The initial report by French investigators into the June 1 crash of Air France flight 447 in the Atlantic Ocean shows there were communication problems between air traffic controllers in Brazil and Senegal at the time of the crash. Flight 447 never made contact with air traffic controllers in Senegal monitoring a wide swath of the Atlantic, but for several hours, the controllers in Dakar assumed the flight had flown through their airspace and into Cape Verde’s airspace, the French report says. About three hours after taking off, flight 447 sent a string of automated messages over ACARS to Air France that the autopilot had disconnected and that there were several failures on the primary flight displays. For several hours after that, controllers in Dakar and Cape Verde called each other and talked about estimates for where the flight would be, but neither ever had contact with flight 447. Four hours after the burst of ACARS messages that lead up to the crash, and without contact from flight 447, the Dakar controller told the Brazilian controller that the flight had passed into another control area. In the course of its investigation, French authorities found that three other flights in the area at the time deviated as much as 80 miles around large thunderstorms that may have played a role in the crash. Two of those flights also had trouble reaching controllers in Dakar over high-frequency radio. So far, 50 bodies have been recovered from flight 447, as well as an assortment of parts of the plane, including the vertical stabilizer, a bathroom door, parts of the crew rest area and part of a galley. The flight data and cockpit voice recorders have not been located, and officials have said they may never be found since the signals would be faint by now.

Blame an automatic, computerized check of the Airbus A320’s nose wheel steering for the 2005 emergency landing of a JetBlue flight in Los Angeles that was broadcast on live television. Every time the nose gear retracted into the landing gear bay, the plane’s systems would quickly rotate the gear partway to ensure that it was steering correctly – and that led to the fatigue of four critical pieces that helped keep the nose wheel aligned, according to the National Transportation Safety Board. Over time those pieces, known as anti-rotation lugs, fatigued from the repeated steering checks, the NTSB said in its probable cause report last week of the Sept. 21, 2005, emergency landing. The lugs fractured and separated when the crew raised the landing gear on takeoff from Burbank’s Bob Hope Airport. Following an alert from the cockpit displays, the crew lowered the gear again. But with the nose wheel now askew, the plane’s braking system detected an error and disabled the nose wheel hydraulics, making it impossible to straighten it out. The plane landed safely at Los Angeles International Airport with the nose wheel 90 degrees to the side. The skidding wheel caught fire and about half of the nose wheel rims were ground down as the plane slowed, but there were no injuries. Since the 2005 accident, Airbus has changed the computerized checks so that such a problem would no longer occur.

Concerned about shoddy maintenance checks, the National Transportation Safety Board wants airlines flying certain Bombardier and Airbus models to verify that engine cowls are latched correctly. Since April 2007, the NTSB noted four incidents in which planes, often departing early in the morning after having overnight maintenance checks, had one or more engine fan cowls come off during flight, damaging parts of the planes. No one was injured in those incidents. The NTSB wants airlines to be required to have two mechanics sign off that engine cowls have been latched correctly; among U.S. carriers that do that, none have had a cowl come off in flight, the agency said. The most recent incidents involved a Bombardier CL-600 in one case and Airbus 319s in the other three. Though Airbus has issued service bulletins related to problems with cowl latches, incidents have kept happening, the NTSB said, so mechanics and pilots should be required to more carefully check them.

The transatlantic heavy metal battle between Airbus and Boeing hardly let up in the past year. Airbus, faced with nearly two years in delays and billions of dollars in losses from developing the A380 superjumbo jet, soldiered through with a management shuffle and consolidation of its manufacturing facilities. In keeping with its amended timeline, it delivered the first plane to Singapore Airlines in late October. Meanwhile, after a ceremonial aircraft rollout held together with plastic fasteners in July, the Boeing 787 program has hit several snags. Boeing’s global assembly system, which has dozens of companies in almost as many countries making various parts of the plane, had difficulty getting everything done. The plane’s first flight is expected by spring 2008 and Boeing pushed back the first deliveries of the 787 to November or December.