"June the 1st, 2009." "Air France flight 447 is en route from Rio to Paris." "Then, the plane vanishes over the Atlantic" "We've lost an aircraft with 228 people on board." "Aviation experts are baffled." "Did the aircraft just go missing?" "Has it actually crashed?" "The plane is one of the most technologically advanced passenger aircraft ever to fly." "For an A330 to have gone missing, it was kind of unthinkable." "Clues to what happened to Flight 447 are frustratingly few." "But now, recordings have been recovered from the cockpit" "These incredible tapes don't only reveal what caused the crash" "they pose a disturbing question:" "Just how safe is flying today?" "31st of May, 2009, Rio de Janeiro." "Galeao International Airport, 7pm local time." "The Air France flight, an Airbus 330, takes off for the 11-hour journey to Paris." "Air France is a great airline, the A330 is the latest generation of airplanes." "The aircraft is so technologically advanced, aviation experts claim it pretty much flies itself." "The pilots will be flying the aircraft manually during the take-off." "As soon as the aircraft is off the ground, the pilots will put the autopilot in." "Then it doesn't come out until the last 500 feet of the descent, they trip the autopilot out, and then by the time the aircraft has come to a halt off the runway you had about two minutes of flying, so it's about four minutes of flying." "There are 228 people on board from 32 different countries, including five from the UK, but the majority are French." "Caroline Soulas and her husband, Air France flight attendant Sebastien, have just enjoyed a three-day break in Rio." "Caroline got the opportunity to travel much because with her husband she went everywhere in the world." "Especially for Brazil, she went three times in Brazil." "She fell in love with this country." "Just before boarding Flight 447," "Caroline contacts her mother, Corinne, at home in Paris." "Before leaving Rio, it was about seven o'clock." "She sent me a text saying," ""It's a pity to leave Rio because it's so sunny."" ""What's the time in Paris?"" "It was the last text I had." "1:35am." "Flight 447 makes final radio contact with Brazilian air-traffic control." "The plane leaves Brazilian airspace, and now flies into a radar dark spot in the middle of the Atlantic." "The aircraft will be out of radar contact until it comes within range of Senegalese air-traffic control." "It was right in the middle of a big gap in the middle of the ocean and it was in a point where it was handing off between Brazil and Senegal." "Most people don't realize that communications over the oceans are actually pretty spotty, and in this case, they were extremely spotty." "3:45am." "Two-and-a-half hours after leaving Brazilian air control," "Flight 447 still hasn't appeared on the radar screens in Dakar." "They were slow to recognize, first of all, that the aircraft had gone missing." "Senegal didn't sound the alarm very quickly." "A search and rescue operation was scrambled to the last known position of the missing aircraft." "In Paris, families and friends gather to meet the flight at Charles De Gaulle airport." "ANNOUNCEMENT:" "Waiting for the Air France flight 447..." "Corinne Soulas is at home expecting her daughter to phone, but it is Caroline's father-in-law who rings." "I receive a call asking me which was the number of the flight, because he has heard on the TV or on the radio that a plane has disappeared, and I didn't know that, so I..." "I began to be afraid and when I saw every text on the TV or hearing the radio," "I became er...er...mad." "I became mad." "Caroline's father Robert was working abroad when he heard the news." "After I was alone on the Earth, it was a great moment of loneliness." "I couldn't imagine the loss of Caroline." "It was impossible." "Within hours of the disappearance, Air France makes an announcement." "This is a catastrophe, undoubtedly, and we have lost an aircraft with 228 people on board." "Flight 447 has seemingly vanished." "No mayday, no trace on radar." "No witnesses and no sign of wreckage." "Clues to what happened to Flight 447 are frustratingly few." "There was so little information available initially." "Did the aircraft just go missing?" "Has it actually crashed?" "Where was the wreckage?" "The crew showed no sign of alarm because if they were seriously alarmed by something they'd have made an emergency call to air traffic control, but they didn't." "And the fact that there was no distress signal, what does that say to you?" "It could be, dare I say, a bomb or something like that." "The first thing people think about now, post-2001, is terrorist attack." "When French intelligence officers checked the passenger list, they spot names they suspect are linked to radical Islamic organizations." "Only the wreckage could confirm or disprove the bomb theory but they cannot pinpoint where the plane went down." "The difficulties for Air France 447 were huge." "Firstly, the aircraft crashed in an area where there is no radar coverage, so it was not possible to locate where it had hit the sea, so the search area was enormous." "They were looking over an area of 17,000 square kilometers." "On June the 6th, five days after Flight 447 disappeared, fragments of wreckage, along with 50 bodies, are discovered approximately 600 miles off the coast of Brazil." "The find rules out a bomb." "The plane was in one piece when it hit the water." "The fact that the bodies that were found floating on the water came from many parts of the aircraft when they were identified, gives some indication that the aircraft was intact and the people were still inside it when it struck the water." "But if an explosion didn't down Flight 447, what did?" "How can such a sophisticated expensive machine have such a large, profound loss of life?" "There was a very strong hunger and need to know why it happened both for the families and also for future safety." "With over 600 Airbus A330s in daily service worldwide, it's vital to find out what caused the crash." "The answers could lie in the plane's black boxes, but they are lost two-and-a-half miles down on the seabed." "I want to know exactly why my daughter died." "A reason why." "French investigators need to discover why a state-of-the-art" "Airbus A330 has crashed off the coast of Brazil." "They believe the missing flight data black boxes can solve the mystery." "It was possible that we would never find the black boxes and certainly, there have been accidents in the past where the black boxes have never been found." "A French nuclear submarine is enlisted to join the search." "It can pick up the ultrasonic signals transmitted by the black boxes." "You have a 30-day lifespan on the underwater locator beacon and the terrain at the bottom of the sea was very mountainous, if you can imagine the sea bed rises and falls by a huge amount, varying between..." "I think it was around 900m down to more than 4,000m depth." "30 days pass, with no success." "The team now send mini-subs down to scour the seabed." "The black boxes were the crucial piece, which is of course why incredible amounts of time and treasure were spent by the French government and others, many assisted, trying to find these things." "And it was an extraordinary search effort." "But after almost two years, one of the greatest underwater searches in maritime history-- costing over £25 million-- draws a blank." "Just as it seems the mystery of what downed Flight 447 would never be solved, the French investigators turn to the American team that located the wreck of the Titanic in 1985." "Then, on the 2nd of April, 2011, the dive team find the shattered fuselage... 13,000 feet down, on the seabed." "They also find 104 bodies." "Many are still strapped in their seats." "Quite a few of our families were, literally, on tenterhooks, waiting for a call as to whether their loved ones had been found." "And for the families that then get the call saying, "Sorry, we haven't found it", their hopes have been raised up, then dashed again." "74 bodies remain missing, including that of Caroline Soulas." "It was..." "It was a nightmare, a new nightmare for a lot of families." "But deep under the Atlantic, the divers are still searching the wreckage." "Until, at last, they find what they are looking for-- the black boxes." "When they did find them, it changed everything." "Because now we started really getting a clear picture." "The families and friends of the 228 people who died now have a chance to find out what really caused the crash." "The black box data will unravel the precise sequence of events that led to the loss of the aircraft." "The actual recordings have not been publicly released but actors will read a transcript, documenting the final, terrifying minutes leading up to the crash." "(French)" "Flight 447 leaves Rio and heads north, following the east coast of Brazil." "In charge of the plane is Captain Marc Dubois, age 58, with almost 11,000 flying hours under his belt." "The second pilot is 37-year-old David Robert, who's clocked up over 6,500 hours." "The third pilot is Pierre-Cedric Bonin, whose wife is also on tonight's flight." "Age 32, Bonin, with just under 3,000 flying hours, is the least experienced member of the crew." "Bonin is sitting in the cockpit's right-hand seat." "His captain, Dubois, is sitting on the left." "Robert is taking the regulation sleep break in the small cabin to the rear of the cockpit." "Dinner service is over and the cabin lights have been dimmed." "The plane is due to reach Paris in eight hours' time and many passengers will now try and grab a few hours' sleep." "Things also seem relaxed in the cockpit." "They're making radio calls, passing position reports to Air Traffic Control." "It's all pretty quiet." "In the middle of the Atlantic, in the middle of the night, there's not much to do." "Captain Dubois is a veteran of the Rio-Paris route and points out an upcoming landmark to his junior First Officer, Bonin." "As they approach the Equator, they will enter an area called the inter-tropical convergence zone." "For aviators, that area is famous for creating conductive weather and thunderstorms." "It was generating some really interesting and severe areas of weather the night of the crash of Air France 447." "Michael de Villiers has analyzed the weather patterns on the night of the crash." "What it shows there is the areas that were forecast on the significant weather chart where there would be thunder activity." "Quite a few around." "A thunderstorm is probably the most dangerous form of weather." "Its strong updrafts, downdrafts, can knock the aircraft around and can also cause structural damage if a thunderstorm is severe enough." "You get icing, you get the hail, you get lightning, which can also damage an aircraft." "Massive cumulonimbus storm clouds can extend upwards to 50,000 feet-- too high for commercial planes to fly over." "Sometimes you've really got to think about which route you're going to take and which headings you're going to take up to try and avoid them." "But Captain Dubois seems unconcerned and Flight 447 stays on-course." "Navigating around storm clouds is not demanding." "You look at them-- if they're in front of you, you turn left or turn right and you fly round them." "I mean, this is not difficult stuff." "But several other flights crossing the zone that night do decide to divert around the storm." "1:51am." "Now the dimmed cockpit is suddenly lit up." "Veteran pilot Dubois recognizes the bright flashes as St Elmo's Fire, a spectacular electrical phenomenon common in the tropics." "There were a number of unusual things that started to happen." "There was apparently a blue glow that was St Elmo's Fire, and that projects a very odd and eerie light into the cockpit." "The St Elmo's Fire, it is just this discharge on the windscreen-- as heavily-charged ice pellets hit the windscreen, they discharge electricity, so you get these patterns going up the window." "David Robert, who was having a break in the small cabin at the rear of the cockpit, will shortly swap places with Captain Dubois." "Before Robert arrives, Captain Dubois wants to establish who's going to fly the plane while he is on his break." "This means Bonin, with the least flying hours on his record-- will pilot the plane until the captain returns." "If a captain is going on the break, you would have thought that the priority would have been to have the most experienced person in charge of the aircraft and sitting in the appropriate seat." "I did find it interesting that, from what I thought it would certainly be the busiest part of the flight, in terms of weather avoidance, that the captain decides to take rest for that." "I would have thought that that would be the bit the captain would want to stay for." "The decision he made in his mind, he was quite happy with this." "In hindsight, us looking at it, maybe it wasn't the best decision." "Minutes after Captain Dubois leaves the flight deck, the weather deteriorates." "Robert suggests changing course to avoid the storm clouds." "As Bonin steers the plane 12 degrees to the left, a sharp, chlorine-like smell spreads through the cockpit." "Robert, who's flown many trips across the tropics, instantly recognizes the strange smell, but it seems to startle his younger colleague." "There were unusual smells in the cockpit, there were electrical disturbances and electrical phenomena around St Elmo's Fire, and so on." "So there are many things that can contribute to degraded pilot performance." "2:10am." "A loud sound is heard in the cockpit." "Experts analyzing the black box tape believe it's the sound of ice crystals hitting the aircraft." "Then, an alarm is triggered." "(Beeping)" "The alarm warns the crew that the auto-pilot has shut down and handed control back to them." "Bonin is sitting in the right-hand seat and takes manual control of the plane." "His more experienced colleague, Robert, is now effectively co-pilot." "What the crew don't realize is that the plummeting temperature has caused ice to block three vital sensors, called pitots." "The pitot system, which basically detects the speed of the air against the aircraft, ended up becoming blocked, therefore that effectively dropped to zero and they lost all speed indication." "The airplane, while it's in autopilot, suddenly said," ""We know we're getting rubbish information here." "We cannot deal with rubbish information, therefore we're going to trip the autopilot out and hand it back to the pilots."" "This is where they start earning their money." "But it's not an emergency." "It just means that there is no forward speed information." "In theory, when the ice melts, the pitot sensors will work again." "The drill is, do nothing." "Literally, just fly the aircraft, continue to fly it straight and level." "Leave the power where it is, because it's been working pretty well for you, up until this point." "If the crews touch nothing, the aircraft will remain fairly stable while they sort themselves out and get the aircraft into a safe flight configuration." "In the case of Air France 447, it was almost an immediate reaction by the pilot flying that actually made the situation worse." "We will absolutely never know why the pilot responded in the way that he did." "Air France Flight 447 has flown into a storm and its speed sensors have cut out." "The plane's autopilot has shut down, handing control of the aircraft back to the flight crew." "The captain is on a sleep break." "First Officer Bonin is now flying the plane manually." "His fellow officer, David Robert, with many more flight hours' experience, is handling radio comms." "(French)" "Bonin controls the plane with a side stick." "He had the side stick in his right hand and he just yanked it backwards." "In layman's terms, what the pilot flying did was pull back on the control stick which caused a change in the pitch attitude to go nose up causing the aircraft to climb." "The black box data confirms why Bonin wanted the plane to climb." "The aircraft instruments showed a loss of altitude of 400 feet or so." "But when the speed sensors froze up, the instrument displays gave the pilots false readings of their speed and altitude." "It was not an actual loss of altitude." "It was only instrumental." "It was false, it was wrong." "You've got to rely on your instruments and, of course, if your instruments are now faulty or telling you wrong information, then it's difficult to know where to take that, because you're trained to rely on these things." "Bonin decides to trust the instruments." "He pulls back the stick and the plane starts to rise." "The aircraft will go up quite rapidly." "In fact, at one point, it's climbing at 7,000 feet a minute, which is a very high rate of climb at that altitude." "Because he was going uphill into very thin air, that the aircraft couldn't be supported by while it was at its weight, the aircraft started slowing down." "Just like if you leave your foot on the accelerator of a car and it starts to go up a hill, it will slow down unless you give it more gas." "So, this airplane was slowing down." "(ALARM) Stall." "Stall." "Now, another alarm rings out." "The stall warning." "(ALARM) Stall." "Stall." "A stall happens when the aircraft is going too slowly for the wings to produce sufficient lift and therefore the aircraft starts to drop." "It starts to fall." "It stops flying, starts falling." "To prevent the plane falling, Bonin needs to act quickly." "When the stall warning occurred, the pilots are expected to take an immediate action of changing the attitude." "Push forward on the side stick, reduce the angle of attack and therefore recover from the stall." "The way to recover that is to get your speed back and the way to get your speed back is to put the nose down and go downhill." "But Bonin doesn't put the nose down." "He keeps the stick back and the aircraft gains even more altitude whilst continuing to lose speed." "I'm only left to draw the conclusion that they didn't believe that the aircraft was stalled." "The black box records show that one of the three speed sensors that had frozen now starts working again." "Unfortunately, when the airspeed indications came back online, the aircraft attitude and various other parameters of the aircraft had changed quite dramatically." "Now some new sensors come back in with valid information that didn't look valid because everything else was so totally messed up." "And that's really where things went from a very benign circumstance to a rapidly escalating out-of-control circumstance." "Robert presses the crew call button." "He wants to get Captain Dubois back from his break and onto the flight deck." "But there's no answer." "Air France 447 is now seven miles above the sea and still climbing." "Once you're going up very, very fast, the speed is decaying very, very rapidly." "If you kept pulling back then you'd increase the rate of climb to a point and the speed would decay until you got towards the point where the aircraft stalled." "And then everything changes very dramatically." "Now, at nearly 38,000 feet," "Flight 447 starts to drop." "Just under a minute after he was first called," "Captain Dubois returns to the cockpit, taking the jump seat behind the younger officers." "When the captain emerged onto the flight deck, that was a point at which a fresh set of eyes could have made sense of what was actually going on and there was still time to recover the aircraft." "There wasn't any conversation about," ""Here's what happened and here's how we got into it"" "I think it would be very difficult for somebody just walking straight onto a flight deck to suddenly, instantly determine, "Oh, you are in a deep stall, descending at 10,000 feet a minute with a high nose attitude." "You need to do this."" "The variometer, the instrument that measures the vertical speed of the aircraft, has stopped working." "They were faced with unreliable indications of things and they were trying to make sense of what was reliable and what the airplane was actually doing so they were struggling to know what you could believe and what you couldn't believe." "Because Bonin is still pulling the stick back, the nose is up and the plane is stalling." "He thinks the plane is going too fast and moves to put on the air brakes." "At that point, that is absolutely the wrong thing to do." "The problem already was going too slow and not having enough lift." "The speed brakes would have made that worse." "David Robert rapidly overrules the man flying the plane." "The aircraft now falls to below 30,000 feet, but they still have time to recover the situation." "If they had stuck the aircraft's nose down and applied a decent amount of power, they could have recovered completely from the stall and, with an undamaged airplane, resumed the flight." "Robert now takes over control of the plane, without issuing the customary verbal acknowledgement." "But he doesn't realize that Bonin is still pushing back on his stick, and the crew concentrate on getting the wings straight, rather than powering the plane downwards, out of the stall." "They didn't understand what was happening to the airplane." "They didn't have the..." "The picture they had in their head of what was going on was so confused that the actions they took, which they hoped would recover the airplane, were absolutely the wrong actions." "They were suddenly faced with something they'd never experienced before, and therefore there was a moment of complete shock, known as the startle effect." "A lot of things were happening, all at the same time, and they didn't quite know exactly what was happening." "We'll never know what was going on, actually, in the heads of those pilots." "All we know is they were confused." "Exactly what picture they had of what was going on, we'll never know." "The stall alarm, having rung 58 times, now cuts out." "The computer stopped telling the pilots the aircraft was stalled because it had gone into realms that the computer just didn't recognize." "The computers have switched off." "They've said," ""Sorry, there's no information that I can work with, so I'm out."" "The ocean is now just 20,000 feet below the rapidly-descending plane." "The aircraft went down that way with an average rate of descent of 10,000 to 15,000 feet a minute." "That is quite a lot and that means there was an awful noise." "The aerodynamic noise was terrific-- because there was so much turbulence being generated by the wings." "Robert thinks he is flying the plane but doesn't seem to realize that Bonin is still pulling back on his stick and still keeping the nose of the plane up." "It certainly appears that there was a breakdown of the discipline and communication on that flight deck." "They're flying through what they call flight level 100, which is 10,000 feet and I think that was a point where we went from, "We have some time to figure this thing out", to, like, "We might not be able to save ourselves."" "This aircraft was falling out of the sky like a stone." "It was absolutely not flying." "It was falling." "And it was falling with its nose pointed upwards." "Captain Dubois now gets the vital information." "He realizes Bonin has been pulling back on the stick, pushing the nose up and stalling the aircraft." "To get out of the stall," "Robert knows he must get the nose of the plane pointing downwards." "The aircraft was mushing down like that, nose in the air, and it was mushing down through the sky like that." "As they near 2,000 feet, the aircraft's ground proximity warning system detects the ocean below and a new warning sounds." "(ALARM) Pull up." "Pull up." "The recording stops at 02 hours, 14 minutes, 28.4 seconds." "228 people died on Air France flight 447." "The crash also shattered the lives of families and friends." "Sebastien Vedovati and Caroline Soulas met in 2003, on an Air France flight to San Francisco." "Six years later, they died on Air France 447." "I love this picture, because we can see their rings, and I've got the same ring." "They were in love with each other." "Her parents, Robert and Corinne, often visit the memorial dedicated to the passengers and crew, located in Pere Lachaise cemetery." "Their daughter has no grave." "Her body was never found." "And the problem is also that they were a couple." "Sebastien's body has been retrieved and Caroline, no." "So it's been that they are separated now forever." "I hope she didn't feel anything before the impact, before the crash, I hope." "I'm not sure of this." "One of the questions that I get asked is: "Did my father, husband, son, brother, sister, know anything about what happened?"" "The hardest one for me was talking to the family of a young boy who was coming back from being with his grandmother in Rio, and they only asked me one question: "Did he suffer?"" "A mother asked me: "So, would my daughter have known about this?" "Because a lot of friends have told me she wouldn't have been conscious."" "And I felt obliged to tell the truth which was, I'm afraid in my view," "I think, she would certainly have been alive throughout the three and a half minute descent." "She may well have been asleep." "I would hope she was asleep, but it would have been a bumpy, uncontrolled descent and so she may well have known about it." "At a press conference in Paris," "Air France robustly defended their pilots and acknowledged the dedication of all 12 air crew who died in the disaster." "(French)" "You have to go back and say, so three experienced pilots, qualified pilots, and between them they couldn't figure out what was wrong with their airplane, why it was flying into the ocean." "That's a system failure, that's not a pilot failure." "A report by the BEA, the French safety investigation agency, found that the disaster was the result of both technical and human factors that started when the AF447 speed sensors, called pitots, malfunctioned and tripped the plane out of autopilot." "Thales, the manufacturer of the pitots, state, "The tubes had to operate under severe environmental constraints that were well outside of both the specified parameters and certification requirements."" "But this wasn't the first time that this type of pitot tube had failed." "EASA, the European Aviation Safety Agency, were aware of 17 cases of pitot failure from 2003 to 2008, but state, "it was not reported to them that crews had difficulties in addressing the situation." "The pitots had been qualified to high standards and therefore did not justify mandatory action."" "Air France knew there was a problem with the pitot tubes and, you know, by agreement they were going to phase in these replacement working pitots over a matter of months, but what they weren't going to do is to ground all their Airbus aircraft" "whilst these new working pitots are retrofitted." "They felt that they could operate safely, in their opinion." "Airbus, the manufacturer of the A330, also stress the pitots fitted on the plane met all safety requirements." "All three pitot probes satisfied the requirements of certification and, subsequent to the accident, were retested and they still satisfied, in fact they did better than the certification limits by quite a bit." "After the accident," "EASA made installation of new pitots compulsory, and since August 2009, the entire Air France fleet of A330s is equipped with the new pitots." "The investigation report also recommended improvements to A330 stall alarms and cockpit instrumentation." "Primarily, the planes' flight path navigational aid, the flight director." "The flight director was a bit confusing." "Keep in mind, we've established already that the computers were confused." "They were still tending to follow the flight director commands." "Airbus say the pilots ignored operational procedure and should have turned off the flight director as soon as they lost their speed readings." "But they will vigorously examine all recommendations made by the BEA." "But does advanced technology always make flying safer?" "The airplanes themselves, they may be simple to fly, they may have automation to help you do it, they may have computers to help you calculate things with incredible accuracy, but they are immensely complex, so if anything goes wrong," "it's rather like something going wrong with your computer." "An airplane, it's just a big bunch of computers nowadays." "So can we trust that pilots still have the skills to fly?" "The crew of AF447 were fully trained and qualified." "But the French investigation recommended additional training for pilots." "To some extent, this accident was predictable." "We've known for a long time that there are areas where pilots need better training and it's not just on Airbus type of aircraft, it's on all the modern jet fleet of aircraft." "Pilots who are primarily used to using all the automatics can have their manual flying skills degraded, and this is a concern within the industry, that that is happening." "Therefore, if you have an unusual situation that perhaps they haven't trained for, then it does rely on the discipline and appropriate training for those pilots to be able to say" ""I can still fly this airplane."" "Air France state that over the past three years, simulator sessions have been introduced to address unsure speed at altitude, as well as new emergency maneuvers in case of a stall situation." "EASA say they're reviewing all safety recommendations made by the report and, if necessary, will then take measures to improve aircraft equipment and decide on additional training requirements." "This aircraft crashed because they didn't know what was going on." "They should have known what was going on." "Do I blame them?" "No, I blame the system." "The training." "The training." "It's not Air France either because Air France trains its pilots like other airlines train their pilots." "It's the fact that the training that the law requires the airlines to do is all wrong." "It does not address the needs of pilots flying modern highly-automated airplanes, and that is why Air France 447 happened." "Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd"