Why were names deleted from the 447 passenger list?

The reason may not be as sinister as people think.

If you look up the Flight 447 passenger list today, you'll find 204 names reflecting 32 nationalities. There were, however 228 passangers on the flight. Not all the names have been released.

The official listing has fluctuated with time. This is actually a fiarly common occurance in disasters. Normally, airlines do not want to release the names of the deceased until after the families have been notified. No one wants a wife to learn her husband died in a plane crash from CNN. The problem comes in with the logistics of contacting the next of kin for 228 deceased plus the flight crew. Errors do happen, both in reporting and in tracking that data. It's also not uncommon for the family of the wrong person to be notified of his death. Similar names and similar flight numbers can lead to some very gut wrenching errors.

The 9/11 World Trace Center attack was the most chaotic example of this, as information on who was in the buildings when they collapsed was sparse and hard to come by.

For example, Chen Qingwei was dropped from the list early on, but restored by the time the June 1 listing was released. He, James Reidner, Richard Essen, Owen Mason and Jean-Claude Lozouet were removed from early listings. Two of these five were later restored to that list. In the absence of information to the contrary I assume there was no sister reason their names were removed. The fact that the three men I wrote about, all 9/11 survivors, have not been returned to the public listings is perplexing, but not unexpected.

I'm not, at this time, implying there's any kind of a cover-up. It could be as simple as a desire to avoid alarming people with a coincidence, or a failure to locate the next of kin for the three deceased men. Is there something deeper going on? Is something being hidden? We won't know until the full list of all 228 deceased passengers has been released. If this happens before August of 2009, and James Reidner, Richard Essen and Owen Mason are on that list, then I'll assume their mysterious disappearance was a clerical error, or necessitated by a clerical error in notifying next of kin.

If, on the other hand, their names remain "dissipated" from the official records, we'll know something is up.