AF447 crash is the worst in Air France's history. Photo / AP
"****, we're dead," a pilot shouted. With that, the Air France A330 plunged belly-first into the Atlantic Ocean and was immediately swallowed up by waves.
It was 10 years ago yesterday all 228 passengers and crew on flight AF447 from Rio de Janeiro to Paris died in the worst crash in Air France's history and the deadliest accident involving an Airbus A330, news.com.au reported.
Both companies would later be probed for alleged manslaughter, but at the time, the crash was a mystery. It would take years until the world understood what caused the popular jet to fall from the sky and the disturbing actions in the cockpit before its fatal plunge.
AF447 — serviced by Air France's newest A330 — was flying through a storm over the Atlantic Ocean, three hours and six minutes from Rio airport, when it stopped making contact with air traffic control.
It should have contacted controllers when it flew from Brazil into Senegalese airspace about 2.20am, but didn't. Then it should have contacted the controller in Cape Verdean airspace about 4am, but didn't. Attempts to reach AF447 failed — including an attempt by another Air France flight.
A major multinational search by air and sea was launched on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. By the afternoon, then-French President Nicolas Sarkozy said there was almost no chance of survivors.
In the days that followed, as Brazil announced three days of official mourning, random pieces of debris and the bodies of two male passengers were recovered.
But it would take an extraordinary 22 month-long underwater search effort, at the cost of $50 million, to find the actual wreckage of AF447.
After retrieving bodies, the primary focus of the mission was recovering the crucial black boxes — the flight data and cockpit voice recorders — from bottom of the ocean.
They were the twin keys that would unlock the mystery of what happened. But for the BEA, the French air investigation authority that oversaw the search, finding them didn't come easy.
"Our mission is to find out what happened as quickly as possible to prevent another possible accident so time is our enemy and for five long days until the first pieces of floating debris were found, we hadn't a clue," senior BEA adviser Olivier Ferrante recently told The Guardian.
"We had a search zone with a radius of 40 nautical miles where the aircraft could be. It was complicated."
There were several unsuccessful missions to find the wreckage site.
Finally, in April 2011 — nearly two years after the crash — a search team led by American marine scientists found a large part of the debris field, including the largely intact fuselage with dead passengers still strapped inside.
Subsequent dives recovered the black boxes and they revealed chaos in the cockpit as technical problems were compounded by confusion among the pilots. They also revealed some shocking cockpit secrets.
The Air France captain was asleep, leaving a rookie in charge of the plane, when things started to go wrong about four hours from Rio.
The rookie, 32-year-old co-pilot Pierre-Cedric Bonin, was dubbed the "company baby" and had clocked up only a couple of thousand flying hours. Slightly more experienced first officer David Robert, 37, was the Pilot Not Flying.
The veteran captain Marc Dubois, 58, was asleep. After the crash, it was scandalously revealed he'd spent most of the night before with an off-duty flight attendant, and only managed an hour of sleep before the flight.
The core of the plane's problem was that its Pitot tubes — which calculated airspeed and altitude — became clogged with ice crystals as the plane passed through a low-pressure belt called the Intertropical Convergence Zone. That led to faulty speed readings and this caused the autopilot and autothrust to disengage.
The icing over of Pitot tubes was a known issue on some Airbus models and Air France had ordered new ones to replace them — but those replacements were sitting in a storehouse at the time, according to author and pilot William Langewiesche's report on the Air France disaster for Vanity Fair.
But it was the reactions of the pilots — company baby Bonin, who panicked at the controls, confused first officer Robert, and the captain, Dubois, who woke up and returned to the cockpit when it was already too late — which sealed the plane's doom.
As the plane was being jostled by light turbulence with autopilot off, Bonin grabbed his sidestick to control the plane. His actions behind the controls would be described by investigators as "excessive".
In an inexplicable move, Bonin pulled up the nose of the plane, apparently to try and slow it down. It sent the A330 into stall.
Stall alarms sounded and panic set in. The final report into the crash found Robert lost valuable time trying to rouse the captain instead of fixing Bonin's mistake.
The pair also failed to discuss warnings repeatedly sounding in the cockpit.
Essentially the pilots, as the BEA concluded in a 2011 report, did the opposite of what they should have to save the plane.
"The situation was salvageable," BEA director Jean Paul Troadec said when the report was handed down.
Speaking to French newspaper Le Figaro, a French pilot described Bonin's actions as "totally incomprehensible". "My colleague must have panicked," he said.
One minute and 38 seconds after the malfunction, captain Dubois finally entered the cockpit. But it was already too late. The A330 was stalling and nothing could be done.
The black box voice recorder captured the final conversation.
"F*ck, we're going to crash! It's not true! But what's happening?" Robert yelled out.
As a series of alarms continued to sound, Robert or Bonin said: "F*ck, we're dead."
Dubois, the captain, spoke last. "Ten degrees pitch," he said. Two seconds later, the plane crashed into the Atlantic Ocean, off the coast of Brazil, at 200km/h.
The BEA handed down its final report in 2012, citing a series of reasons for the crash, notably bad decisions by the flight crew.
It also said the pilots lacked practical training to deal with the situation. Air France defended its pilots and blamed a malfunction with the plane's altitude alert system.
But chief investigator Alain Bouillard questioned the "piloting culture" at Air France.
"If the captain had stayed in position through the Intertropical Convergence Zone, it would have delayed his sleep by no more than 15 minutes and because of his experience, maybe the story would have ended differently," he said in 2012.
"But I do not believe it was fatigue that caused him to leave. It was more like customary behaviour, part of the piloting culture within Air France. And his leaving was not against the rules.
"Still, it is surprising. If you are responsible for the outcome, you do not go on vacation for the main event."
Air France and Airbus have been investigated for "involuntary homicide", or manslaughter, which wrapped up in March, but there's no word on whether a trial will be held, according to The Guardian.
Ten years after one of the worst aviation disasters of our time, that is one of the last remaining questions.
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