Unanswered calls led to the immediate reaction of the French air force, responsible for the French sky. Friday, relates the daily Sud-Ouest, a Boeing which was making a connection between Barcelona and New York, did not respond to repeated calls from French air traffic control while it was flying over southwestern France. Fearing a malicious act, air traffic control then attempted to reach the crew on the international distress frequency. There too, no answer.
Consequence: the “civil airliner of the Boeing 767 – 400 type was the subject of an intervention of the sky police”, announced in a press release sent to the newspaper the Air Defense and Air Operations Command. A Rafale was mobilized in an emergency to ensure “that the behavior came only from a failure of the crew of the aircraft to maintain permanent radio contact with the air traffic controllers”, details the text.
Supersonic speed at high altitude
Friday, the inhabitants of Dordogne and Gironde then heard a deafening noise in the sky: the device has indeed crossed the sound barrier. “To join this aircraft, the fighter plane had to go into supersonic speed at high altitude”, explains the command. The goal is to “ascertain visually as soon as possible the reasons for this questionable behavior”. Which was indeed the case.
“After having carried out the usual checks on the identity of the aircraft, then tried on numerous occasions to establish radio contact, the fighter aircraft showed itself to the Boeing crew without committing the safety of the aircraft or its passengers, continues the text. Thanks to this maneuver, the crew members reacted and resumed radio contact at 12:14 local time with the fighter plane on the distress frequency. An investigation will have to determine the reasons for this long radio silence.
According to the Air Force, cited by Sud-Ouest, in most cases this lost communication “lasts only two to three minutes and does not require the take-off of one of our emergency devices”. However, this is not the first time that a fighter plane has been dispatched in an emergency to an aircraft that no longer responds. In 2018, the army said it had identified 35 takeoffs linked to a loss of radio contact, out of the 88 takeoffs of fighter planes linked to alerts.
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