By Tim Hepher
PARIS (Reuters) - Brazilian navy ships found more bodies from the Atlantic plane crash on Sunday, and Air France said it had been replacing speed sensors at the centre of the investigation into the cause of the disaster.
Air France said late on Saturday it was accelerating the replacement of speed sensors on all its Airbus long-haul planes.
It said it had begun the switchover five weeks before Monday's crash, but only after disagreeing with Airbus over the planemaker's proposal to carry out tests before replacing them.
An Airbus spokesman declined to comment and said it could only discuss the investigation with French air authorities.
"We are fully supporting the investigation with logistics, information and documentation," he said.
Investigators are considering the possibility that the speed sensors on Flight 447 may have iced up, resulting in faulty readings that caused the pilots to set the plane at a dangerous speed as it passed through violent equatorial thunderstorms.
But the head of France's air accident agency BEA said on Saturday it was too soon to say if problems with the speed sensors, known as pitot tubes, were in any way responsible.
The crash of the flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris with 228 people on board was the world's deadliest air disaster since 2001 and the worst in Air France's 75-year history.
Brazilian navy ships found the bodies of two men and debris including a blue seat with a serial number matching the crashed plane, a rucksack containing a vaccination card, and a briefcase with an Air France ticket inside on Saturday, rescuers said.
Three more bodies were found in the Atlantic early on Sunday, they added.
Rescuers face a monumental task in finding the black box flight recorders 4,000 metres under water, and investigators are left with scraps of satellite data sent by the doomed plane in the last few minutes before it is presumed to have crashed.
LOST DATA
France's BEA said on Saturday the A330 had sent out 24 error messages in four minutes including one indicating a discrepancy in speed data. It said similar problems had happened before.
Air France said it had first noticed that ice in the sensors was causing lost data in planes like the A330 in May 2008 but that it failed to agree with Airbus on the right steps to take.
According to Air France, Airbus offered to carry out an in-flight test on new sensors this year but the airline decided to go ahead and started changing them anyway from April 27.
But it acknowledged that it had decided not to carry out an Airbus recommendation in September 2007 that airlines install a new sensor originally developed for the smaller A320.
At that stage, only a "small number of incidents" had been reported on larger planes and the advice was not mandatory, which it would have to be if safety were seen at risk, it said.
Air France did not say whether the crashed plane had the new sensors but its last maintenance hangar visit was on April 16.
Some of the A330's 50 or so other operators defended the plane's safety record at an airlines meeting in Kuala Lumpur on Sunday, saying the crash was an isolated incident.
"It's a safe plane, it's a good plane," Chew Choon Seng, Singapore Airlines chief executive, told Reuters.
Airbus has however faced problems with the speed sensors dating back to at least 2001, forcing changes in equipment as well as the pilot's flight manual, according to online filings.
In 2001, France reported several cases of sudden fluctuation of A330 or A340 airspeed data during severe icing conditions and Airbus was ordered to change the cockpit manual, according to the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration.
