![]() One of the pilots was heard saying: “ we’re going to crash! It’s not true! This can’t be happening!” The last words on the tape were “We’re dead.” Seconds before impact, the transcript reveals the pilots still could not understand, or believe, what they were seeing. The plane dropped like a stone at a rate of 12,000 feet per minute. But the copilot had pitched the plane up, causing it to stall, and he spent the last minutes of the flight trying to raise the nose of the Airbus 330, the reverse of what pilots are taught to do. The alarms stopped a minute later, after a backup system for the speedometer kicked in. Loud alarms blasted the cockpit, and the pilots began to panic. First, a cloud of ice pellets struck the jet, freezing its speedometers, known as pitot tubes. Once the boxes arrived under police escort at a Paris laboratory, investigators quickly found that aside from some minor damage, the data was intact.īy May 2011 the final moments of the Air France flights had emerged, revealing a series of mishaps, each of which could have been survivable-but instead spiraled into a deadly crash. Still, they had never been recovered after having been submerged for so long in such depths. (Humans can withstand roughly 5 Gs before passing out.) Within them, they contain critical information about a plane’s last moments. This latest mission, using autonomous submersibles that combed the ocean floor, was to be the final attempt before authorities would pull the plug on more expensive undersea investigations.īlack boxes-which are actually orange, not black, to aid in discovery-are remarkably resilient they’re built to withstand fires of 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit and an impact of 3,400 times the force of Earth’s gravity, roughly a velocity of 310 mph. The search to date had been one of the biggest and costliest in the history of airline crashes, costing the industry more than $30 million. If the recordings they housed had survived the punishing conditions at the bottom of the sea, they could solve the mystery of what happened to Flight 447. ![]() ![]() That is, until two years later, when, from depths of 13,000 feet at the bottom of the ocean, the same team behind the discovery of the Titanic dredged up a pair of metal boxes from the wreckage of the plane, each about the size of a shoe box. Those were the last words anyone heard from the cockpit or from the 228 souls aboard, who never made it to their destination. A relief pilot joined the copilot at the controls. And then, he left the cockpit for a scheduled rest break-another normal practice on this 11-hour run. “Air France four-four-seven, contact Atlantic center,” the captain repeated back to the control center. For the seasoned captain flying the Airbus A330, this was a routine handoff, and although the plane was heading into a thunderstorm, there was nothing to suggest anything was amiss. They had entered a communications dead zone over the South Atlantic Ocean it would be another two hours before the jet could contact a human on the ground. Universal Time on June 1, 2009, the pilots of Air France Flight 447 from Rio de Janeiro to Paris radioed to Brazilian air traffic controllers as they were leaving their airspace.
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