of travel, though more than half of the disappeared were French and Brazilian. Globalised too, the short summaries of their lives, the photomontages of smiling passengers published two days after the catastrophe. Eithne Walls, the opthamologist and Riverdancer from Co Down, appeared in Paris Match, Le Parisien and Le Figaro; her friend Aisling Butler, from Co Tipperary, was shown in Le Monde, hugging a koala bear.
Inexorably, as we learn their individual stories, the wave of sadness engulfs us. Initially, each country mourns its own victims. Then grief too is globalised. A photograph of Bianca Machado Cotta – a medical doctor, like the three young Irish women – and her bridegroom Carlos Eduardo de Mello Macário was widely published, first in Brazil, then around the world. The couple married on Saturday, May 30th. Their wedding reception, in a nightclub near Rio de Janeiro, continued until 3am on Sunday. After a few hours’ sleep, the newlyweds went to the airport and boarded flight AF447, bound for their honeymoon in Paris.
Love also explained the presence of Harald Maximillian Winner, a German man, on flight AF447. The 44-year-old had recently met a Brazilian woman, Helen Pedroso. He was en route for Berlin, to collect legal documents he needed to marry Pedroso and settle in Brazil. She saw him off at the airport.
The orchestra conductor and composer Silvio Barbato (50) had worked with Roberto Alagna, Angela Gheorghiu and Montserrat Caballé, and was starting a European tour. In Sao Paulo, Antonella Pareschi, the violinist who lived with Barbato, told the local press she wouldn’t believe Silvio was dead unless his body was found. “Maybe he swam to dry land, like in the film Alone in the World,” she said. “He always joked to me that he wasn’t going to die, just disappear.”
Not die, but disappear. Vanish. Like Elijah, the Old Testament prophet who ascended to heaven in a chariot. With the Brazilian navy’s admission early yesterday that the wooden pallet and buoys it fished out of the sea on Thursday were not from the Airbus 330 after all, the mystery continued. “Mystery” recurred constantly in French coverage of the disaster, printed in letters two inches high on newspaper front pages.
IRONY AND FATE also loomed large. A Frenchman who was severely injured in the 2001 explosion at the AZF chemical factory in Toulouse died on flight AF447. Christine Badre Schnabl, 34, a pretty blonde Swedish mother of two, so feared air crashes that she and her husband travelled separately. She took their five-year-old son Philippe on AF447. Her husband took their three-year-old daughter on the following flight. On arriving at Roissy Charles de Gaulle airport, husband and daughter learned the horrific news.
Pascal Linguet (48), accompanied 10 winners of his company’s best salesman competition on the prize trip to Brazil. He wanted his wife Marie-Noelle (47) to go too, but she refused. Despite her grief, she told French television, it was better she survived, for the sake of their children, aged 12 and 14. It will take a week or two for the letter Pascal mailed before boarding the flight to reach Marie-Noelle. “I’m waiting to receive his last postcard,” she told Le Parisien newspaper.
The small town of Ermenonville, population 913, is so close to Roissy that it’s known as “the Air France village”. It has twice been cursed by air disasters. In 1974, a Turkish Airlines aircraft crashed in the adjacent forest, killing 346 people. Anne Grimout (49) was first deputy to the mayor, and chief stewardess on flight AF447. She had persuaded two friends from the town council, Nathalie Marroig (41) and Marie-Josée Treillou (70), to go with her to Rio. Now the whole town is in mourning.
DURING THE week, when the individual stories of victims began being told, one French radio station spoke of “voyeurism”. The tragedy raised the intractable ethical question of the boundary between compassion and ghoulishness. From Monday morning, when the words “AF447 delayed” appeared on the arrivals panel at Roissy, media were treated as predators. Police guards separated journalists from the families of victims at the airport, at the Pullman Hotel where the families were taken, and at a service in Notre Dame cathedral on Wednesday.
Yet family members who did not entrust themselves to the care of Air France and French authorities wanted to talk to journalists. The relatives of victims of past air crashes were interviewed at length, as if there were a statute of limitations for respecting grief.
Laurent Jouault (41), who lost five family members in the Sharm el-Sheikh disaster, an air crash that killed 148 people, including 134 French people, over the Red Sea in 2004, had a sense of déjà vu: “A distant crash at sea, a bomb scare a few days before, the hypothesis of a terrorist attack immediately discounted; this tragedy is quite similar to ours,” he told Le Parisien.
“Again, there are families waiting around Roissy, experts rushing in with all sorts of theories, cheeky travellers who claim they’re survivors because they almost took that flight . . . The whole thing takes me back five years.” Jouault believes families need psychological help. But, he warned, “after the big circus by the authorities the first few days, it’s a desert. The ‘psychological cell’ is hot air. At first everyone is supportive. Then you go home. Nobody telephones, and you realise you have to get through it alone. My family, like many others who mourned the Sharm el-Sheikh disaster, was left by the wayside . . . Five years later, I still don’t know why the plane fell out of the sky, and I’ve retrieved neither bodies nor personal effects. The indemnities haven’t been paid.”
Air France may be quicker to compensate family members than Flash, the Egyptian charter company that put on the Sharm el-Sheikh flight. Under the 1999 Montreal Convention, an airline must pay relatives, even if it was not at fault. The convention provides for up to €109,000 per victim, but families have been awarded far greater sums in court, and airlines tend to settle out of court before investigations are concluded. Amounts depend on age, profession, nationality and the relationship between the claimant and the victim. It is estimated this disaster will cost Axa, Air France’s main insurance company, some €211m.
IT IS THE PARADOXES OF flight AF477 that trouble us. Our world is so small that we can board a plane in Rio at dinnertime and arrive in Paris before lunch the following day. Yet the Atlantic Ocean is so vast – nearly six and a half times the size of the US – that it takes a French undersea research vessel 10 days to reach the crash zone to search for the flight recorder.
We live in an epoch of astonishing technology, of mobile phones and the internet, where a Pentagon computer operator in Florida can fire a lethal rocket from an unmanned drone in Afghanistan, and watch the result on a screen. Yet we don’t know, and may never know with certainty, what happened to flight AF447.
There are contradictions in all we are told: that aircraft have double and triple safety systems. Like the Titanic, an Airbus ought to be unsinkable. But is technology a match for violent clouds so high an aircraft cannot fly above them? For hailstones the size of footballs that can smash an aircraft’s windscreen? For winds that can rip off a wing? Then there was Osama bin Laden on television screens. He didn’t mention flight AF447. Was the al-Qaeda leader’s resurfacing, so soon after the disaster, a mere coincidence?
French authorities appear over-eager to discount a bombing, perhaps because the malevolence of a deliberate attack seems worse than human error, technical failure or the ferocity of nature.
Yes, there was a bomb scare on an Air France flight from Rio to Paris four days before, but there are bomb scares every day. French authorities said if the aircraft had exploded, the fuel would have burned in the air, not settled in pools on the surface of the Atlantic. But yesterday, what were reported to have been pools of kerosene turned out to be boat oil; what was reportedly a chunk of fuselage, an abandoned dinghy. The mysteries of AF447 remain intact.