Egyptian authorities hired a deep ocean survey and recovery company to join the hunt for wreckage of the EgyptAir jet that went down over the eastern Mediterranean last week as new satellite evidence emerged to help narrow down the likely crash site. Egypt’s civil aviation ministry signed the agreement on Friday with Deep Ocean Search, according to a statement from France’s air accidents bureau, BEA, which is part of the investigation. A DOS’s vessel will join the Laplace, a French Navy ship set to arrive in the area over the weekend and deploying specialist technology to pick up telltale “pings” from the Airbus Group SE A320’s black-box flight recorders. European and US satellites captured emergency distress signals from the doomed EgyptAir Flight 804 minutes after it fell off radar on May 19, the US’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said Friday. A device known as an emergency locator transmitter, or ELT, began radioing an automatic distress message at 2:36 a.m. local time, Lieutenant Jason Wilson, an operations support officer at NOAA, said in an e-mail. That could help indicate a crash area with a 5-km radius. Regarded as key to determining what brought down Flight MS804 while en route from Paris to Cairo with 66 people on board, the data and voice recorders -- actually colored orange -- are detectable only from within a few miles, and are likely to run out of power in about three weeks. The Egyptian-led committee that’s investigating the downed plane has begun studying information from Greek air traffic control about the accident and more information on the radar that tracked the plane before it went down “is expected to be received,” the BEA said. The BEA is involved because Airbus is based in Toulouse and the flight left from Paris. DOS is based in Mauritius, staffed by veterans of the French Navy and has recovered precious metals from a ship sunk in World War II in the mid-Atlantic at a depth of 5,150m, the company said. The area where the EgyptAir flight went down is thought to be more than 3,000m deep.<br/>
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Long before EgyptAir Flight 804’s pilots received an alert signaling smoke in a vital electronics compartment, US safety watchdogs documented that such warnings on that airliner model were frequently erroneous and sometimes prompted unnecessary and risky cockpit responses. According to people familiar with the probe into this month’s crash of the Airbus Group SE A320, investigators are trying to determine whether the pilots reacted to the smoke message by following an emergency checklist that can lead to shutting down essential safety systems, including automated flight-control protections. Possible pitfalls of that procedure emerged vividly in an April 2011 incident. Shortly after United Airlines Flight 497 took off from New Orleans, the pilots of the A320 plane received a smoke alert from the hub of its avionics system, but investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board later said they found “no evidence of fire or overheated components.” The pilots told investigators that “after they began to respond to the smoke warning, electrically powered items in the airplane ceased to function,” according to National Transportation Safety Board documents. The crew lost some radios and a transponder, and needed air-traffic controllers to direct the jet back to the runway, where it landed with impaired steering and its nose wheel veered into grass beside the runway. Nobody was injured. Ten days later, United sent pilots a bulletin saying its “Airbus fleet has experienced cases of spurious avionics smoke warnings” and stressing that emergency electric shutdowns are required only in the event of “perceptible smoke.” It isn’t known if the EgyptAir alert was false, or what actions the crew took. The newer-model, optical smoke sensors installed on the 13-year-old jet have been deemed more reliable than older technology like that on the United plane. But the more recent variants continued to issue false warnings—though at significantly lower rates than the older ones—and were “still sensitive to dust and some aerosols,” Airbus told US crash investigators in 2011.<br/>
Lufthansa has cancelled the only flight between Germany and Venezuela, underlining the worsening conditions and growing isolation of the South American country. The German airline has flown from its Frankfurt hub to Venezuela’s capital Caracas three times a week. But in an email to Venezuelan customers on Saturday night European time, the company said it would cancel the route from June 17. Several other international carriers have halted or reduced their Venezuelan operations, including Air Canada, American Airlines and Alitalia, in large part because of the socialist government’s tight currency controls, which left them with billions in unpaid bills. Near-empty tarmac at the airport serving Caracas is an increasingly common sight in a country ravaged by a social, political and economic crisis. The International Monetary Fund forecasts the economy will shrink 8% this year, and 4.5% in 2017. Inflation is galloping and is forecast to exceed 1,642% next year. Lufthansa’s decision is the latest signal of the dire state of the Venezuelan economy, which was highlighted by food shortages and looting in parts of the country alongside power and water rationing. Lufthansa confirmed the decision reflected Venezuela’s economic condition. Demand on the route has fallen over the past few years as fewer business travellers visit the country.<br/>
United will stop flying to Nigeria next month, ending the carrier’s only route to Africa because of weakness in the energy sector and difficulties in collecting money from tickets sold in that country. The daily route from Houston to Lagos had underachieved for years but was kept alive because of its importance to Texas-based customers, United Continental said in a note to employees Wednesday. The last flight will be June 30, after which Delta will be the only major US carrier flying to Africa. Nigeria has restricted the amount of money that can be moved abroad after the global slump in oil prices depleted the government’s U.S. currency reserves. The country owed airlines about $575m in air fares as of March 31, according to the IATA. “Repatriation has been a significant issue, as has been the downturn in the energy sector,” said United spokesman Jonathan Guerin, who confirmed the note’s authenticity. Passengers can still fly to Nigeria on United’s trans-Atlantic business partner, Lufthansa, through a connection in Frankfurt. <br/>