The French Air Accident Investigation Bureau has put an end to the history of one of the most. A report has been released on the causes of the crash of an Air France airbus over the Atlantic. On July 1, 2009, en route from Rio de Janeiro to Paris, an A-330 crashed into the ocean, killing 228 people.
The investigation into the tragedy was complicated by the fact that the wreckage of the liner went to great depths. The flight recorders were discovered only after the disaster itself. Having deciphered them, experts shared preliminary conclusions: part of the blame was placed on the pilots who failed to adequately respond to equipment failure. Whether this version was confirmed in the final analysis will be reported from Paris NTV columnist Vadim Glusker.
In this plane crash, both turbulence and the lack of visual references played a fatal role, but most importantly, icing of the sensors of the air parameters system.
Alain Bouillard, head of the investigation: “The reason for the plane stall was the lack of control of the flight path in conditions of lack of information about altitude and speed. Ice crystals clogged the channels of the air pressure sensors, the so-called pitot tubes.”
But the experts' main complaint is against the crew itself. The report explicitly states that the pilots' actions during the emergency were erroneous.
The investigation showed that three hours after takeoff, the crew commander woke up the co-pilot and told him that he would go to sleep. Ten minutes later, the co-pilot announced to the crew that the plane was entering a zone of turbulence, and the pilots decided to transfer the plane to manual control mode. After two minutes, the sensors begin to show mutually exclusive speed indicators. The co-pilot is still trying to wake up the crew commander, who will eventually return to the cockpit. Then an alarm about loss of speed will be sent. At 2:12 the latest decryption data and the commander’s cry: “We don’t have any indicators, we can’t trust the instruments!”
Alain Bouillard: “Based on the aerodynamic noise and shaking, the pilot decided that the aircraft's speed must be too high. Despite the fact that the stall indicator went off repeatedly, the crew never realized that the stall had begun and the plane was plummeting."
In addition, experts found that the ship's commander did not just sleep during the emergency and refused to return when the co-pilot persistently called him: he spent time with the flight attendant. Be that as it may, the technical investigation into the plane crash has been completed. Now forensic investigators will deal with the last flight of the Airbus A-330.
A330 crash in Atlantic- a major aviation accident that occurred on June 1, 2009. The Airbus A330-203 airliner of Air France operated flight AF447 on the route Rio de Janeiro - Paris, but 3 hours and 45 minutes after takeoff it crashed into the waters of the Atlantic Ocean and was completely destroyed. All 228 people on board were killed - 12 crew members and 216 passengers.
This is the largest disaster in the history of Air France and the largest crash of a passenger plane since 2001 until the Boeing 777 crash in the Donetsk region (July 17, 2014, 298 dead).
The final report of the investigation into the causes of the disaster was released at a press conference on July 5, 2012.
As the causes of the disaster, it indicates freezing of the pitot tubes, the subsequent shutdown of the autopilot and uncoordinated actions of the crew, which led to a stall from which the crew was unable to recover the plane.
Flight 447 Details
Airplane
Airbus A330-203 (registration number F-GZCP, serial 660) was released in 2005 (first flight on February 25). On April 18 of the same year it was transferred to Air France. Equipped with two General Electric CF6-80-E1A3 turbofan engines. On December 27, 2008, February 21, 2009, and April 16, 2009, the aircraft underwent scheduled repairs, and no problems were found. On the day of the disaster, the airliner had completed 2,644 takeoff-landing cycles and had flown over 18,870 hours.
Crew and passengers
The aircraft was flown by a crew consisting of:
According to Air France, there were citizens of 33 countries on board the airliner. The crew included 3 pilots, 3 chief stewards and 6 stewards and stewardesses. All crew members are French, except for one Brazilian stewardess.
Among the 216 passengers were 126 men, 82 women, 7 children and one infant.
The plane was almost completely filled - 3 passenger seats out of 219 remained free.
| Nationality of people on board | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Citizenship | Passengers | Crew | Total |
| France | 61 | 11 | 72 |
| Brazil | 58 | 1 | 59 |
| Germany | 26 | 0 | 26 |
| Italy | 9 | 0 | 9 |
| China | 9 | 0 | 9 |
| Switzerland | 6 | 0 | 6 |
| Great Britain | 5 | 0 | 5 |
| Hungary | 4 | 0 | 4 |
| Ireland | 3 | 0 | 3 |
| Libya | 3 | 0 | 3 |
| Morocco | 3 | 0 | 3 |
| Norway | 3 | 0 | 3 |
| Slovakia | 3 | 0 | 3 |
| Spain | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| Poland | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| USA | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| Austria | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| Argentina | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| Belgium | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| Gabon | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| Denmark | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| Iceland | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| Canada | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| Netherlands | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| The Republic of Korea | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| Russia | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| Romania | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| Türkiye | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| Philippines | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| Croatia | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| Sweden | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| Estonia | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| South Africa | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| Total | 216 | 12 | 228 |
Among the passengers were a number of famous people:
On board flight 447 was a Russian businessman, resident of the Moscow region, Andrei Kiselyov.
In total, there were 228 people on board the plane - 12 crew members and 216 passengers.
Chronology of events
Airplane disappearance
Flight AF447 took off from Rio de Janeiro to Paris at 23:29. After 2.5 hours, the pilots reported turbulence, then the aircraft’s on-board computer transmitted several service messages, after which contact with the aircraft was lost.
On the afternoon of June 1, Air France representatives said that there was practically no chance of finding the plane intact, and by the end of the day it was announced that the plane had crashed.
Another 14 bodies were found during the day, bringing the total to 16. Air France says it is replacing pitot tubes on all Airbus planes on the assumption that defective older-type sensors may have caused the crash.
June 8
A Brazilian search team retrieves part of a vertical tail fin painted in Air France colors from the ocean. The Brazilian Navy reports that about a hundred objects were found in the crash area, including seats and oxygen masks with the Air France logo.
the 9th of June
Brazilian officials say a total of 41 bodies have been found. The first 16 bodies found over the weekend will arrive at the rescue base in Fernando de Noronha, located off the coast of Brazil. The remaining 25 will be delivered later.
June 10th
The French nuclear submarine Emeraude, equipped with high-precision sonar, reaches the disaster site to begin searching for the black boxes.
Search operation
year 2009
The search operation was launched several hours after contact with flight AF447 was lost. Bad weather at the supposed site of the disaster greatly hampered the search.
2011
Investigation
Before the discovery and decoding of flight recorders, the only data on the condition of the aircraft before the disaster were automatic messages transmitted by the airliner. There was no objective control data, since the airliner was outside the radar coverage area at the time of the disaster.
The first results of the investigation into the crash of flight AF447 indicated that the airliner did not collapse in the air, as previously thought, but after hitting the water. This preliminary conclusion was made by experts from the French Bureau of Investigation and Analysis of Civil Aviation Safety (BEA), which published a report on July 2, 2009. According to him, the plane fell into the water " with significant vertical acceleration».
On March 17, 2011, French authorities announced that they were launching an investigation into the European aviation concern Airbus on suspicion of manslaughter.
On May 16, 2011, it was reported that BEA had succeeded in copying all data from the parametric recorder. BEA officials, who were investigating the cause of the crash, also managed to obtain recordings of the last two hours of the flight from the voice recorder. All collected data was sent to the BEA for thorough analysis.
Flight recorder data
The report provides flight data recorded by parametric and voice recorders. At 01:55 the crew commander woke up the co-pilot and said: […] he will take my place. After the briefing, at 02:01:46, the commander left the cockpit and went to rest. The co-pilot sat in the commander's seat, the trainee co-pilot sat in the right seat. At 02:06, the co-pilot warned the flight attendant team that the plane was entering an area of turbulence. After 4 minutes, the pilots performed a slight left turn and reduced speed from 872 km/h to 400 km/h due to increasing turbulence.
At 02:10:05 the autopilot and autothrottle switched off. The co-pilot pushed the stick to the left and down, countering the right roll. The stall warning sounded twice. After 10 seconds, the plane's speed dropped sharply from 398 to 111 km/h. The angle of attack of the aircraft increased and the altitude began to rise. The left side of the instrument panel displayed a sharp increase in the indicated speed - up to 398 km/h. The integrated backup instrumentation system did not display this change for a minute (the readings on the right side of the instrument panel are not recorded by the parametric recorder). The trainee co-pilot continued to keep the nose of the aircraft up. The angle of the horizontal tail stabilizer increased from 3° to 13° within one minute and remained in this position until the end of the flight.
At approximately 02:11, the plane reached its maximum flight altitude of 11,600 meters. In this case, the angle of attack reached 16°, the engine control levers (EC) were moved to the “ Takeoff/Go-Around"(maximum thrust). At 02:11:40 the PIC returned to the cockpit. The angle of attack increased to 40°, the aircraft descended to an altitude of 10,675 meters with almost 100% engine thrust (the revolutions of the front engine fan, which creates most of the thrust in turbofan engines, are recorded). The stall warning is disabled because the indicated airspeed is considered unreliable at this angle of attack. Approximately 20 seconds later, the co-pilot reduced the pitch angle slightly, the indicated airspeed became valid, and the stall alarm sounded again. From this moment until the end of the flight, the pitch angle was not less than 35°. In the last minutes of the flight, the throttles were in the “low throttle” position (minimum thrust). The engines continued to operate and remained completely under the control of the crew.
The recording of both recorders ends at 02:14:28 or 3 hours 45 minutes after takeoff. At this moment, the aircraft speed was 198 km/h with a vertical speed of about 3345 m/min, the engine thrust was 55% of the maximum. The pitch angle was 16.2° (nose up), with a left bank of 5.3°. During the descent, the plane turned almost 180° to the right on a course of 270°. The airliner was in a stall for 3 minutes 30 seconds, falling from a height of 11,600 meters.
Incorrect airspeed readings are an obvious cause of autopilot disengagement, but why pilots lose control of the airplane remains a mystery, especially since the pilot typically tries to lower the nose of the airplane to prevent a stall. Multiple sensors show the pitch angle and there is no sign of any malfunction.
BEA Third Interim Report
The third report stated that some new facts had been established, in particular:
BEA organized a team of aviation specialists and doctors to analyze the pilots' response to the current situation.
Air France published a bulletin in which it stated that " misleading stall warning signals on and off, contradicting the actual attitude of the aircraft, could be factors that significantly complicate the crew's analysis of the situation» .
BEA Investigation Final Report
It confirmed the findings of previous reports, noted additional details and added recommendations to improve aviation security. According to the findings of the final report, the disaster occurred as a result of the following main events:
- Temporary desynchronization of speed readings, most likely as a result of pitot tubes being clogged with ice crystals, which led to the autopilot being turned off and switching to an alternative piloting law (English).
- The crew made inappropriate control actions, which led to the departure from stable flight.
- The crew did not take the actions prescribed in the event of loss of current speed readings.
- The crew was late in determining and correcting the deviation from the specified flight mode.
- The crew did not have sufficient skills to determine when a stall was approaching.
- The crew was unable to determine the beginning of the stall and therefore did not take action to recover the aircraft from the stall.
These events were the result of a combination of the following main factors:
- Feedback mechanisms in the controls involved made it impossible to identify and correct repeated failures to follow procedures for loss of current speed readings and pitot tube icing and its consequences.
- The crew did not have practical skills in manually controlling the aircraft either at high flight altitudes or in the event of discrepancies in the current speed readings.
- The joint performance of the duties of the two pilots was complicated both by a lack of understanding of the situation at the time the autopilot was turned off, and by an inappropriate reaction to the effect of surprise, which led them to a state of emotional stress.
- There was no clear indication in the cockpit of the discrepancy in the current speed readings recorded by the on-board computers.
- The crew did not respond to the stall warning due to the short duration of the stall warning, which may have appeared to be a false alarm; with a lack of visual information confirming that the aircraft is approaching a stall after losing speed; with readings from the main computer, which could confirm the crew’s erroneous understanding of the situation; not recognizing the sound signal; mistaking buffeting during a stall for buffeting associated with exceeding the maximum speed; or having difficulty identifying and understanding the features of the transition to an alternative aircraft control law that does not provide protection in the angle of attack channel.
- Inconsistency of actions and poor training of the crew (co-pilots David Robert and Pierre-Cedric Bonin, who were in the cockpit). For three minutes, while the emergency situation was developing, the pilots could not come to a common opinion about the spatial position and direction of movement of the aircraft.
- Panic in the cockpit. More than a minute before the commander arrived, the two pilots took chaotic and uncoordinated actions, which transferred the situation from an emergency to an emergency. The required report to the commander about the situation in the cockpit was not made.
- The trainee co-pilot Pierre-Cedric Bonin, who was in the right seat, committed a gross violation of the crew resource management procedure (). At the first sign of a malfunction, he panicked and pulled the control stick towards himself, without informing either co-pilot David Robert, who occupied the PIC seat, or commander Mark Dubois, who arrived a minute later. He reported his actions only a few seconds before the plane crashed into the water. The crew commander immediately made the right decision and ordered to stop attempting to climb; the co-pilot demanded that control be transferred to him. At an altitude of about 600 meters, the plane began to pick up speed, but it was not possible to stop the stall in time.
According to the publication, the plane remained operational and under control the entire time before the collision with water. The authors of the article placed all the blame for the disaster on the inexperienced trainee co-pilot Pierre-Cedric Bonin.
Chesley Sullenberger, chairman of the International Civil Airline Pilots Association, believes that in this case there is a systemic flaw in the design of modern aircraft and the crew training system. In his opinion, modern computer systems control the aircraft 99% of the time, which deprives pilots of direct piloting experience and reduces their preparedness for emergency situations.
In addition, several documentaries and programs were aired that put forward various alternative versions of the disaster, but all of them lost relevance after the discovery of the flight recorders.
The Air France pilots' union said pitot tubes played a decisive role in the crash. Union President Gérer Arnoux confirmed that the disaster could have been avoided if only they had been replaced in time.
Cultural aspects
Air France Flight 447 crash featured in season 12 of Canadian documentary series
The horrific plane crash occurred on June 1, 2009, over the Atlantic when Air France Flight 447 Rio-Paris experienced air turbulence, according to pilot reports, and then experienced multiple electrical system failures and depressurization, according to a computer message. salon.
Ocean Search for Air France Aircraft Continues
June 2, 2009
http://www.reuters.com/article/topNews/idUSTRE5501PB20090602?sp=true Four hours after taking off from Rio de Janeiro airport, the Air France plane flew into an area of stormy weather and 15 minutes later transmitted an automatic message indicating an electrical failure. The culprit could have been lightning striking and causing the failure of some mechanisms on the Airbus 330-200, which has a good track record of reliable operation. But aviation experts said a lightning strike on a plane is a common event and cannot alone explain the cause of the disaster. They also said the plane may have suffered an electrical failure, effectively leaving the pilots "blind" and rendering the plane helpless in an area notorious for its bad weather.The plane's black box is unlikely to be found because the Atlantic is three miles deep below the crash site. When speculating about the cause of the disaster, experts take into account the following key points: airliners do not crash due to lightning strikes alone; electrical systems are designed to be redundant to prevent complete failure; storms do not cause electrical failures; fuel films found at the crash site indicate that there was no explosion, such as a bomb, and no terrorist group has claimed responsibility; and depressurization of the cabin may indicate that the plane has broken up into pieces.
What Happened to Flight 447?
June 1, 2009
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE5505BF20090602?virtualBrandChannel=10531&pageNumber=2 Four hours into the flight, the plane encountered an area of severe turbulence. Fifteen minutes later, now over the ocean and a long distance from shore, an automatic signal was transmitted indicating that the aircraft was in serious trouble. A sequence of a dozen technical messages showed that a completely unprecedented situation had occurred on the aircraft - several electrical equipment systems had failed, and the failure of the pressurization system posed the greatest threat. It has been four decades since lightning alone caused a plane crash in the United States. Much time and effort is spent protecting aircraft from clear and present dangers. And lightning strikes airliners all the time - you don't hear about it because nothing bad happens. Remember, one thing rarely causes a modern airliner to crash. Experts: Jetliner Crashes Due to Storms Are Rare
June 1, 2009
http://www.newsday.com/news/local/ny-liplan0212831280jun01,0,5886616.story Early Monday morning, 14 minutes after Air France Flight 447 "entered a thunderstorm area with severe turbulence," the plane sent an automated message indicating an electrical failure and cabin depressurization, said company spokeswoman Brigitte Barrand. The Terrifying Last 14 Minutes of the Plane
June 3, 2009
http://www.nypost.com/seven/06042009/news/worldnews/jets_horrifying_final_14_minutes_172538.htm At 11:10 p.m., a cascade of horrific problems began. Automatic messages transmitted by the jetliner indicated that the autopilot had disconnected, suggesting that Dubois and his two co-pilots were trying to navigate through dangerous clouds manually. The main computer system switched to an alternate power source, and the controls responsible for maintaining the plane's stability were damaged. An alarm sounded indicating a malfunction of the aircraft's systems. At 11:13 p.m., other automated messages reported failure of the airspeed, altitude, and direction control systems. Control of the main on-board computer and wing spoilers also failed. The last automatic message, at 11:14 p.m., indicated a complete electrical failure and severe cabin depressurization - catastrophic events indicating that the aircraft had broken up and crashed into the ocean. New Air France Flight Debris Found, Hardly an Explosion
June 3, 2009
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20090603/wl_nm/us_france_plane Brazilian Defense Minister Nelson Jobim said the presence of large patches of fuel in the water would likely rule out an explosion, quashing speculation about an explosion. The plane sent no distress signals before the accident, only automatic messages indicating electrical failures and depressurization shortly after it entered the stormy weather zone. If the data indicating decompression was correct, then it was caused by problems with structural strength. Aviation trade publications have been paying particular attention to a series of warnings issued in recent months by US and European regulators about electronic systems on A330s and A340s that could send the planes into nosedives. The directives covered ADIRUs - Airborne Inertial Reference Units - which relay critical information to the cockpit to help the aircraft fly.Per the Zetas, the Air France plane failed to withstand the electromagnetic flux, which caused the electrical systems that control the plane to fail.
Today, the world's media are commenting on the mysterious disappearance of an Air France plane over the Atlantic with 228 people on board. The Airbus A-330 was caught in a severe thunderstorm with thunder, lightning and turbulence, but its design was considered very reliable. The first interviews are given by the lucky ones who were not allowed on the fateful flight.
Watching in horror the search for the missing Air France plane over the Atlantic, Dane Stefan van Oss thanks God for saving him from death. The fact is that Stefan was also supposed to fly on this plane.
Three weeks ago he decided to go on vacation to Brazil. He really liked the country, and really wanted to extend this vacation, but he had to return. On Monday Stefan had to fly back to Europe and he bought tickets for flight AF 447.
As van Oss said in an interview with the Danish TV show Hart van Nederland, he was saved by a miracle - a very good friend called and said that something bad would happen and Stefan should not fly on this flight. He obeyed and did not board the plane, which he later did not regret.
Let us remind you that the search continues in the Atlantic Ocean for the Airbus 330-200 airliner that disappeared from radar screens during the flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris, the Washington Post reports. “On board were 12 crew members and 216 passengers - citizens of 32 countries,” write correspondents Edward Cody and Sholnn Freeman.
At 4:00 am Paris time, the aircraft encountered a severe thunderstorm with thunder, lightning and turbulence. From 4:14 a.m., the airliner sent several automatic signals about a power outage and a drop in air pressure in the cabin, after which the connection was lost.
“If a plane sank in the middle of the Atlantic, finding material traces of the disaster will not be easy. The central regions of the oceans are one of the most remote corners of the world from civilization,” an expert from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology explained to the publication.
Modern airliners typically avoid the front of a thunderstorm, even though they are designed to withstand lightning strikes. The Airbus 330-200 is famous for its reliability, and yet the plane, flying at an altitude of 35 thousand feet, could have landed directly in the most dangerous part of the thunderstorm front, which in this area stretched up to an altitude of 50 thousand meters, the publication cites the explanation of a meteorologist.
It is unclear how long the plane remained in the air after the last automatic message or why the crew did not issue an SOS signal. The "black boxes" are equipped with radio beacons that operate for 30 days, but it will be difficult to detect them in the water, the newspaper adds.
According to The Times, the most likely cause of the A-330 crash appears to be turbulence. For 40 years, there has not been a case where lightning was the main cause of a plane crash, writes the author of the article, Charles Bremner.
Lightning strikes airliners with some regularity, but this does not pose a significant danger. According to recent American statistics, each commercial aircraft is struck by lightning once on average every year.
On the other hand, severe turbulence poses a threat even to large aircraft, the correspondent points out. Small planes caught in a storm periodically find themselves broken into pieces and crashed to the ground. The most famous case of such a disaster occurred in 1966 in Japan, near Mount Fuji: then 124 people died.
The German Der Tagesspiegel, reporting on the plane crash, quotes the words of the head of Air France, Pierre-Henri Gourgeon: rescuers “localized the search area” for the airliner flying across the Atlantic. "The disaster occurred halfway between the coast of Brazil and the African coast."
Gurzhon named a lightning strike as one of the possible versions of the crash. However, the publication comments, experts refute this version, pointing out that modern airliners are equipped with special devices that protect against lightning strikes.
This is the worst and by far the most mysterious disaster in the history of French aviation, writes Le Temps. So far, Air France is putting forward a hypothesis that explains the incident by meteorological conditions. As Météo France meteorologist Etienne Kapikian notes, “this is one of the areas where the most thunderstorms occur in the world.”
According to Francois Grangier of the Bureau of Investigation and Analysis, Flight 447 appears to have been the victim of "something extremely sudden and powerful", so the pilots did not have time to report the problem. The emergency beacons did not signal, which means they were damaged before they could send a signal.
Another mystery is that Briton Patricia Coakley, whose husband was on board the Airbus A330-200 that disappeared on June 1 during a flight over the Atlantic, believes that the plane did not sink. The woman motivates this by the fact that when she calls her husband on her mobile phone, she hears beeps. Thus, the phone is still working and within reach, the British woman says, writes NEWSru.com with reference to The Sun.
Coakley's husband, Arthur, 58, last called his wife to say he had boarded a plane from Rio de Janeiro to Paris. Before this, two flights that the Briton was planning to take were cancelled.
Based on press materials.
On Friday, BEA, the French Bureau of Air Accident Investigation, released a summary of its report on the cause of the crash of an Air France Airbus A330 over the Atlantic Ocean on June 1, 2009. More than two years have passed since the disaster, which claimed 228 lives. The researchers were helped by deciphering the “black boxes” that were found in the ocean only in March of this year.
The pilots "did not determine that the aircraft was losing altitude" despite warning signals, the report said.
Information was confirmed that one of the altitude sensors had frozen - the so-called pitot tube, part of an aircraft air pressure receiver that determines flight speed and altitude. After this, the plane began to descend, but the pilots did not notice this. The flight was long - the plane flew from Rio de Janeiro to Paris. Three and a half hours after takeoff, the ship's captain, 52-year-old Marc Dubois, handed over control to two pilots, putting 32-year-old Pierre-Cedric Bonin in his seat, and went to bed. Bonin was less experienced than the captain, with 2,900 hours of flight time compared to Dubois' 11,000 hours. His wife Isabelle and sons aged four and eight were on board the plane. The third pilot was 37-year-old David Robert, who had flown six and a half thousand hours.
Five minutes after the captain left, the pilot warned the crew that the plane was entering an area of turbulence. After another four minutes, the autopilot and autothrottle switched off. An alarm sounded warning of a stall, but for some reason the pilots ignored it. “It should be noted that the alarm signal, which stopped and then turned on again and at the same time contradicted the readings of the sensors in the cockpit, confused them,” the report notes.
The last time the alarm sounded was for 57 seconds.
Over the next four minutes, the plane went into an aerodynamic stall - its wings simply could not keep the car in the air. The flight recorders recorded that the pilots were trying to prevent the fall, but for some reason they tried to raise the nose of the plane, instead of lowering it, as the rules dictate. Robert was at the helm at the time.
Realizing that the situation was critical, they woke up the captain. But it was already too late. The liner crashed into the waters of the Atlantic at a speed of 180 meters per second. The collision was fatal for everyone on board.
The report notes that the remaining pilots in the cockpit were not trained to work in conditions of unreliable airspeed indicators and were not trained to manually control the machine at high altitude, Reuters reports.
She has already issued a statement in which she asked not to rush into blaming the pilots. “Nothing at this level of the investigation can suggest that the crash was caused by crew incompetence,” the airline said in a statement. Air France representatives tend to blame the aerospace company Thales, which manufactured the speed sensors. Employees of the French Air Accident Investigation Bureau, in turn, recalled that their report is not an official accusation.
Previously, experts have repeatedly expressed surprise at the too slow investigation into what happened. For two years, attempts to find the wreckage of the liner in the ocean were unsuccessful. But in mid-March 2011, a court in Paris brought charges of manslaughter against the airline's management, as well as the head of Airbus. The businessmen categorically disagreed with this formulation and demanded that the court wait for the “black boxes” to be discovered. Just a couple of weeks later, divers reported success: first they found the wreckage of the plane, and then the “black boxes”. The study showed that they were perfectly preserved.
Divers recovered 50 bodies earlier this year, with a further 104 recovered and flown to France over the past month. The remaining bodies of the victims have not been found.