On 1 June, 2009, 12 crew members and 216 passengers were killed when an Air France flight crashed while flying from Rio de Janeiro to Paris. The flight was travelling through a storm over the Atlantic when it disappeared off the radar.
In just four minutes and 24 seconds, the aircraft fell 11,500 metres out of the sky. It’s though that the plane’s speed sensors may have iced up, which triggered autopilot to turn off.
Although debris was spotted in the ocean following the crash, it took almost two years for the black box flight data to be recovered.
In the audio, Marc Dubois, 58, David Robert, 37, and Pierre-Cédric Bonin, 32, could be heard voicing their fears in the final recordings taken just before the plane crashed into the water. “We’ve lost our speeds,” one of the pilots could be heard saying as indicators mistakenly showed a loss of altitude.
“I don’t know what’s happening.”
The automatic pilot disconnected, leaving the three pilots on board in charge.
The crew held up the plane’s nose, but this sent it into an aerodynamic stall. Dubois had been asleep at the time, and the co-pilots didn’t recognise the stall and therefore didn’t move to recover the mistake.
By the time he woke up, Dubois was unable to act quickly enough to save the plane.
Following the recordings, a simulation was created, showing what is believed to be the aircraft’s harrowing final moments. As the plane began to descend towards the ocean, Bonin can be heard saying: “Let’s go! Pull up, pull up, pull up.”
“F***, we’re going to crash! It’s not true! But what’s happening?” Robert said.
It’s unclear who spoke next, but the final recording reveals one person saying: “F***, we’re dead.”
French air investigations authority, the Bureau d’Enquêtes et d’Analyses (BEA) said that the crew in the cockpit had not responded correctly to the problem, and had not had the training needed to manually fly the plane at high altitude once the autopilot had turned off.
While Air France and Airbus denied accusations of negligence, Air France claimed that the alarms confused the pilots in charge.
Last year, a court in Paris ruled that Air France and Airbus were not guilty of manslaughter for the deaths of those on board.
David Koubbi, who was representing the families of a number of passengers, said the ruling was ‘incomprehensible’.
“It is a signal that you can kill 228 people in an air crash and nobody is at fault,” he said. “The families that I represent are devastated, and this has prevented them from mourning their loved ones.”
