Air France Flight 447 plunged into the Atlantic Ocean just four hours after take off on June 1, 2009, killing all 228 people onboard.
The Airbus A330 was en route from Rio de Janeiro to Paris when it vanished over the Atlantic during a storm. It took two years to locate and recover the wreckage following a search spanning 10,000sqkm. Along with the wreckage, the black box and cockpit recordings from those final tragic moments were also retrieved.
The catastrophe was attributed to a mix of technical failure and the pilots’ inability to respond correctly to the plane stalling, causing it to plummet at a rate of 11,000ft per minute. According to France’s Bureau of Enquiry and Analysis for Civil Aviation Safety (BEA), ice crystals led to the autopilot unexpectedly disconnecting mid-flight.
The pilots were left bewildered by an error in the air-speed readings and made the fatal error of tilting the plane’s nose upwards instead of downwards when it stalled.
