On a doomed flight, a chilling alarm was raised by the pilot just moments before it disastrously plunged into the Atlantic ocean.
The horrific incident occurred on June 1, 2009 when the Air France Airbus A330 vanished over the Atlantic during a horrific storm, just four hours after take-off. The catastrophic crash killed all 228 passengers onboard, as the plane flew from Rio de Janeiro to Paris.
It took two years for officials to find the wreckage aircraft in an extensive search operation that covered a whopping 10,000sqkm. Among the most crucial discoveries was the cockpit recordings with the final words of the co-pilot and first officer, Pierre-Cedric Bonin, aged 32 at the time.
He said: “[I] don’t have control of the aeroplane anymore now.”
Before he added: “I don’t have control of the aeroplane at all!”
The investigation found that a deadly mix of technical errors and the pilots’ ill-equipped response when the plane started stalling led to the crash. This led to the plane hurtling downwards at a spine-chilling rate of 11,000ft per minute, the Mirror reports.
The French Bureau of Enquiry and Analysis for Civil Aviation Safety (BEA), reported that ice crystals made the autopilot unexpectedly disconnect mid-flight.
The pilots were left baffled by incorrect air-speed readings and made the catastrophic mistake of angling the aircraft’s nose up instead of down during a stall. The flight’s relief first officer, co-pilot David Robert, aged 37, urgently instructed, “controls to the left” before taking over the controls himself.
Despite this, with Bonin persistently pulling back on his stick, their actions cancelled each other out, triggering a severe “dual input” audio alarm, as reported by Daily Star.
Amidst the blaring cockpit alarms, Captain Marc Dubois, 58, demanded of his crew: “Er what are you [doing]? ” To which Robert grimly confessed: “We’ve lost all control of the aeroplane, we don’t understand anything, we’ve tried everything.”
In a tense moment, Robert was overheard muttering: “Climb, climb, climb, climb.”
Bonin admitted: “But I’ve been at maximum nose-up for a while! ” Realising the dire error, Dubois shouted in desperation: “No no no, don’t climb! No No No! ” Although Bonin relinquished control to Robert, it was tragically too late.
As the plane was too low to recover from the stall, passengers were left unaware of their fate during the terrifying three-and-a-half-minute descent. In a last-ditch effort, co-pilot Bonin pulled back on his control stick and exclaimed in disbelief, “We’re going to crash! This can’t be true. But what’s happening?”
Amidst the chaos, an unidentified voice uttered the chilling words: “F***, we’re dead.”
Fast forward to 2023, both Airbus and Air France have been exonerated from manslaughter charges in connection with the disaster.
The incident has since led to pivotal changes within the aviation sector, including stricter regulations for airspeed sensors and enhanced pilot training programs.
