A black box recording has revealed the final words of the pilot of a flight which crashed into the sea killing all 228 passengers and crew onboard.
On 1 June, 2009, Air France Flight 447 - an Airbus A330 - took off from Rio de Janeiro airport in Brazil, set to fly to Paris, France.
However, it never made it to its final destination after coming into difficulties over the Atlantic Ocean and all 228 people on the plane - made up of 216 passengers and 12 members of crew - were tragically killed.
Days later, debris from the Air France jet was found floating among the waves. However, it took two years for the black box recorders to be recovered by search crews.
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And these recorders held key information about what led the aircraft to go down over the ocean.
Apparently, the plane's speed sensors had become blocked and iced up as the aircraft tried to make its way through a storm, which resulted in the systems producing faulty data for the flight.
The autopilot on the Airbus A330-203 was disabled, while the pilots also had to deal with trying to make sense of confusing data regarding their speed and altitude, and so the recording revealed they decided to resume manual piloting.
However, due to the plane system's not operating properly, captain Marc Dubois, 58, and his two co-pilots David Robert, 37, and Pierre-Cédric Bonin, 32, ended up being guided by incorrect navigation data while battling through a tropical storm.
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The plane entered an aerodynamic stall, which led to trio mistakenly pointing the nose of the jet upwards instead of down.
The flight then started to tumble from the sky as the pilots had a panicked conversation.
Excerpts from recorded conversations reveal that two of the pilots on the Air France flight were asleep when the plane got into difficulty.
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"We’ve lost our speeds!" one pilot began.
"I don’t know what’s happening," another voice was heard saying.
Bonin then was later heard screaming: "Let’s go! Pull up, pull up, pull up!"
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"F***, we're going to crash! It's not true! But what's happening?" Robert then exclaimed.
And the fate of the aircraft seemingly became apparent, when an unknown individual shouted: "F***, we're dead."
So, could the fatal situation have played out any differently?
As per the Daily Mail, chief investigator Alain Bouillard said: "If the captain had stayed in position through the Inter-tropical 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.
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"But I do not believe it was fatigue that caused him to leave. It was more like customary behavior, 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 during the main event."
In 2023, a court in Paris ruled that Air France and Airbus were not guilty of manslaughter for the deaths of those on board.
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Topics: Travel, World News
Callum Jones