Final moments of Air France 447 revealed. The pilots of Air France flight AF447, which plunged into the Atlantic killing 228 people, saw conflicting speeds on their instruments as the Airbus A330 stalled.

That is one of the findings of France's BEA aviation safety agency which has analysed the black box flight recorder for the 2009 accident .

"We have no valid indications," one pilot of the Rio to Paris flight was quoted as saying as the aircraft dropped towards the sea, three minutes before it hit the water.

The 58-year-old captain, who had left the cockpit to take a routine rest, returned but did not retake control of the plane.

"There was an inconsistency between the speeds displayed on the left side and the integrated standby instrument system," BEA said in a statement following its study of the recovered flight data recorders.

"This lasted for less than one minute."

According to the chronology of the flight provided by BEA, the two co-pilots decided at two hours and eight minutes into the flight to turn slightly to the left to avoid an area of turbulence.

Two minutes later the autopilot disengaged, the instruments began showing that the speed had slowed dramatically and the engine stall warning began to sound.

"During the following seconds, all of the recorded speeds became invalid and the stall warning stopped," said the BAE preliminary report.

"So, we've lost the speeds," it quoted the second of the two co-pilots as saying. The responses by the co-pilot flying the aircraft "were mainly nose-up" and "the airplane climbed to 38,000ft".

BEA said: "The descent lasted 3 min 30, during which the airplane remained stalled. The engines were operating and always responded to crew commands."

The last data on the recorder showed that plane's nose was up at a sharp angle as it plunged at 10,912ft (3,300m) per minute.

BEA director Jean-Paul Troadec said: "These are so far just observations, not an understanding of the events."

A fuller report into the cause of the tragedy is expected to be released in a few months time.

Read More:yahoo

Possible cause of Air France 447 crash. Air France 447 May Have Stalled on Sensors. Air France Flight 447’s flight recordings show the aircraft slowed to a stall after its airspeed sensors failed while the two co-pilots were at the controls, two people with knowledge of the investigation said.

The chief pilot, Captain Marc Dubois, was not in the cockpit when the Airbus A330’s sensors malfunctioned, causing the autopilot to disengage over the Atlantic Ocean, said the people, who declined to be identified because the investigation is still confidential.


A low-speed stall occurs when an aircraft slows to the point where its wings suddenly lose lift, an incident pilots are trained to overcome. Flight 447’s last automated transmissions logged faulty readings from airspeed sensors that caused the autopilot to shut down in bad weather, minutes before the June 1, 2009, accident in which all 228 passengers and crew perished.

“To get out of a stall, you stick the nose down and wait for gravity to speed up the aircraft,” said David Learmount, a former U.K. Royal Air Force pilot and safety editor at Flight International. Pulling out can be straightforward, “providing you realize you’re in one,” he said.
Making Progress

Air France spokesman Jean-Charles Trehan said the company had no comment on the investigation’s early findings. France’s BEA air-accident investigation bureau, which also declined to comment, said it plans to issue a factual statement May 27 on its preliminary findings.

Nelson Marinho, who represents families of the Brazilian crash victims, said the group would wait for more information before commenting on the plane’s apparent stall.

“We’re rather concerned about this rush to blame the pilots,” Marinho said in an interview. “They are dead and cannot defend themselves.”

Investigators say they are making progress after maritime search and salvage experts retrieved the flight data and cockpit voice recorders this month from a depth of 3,900 meters (12,800 feet). Dubois was among the victims recovered from the sea surface in the weeks after the crash.
Pitot Tubes

The failure of the Thales SA (HO) airspeed sensors, or Pitot tubes, occurred while the plane was cruising at about 35,000 feet, four hours after takeoff from Rio de Janeiro. At that stage in the Paris-bound flight, it is routine practice for the captain to take a rest break and leave the co-pilots at the controls, Air France has said.

The Airbus A330 has a small sleeping compartment where pilots can recline on long-haul flights.

“All members of the flight crew have the same technical skills and qualifications,” France’s SNPL pilot union said in a statement. It criticized what it described as “deliberately selective reports that cast suspicion on the crew.”

Airbus declined to comment beyond a BEA-approved May 16 telex, in which the company told airlines that preliminary black-box analysis yielded no additional recommendations. Two months after the crash, Airbus advised A330 and A340 operators to replace the Thales sensors with a model from Goodrich Corp. (GR)

A stall is typically preceded by shaking and vibrating of the aircraft, and modern jets are equipped with a steering-stick shaker and audio warning to alert the pilot. Stall recovery requires pilots to coordinate the aircraft’s angle and power to the engines to avoid aggravating the situation.

According to a report by Der Spiegel Online, which could not be verified, the black boxes reveal that the Air France plane climbed sharply after the speed-sensor failure and Captain Dubois returned to the cockpit before the crash.

The BEA has said its May 27 statement will not identify any of the accident’s causes. An interim report is due in mid-July.
Source:bloomberg

Bodies of victims of Air France flight 447 finally found in the wreckage at bottom of the Atlantic after two-year mystery
* Investigators release underwater images of wreckage
* Fresh hope the plane's 'black box' will be recovered

The bodies of some of the 228 victims of the worst air crash in Air France’s history have been found some two-and-a-half miles below the Atlantic Ocean.

Macabre images of the underwater tomb, which includes British and Irish victims, have been grabbed by submarines equipped with robot-controlled cameras.

As investigators released some of the images in Paris, they said they also showed the ‘vast majority’ of the Airbus A330-203 had also been discovered, including its engines.



This raises renewed hope that the black box flight recorders can be retrieved, so helping to explain why Flight AF 447 crashed en route from Rio de Janeiro to Paris on June 1, 2009.

However, after being immersed under intense pressure and in sea water for almost two years, their data may be unreadable.

Confirming the discovery of ‘one large piece’ of the plane, France’s Transport Minister Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet said it contained 'identifiable bodies' .

Jean-Paul Troadec, director of the Bureau of Investigations and Analysis (BEAR) said: ‘The positive news is that the debris field is relatively concentrated. Thus, we hope to find the black boxes.’


And Air France-KLM’s chief executive Pierre-Henri Gourgeon added: ‘This is very good news because it brings with it the hope that at last we will get some information on what caused this accident, which to this day remains unexplained.’

The £8million search is being financed jointly by Air France and Airbus, who are both at the centre of a criminal enquiry into the disaster, and face manslaughter charges.

An initial search immediately after the crash found 50 bodies and hundreds of pieces of the plane, but went cold after that.

The latest search around the Atlantic’s mountainous seabed has been classed by BEAR as a ‘systematic exploration’ of an area of 3,900 sq miles, at depth of some 13,200 feet


Victims’ families are negotiating multi-million pounds compensation claims, and have been highly critical of the way the searches have been carried out to date.

But they will be relieved that more of the bodies have finally been found, and can be buried or cremated properly.

The plane went down in a high-altitude thunderstorm, with experts suggesting that its sensors, known as pitot tubes and made by French company Thales SA, may have iced over and sent false speed information to on-board computers.

In November, Air France issued a memo to investigators saying the carrier had counted 15 incidents in which the sensors had iced over on the same aircraft type in the 10 previous months before the crash.

The latest search boat, operated by the American Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, is unable to salvage the wreckage, but will continue to continue to take pictures using the same kind of equipment which was used explore the remains of the Titanic in 1985.

Salvage boats are currently heading for the area, and are expected to arrive by the end of this month.


Source:Dailymail