Air France Flight 447 Vanishes Over Atlantic Ocean | Mayday | On The Move

[Music] four kilometers below the waves the biggest challenge was the depth at the bottom of the atlantic investigators search for the remains of air france flight 447 this was a major commercial airline what the hell are you doing that had a plane suddenly drop out of the sky in four and a half minutes 228 people are gone it was a real shock do we need to contact brazil and senegal air traffic control right away please air crash investigators face a monumental task we absolutely have to understand why this accident happened the easiest explanation is that the bomb blew it out of the sky that would explain it the answers may lie in the wreckage but finding that evidence stop stop there will take years they had to do whatever it took [Music] air france flight 447 is crossing the atlantic ocean the airbus a330 is flying an 11-hour direct route from rio de janeiro to paris 58 year old captain mark dupois in command here's the new forecast he's been a pilot for well over half his life and is now one of the most senior captains at air france it's hard to see anything in this plane with this lighting first officer pierre cedric bonner is 32 years old he's been flying the a330 for about a year we are arriving at into 37 year old relief pilot david robert is on standby the three pilots fly in shifts to stay alert there are 216 passengers on the overnight flight including canadian business executive brad clemis i talked to my brother on the sunday morning and we talked about our children and then i talked to him right up to the time that he got onto the plane like so many of these air warriors or whatever they call them he flew all the time he was quite used to it and i think he probably even enjoyed it with the autopilot holding the plane steady at 35 thousand feet they're france447 air france 447 go ahead the crew communicates with brazilian air traffic control air france 447 contact atlantic center as they fly an on-board computer monitors the engines hydraulics and other systems it also sends progress reports to air france headquarters every 10 minutes the computer transmits the plane's position along with any maintenance data the goal of the maintenance messages is simply to help the ground teams prepare for any repairs to the plane that are needed for the next departure three hours into the flight the captain reports reaching a navigational waypoint off the coast of brazil air france 447 position in total maintain flight level 350 okay will do so we've got a thing up ahead yes i saw that at 1 49 am the a330 leaves brazilian radar surveillance and enters a communications dead zone over the mid-atlantic two hours later an air traffic controller in senegal tries to contact the flight airplanes come in here france 447 he can't reach the crew so he alerts air france no one has heard from the crew of flight 447 the only communication 24 maintenance messages transmitted by the plane hours earlier an air france maintenance worker tries to make contact but his message bounces back what the hell perhaps the communication system has failed hf radio especially at night is not terribly reliable so for some of the time that it was missing everybody was saying well i i hope it's just a communication problem by the time the plane should have reached french airspace controllers still can't make contact at charles de gaulle airport in paris the 11 10 am arrival time comes and goes with no sign of flight 447 the a330 would have run out of fuel by now the airline begins notifying families the plane has almost certainly crashed at sea i had a infinitesimally small hope that he might have been on a different plane because we weren't 100 sure what other flights might be coming back that he could possibly be on by the afternoon of june the first the world learns that flight 447 from rio to paris has mysteriously vanished it was a real shock to me and the whole industry that that a modern aircraft like an airbus a330 um uh operated by a world-class airline like air france could just go missing without a word searchers scramble to the mid-atlantic to look for the plane and survivors uh the plane had been missing 11 or 12 hours at this stage uh without any communication whatsoever it's one of the worst accidents in the history of commercial aviation an advanced passenger jet is gone 228 people are presumed dead announces there's almost no chance anyone survived the job of solving this mystery falls to the bea france's air safety agency it's under enormous pressure to come up with answers we absolutely had to understand why this accident happened and with that plane and that airline takes charge of the investigation he's a pilot and aeronautical engineer with almost 20 years experience as an air crash investigator i had worked on other important investigations like the concord so i was conscious of the fact that the investigation would be difficult but i was calm and i surrounded myself with competent people french systems engineer leopold sartorius also joins the team on day one from the beginning we expected a long and complicated investigation okay we need to contact brazil and senegal air traffic control right away please their first goal find what's left of flight 447 it disappeared from radar without sending a distress signal yes and for many days there was no trace on the surface of the ocean this is the last time they sent their position positional messages sent by the plane every 10 minutes allowed us to be sure enough of the zone a large zone where the plane might be found sartorius doesn't know what direction the plane flew after sending that last report he only knows how fast it was flying there's a huge area to search i say we start here thousands of square kilometers of open water air and naval forces scanned the ocean looking for any sign of flight 447 finally after five days of searching a brazilian pilot spots a few scattered pieces of floating debris wreckage from an a330 but no survivors the finder raises any lingering doubts about the crash everyone aboard flight 447 is dead your world collapses um it was absolutely horrible you know he was a wonderful person i was very close to him and uh and it's just you know the most horrible thing that you could think of the families of 227 others are in the exact same position they all need answers what brings an airbus down from 35 000 feet nothing the loss of an airplane during cruise is always rare we're more used to events taking place during takeoff or landing so this event raised a lot of questions one of the most pressing and disturbing questions has the world just witnessed a deadly terrorist attack i think a terrorism scenario was thoroughly plausible you know very simply because this is a very modern aeroplane with a very good safety record the easiest explanation is that something that a bomb blew it out of the sky that would explain atlantic currents have spread floating aircraft debris over 500 square kilometers of ocean every piece recovered is carefully catalogued photographed and sent ashore for analysis but it's the wreckage lost at the bottom of the sea that investigators need most wreckage that includes the vital flight recorders [Music] if we didn't find the flight recorders we would never understand what happened the two flight recorders capture important details air france 447 go ahead of what the pilots say and do during the flight 447 contact atlantic center the black boxes are so vital they're equipped with a locator beacon to help investigators find them even underwater but the clock is ticking the beacon can only send a signal for 30 days what's more the mid-atlantic ocean is four and a half kilometers deep in some places deeper than the remains of the titanic technicians listen for the signal at this depth we need to get right over them while crisscrossing a search area of 17 000 square kilometers it was an immense area while the bea scours the ocean floor for the flight recorders other team members are scrutinizing the only hard evidence they have so far i will pull up all the messages they sent the 24 maintenance messages sent by flight 447's aircraft communication addressing and reporting system a cars this is the first serious accident to a modern airliner where we'd had some a cars dated a car's messages are highly technical they're not designed to reveal what the crew saw said or did during the flight to have only the maintenance messages to work with is really unusual we had parcels of information that gave us in fact very little information but they do provide an intriguing lead see this is a problem with torpedo tubes one of the maintenance messages notes a failure in the device that measures air speed the pitot tube the a-car's messages had given us the first piece of the puzzle we knew that there had been a clogging problem in the pitot tubes pitot tubes are small cylindrical sensors that sit outside the body of the plane as air rushes through the tubes they calculate air speed but sometimes pitot tubes temporarily fail in an environment with very dense ice crystals all the ice crystals clog the tube and stop the air from entering air france and other airlines were in the process of replacing pitot tubes to prevent just this kind of problem the tubes were freezing all the time annoying but certainly not dangerous a frozen pitot tube is considered far from catastrophic if you lose a pitot tube you don't fall out of the sky the pilots knew about the issue and how to respond to it the company had notified its pilots with an osv an information bulletin that described the phenomenon and the appropriate measures to take conduit here look at this we are concludes that frozen pitot tubes alone cannot explain the crash there is more to this story these messages aren't much health we were certain of this right away we would have to look elsewhere while the frozen pitot tubes may not have been to blame we are wonders if extreme weather may have played a role strong turbulence can damage a plane or even cause the loss of an aircraft by rupturing a wing or damaging the on-board systems investigators consider the possibility that flight 447 flew through violent weather strong enough to bring down the plane turbulence might explain what caused the accident 33 000 feet maximum thrust even at that altitude it may have been impossible for the pilots to recover from a stall brought on by a violent storm the forces could have torn the plane apart [Music] on a plane the main danger from turbulence is structural breakage like losing a piece of the tail or losing a wing in an extreme and that would lead to the loss of the aircraft i need more weather data pilot reports satellite images everything flight 447 disappeared in a volatile region where trade winds from the two hemispheres converge creating violent storms they were in the intertropical convergence zone which often has very strong turbulence other planes change their route that night to avoid storms in the area but what kind of weather did flight 447 encounter what were the actual conditions what was the actual environment around this plane it was a real question beyond turbulence thunderstorms pose other threats to aviation perhaps lightning was to blame for the crash sir we're losing all our instruments if there had been some deficiency in the insulation of the plane and the systems were damaged we likely would have seen a lot of problems the system did lightning bring down flight 447 so far the only evidence boyar has is floating debris including some unused life jackets indicating that passengers didn't have time to put them on the gillette recovering the life jackets in their original packaging told us that the event happened very quickly the passengers weren't ready for the impact with the surface of the water the unopened life vests hint at a sudden catastrophe but other debris suggests just the opposite the recovery of the tail was a very important element the pattern of fragmentation can reveal important clues about when the tale broke off all the ruptures were static in nature there was no trace of fatigue damage this had to happen when it hit the water the tail was connected to the fuselage at the moment of impact it didn't come apart in flight [Music] if the a330 hit the water in one piece it wasn't brought down by a bomb or by turbulence investigators are no closer to solving this mystery it has been three weeks since flight 447 disappeared into the atlantic ocean in just days the recorder's battery-powered locator beacons will go dead [Music] with only floating debris to study specialists pour over a section of flight 447's galley looks like the pressure was vertical like this they make a key discovery the plane landed flat and at high speed examining the galley confirmed that there was an enormous vertical acceleration the instant the plane hit the surface of the water everything inside the plane was flattened like a car in a metal crusher they realized that the airplane had not nose dived into the sea it was almost certain that it had belly flopped into the sea and how that could have happened to a modern airliner nobody could think of condition under these circumstances it was essential to find the recorders to understand the accident and explain why it happened the search at sea hits day 30 with no sign of the a330 the locator beacon is presumed dead we are turns to high-tech sonar to continue the search sonar was the only way we could detect metal on the ocean floor and have some chance of finding the wreckage [Music] but steep underwater mountains and valleys make the ocean floor difficult to scan the search area really hadn't been seen before it was the size of switzerland and you were running up through the alps trying to find this thing so that's what the terrain looked like basically in in a general sense after months of searching they've scanned more than 22 000 square kilometers of ocean bed and found absolutely nothing the absence of the flight recorders and wreckage felt very frustrating and like a failure to us it was inconceivable in 2009 2010 that we could lose a major airliner and not be able to find it not be able to understand even remotely what had happened and why 228 people had lost their lives investigators are determined to succeed they turned to the same automated underwater vehicles that found the titanic it's probably the first time auvs have been run on that terrain that's steep uh and to look for something this small you know it's a big plane when you stand next to it but when you're searching the ocean it's a very small target still no sign of any wreckage at the bottom of the sea [Music] it's as if the plane simply disappeared 18 months after flight 447 goes missing we are realizes that the odds of finding what he's after are growing slim at the end of 2010 we'd already spent 22 million euros continuing the search will cost millions more with no guarantee of success we weren't sure we could find the wreckage and if we did find the recorders we weren't sure we'd be able to read them the black box is not designed to stay in such deep water for two years and still function afterwards the boxes may have already been crushed by the tremendous underwater pressure at four kilometers below the surface they're up against a punishing force of over five thousand eight hundred pounds per square inch investigators may be fighting a losing battle nearly two years after the air france disaster we are has little to show for his efforts no significant wreckage and no black boxes but he refuses to give up we can't stop we can find the boxes i know we can for the bea it was their job to find out what happened so obviously they wanted to find the black boxes but can you imagine what it would be like for airbus not to know for sure what caused this accident only ever to be able to theorize himalayan families of the victims are also desperate for answers it was extremely important for us that they find the black boxes and find out what happened so we were determined to put as much pressure as we could on the authorities to ensure that the search continued on march the 25th 2011 the bea begins one final search again they launch auvs to scour the ocean floor they focus on a 37 kilometer wide circle around the plains last known position the auv is separate from the vessel so once you launch it it runs its 20 or 24-hour mission independent of the vessel the weather gets rough the eob is still tracking back and forth and it doesn't care [Music] one week into the search a submersible captures a sonar image of something huge on the ocean floor we are gamble may have just paid off it sure looks like a plane the crew immediately sends down another submersible this time to take high-resolution digital images i never thought i'd see the day the crew sends the images straight to boiler's office in paris two years of his life have been devoted to this moment i don't believe it thank god [Music] receiving the photographs was a moment we had waited for for two years it conjured up indescribable emotions very strong on april the 3rd 2011 the wreckage of air france flight 447 has finally been found it lies 12 kilometers northeast of the plane's last reported position at a depth of almost 4 000 meters locating the wreckage was already something exceptional and very significant in the life of an investigator with the crash site pinpointed a second hunt begins an operator guides a robotic submersible as it peers through the darkness in search of the two black boxes it's just like a junkyard it's just nothing but aircraft debris everywhere things are on top of each other there's fuselage skin there's engines there's all sorts of things all over the place days pass with no sign of the recorders investigators know that even if they find what they're looking for two years under water may have rendered the devices useless we had no idea whether the flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder would be in a working order [Music] then we are gets the break he's been hoping for stop stop there zoom in on that i don't know absolutely incredible [Applause] those are moments that are difficult to describe moments in your career that you can't forget an unmanned sub first recovers the flight data recorder then the cockpit voice recorder once it's on deck the john dammery take it and they put it in the box and secure it up then everybody's like holding their breath and at that point you know you have it so it's really a tremendous feeling french john darm escort the flight data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder to leo sartorius's lab in paris after countless hours of searching and theorizing the world may finally understand what happened on board flight 447 the answer to what went wrong may be locked in these water-tight containers there was a lot of concern that we might take a false step that would lead to the loss of the information they must be handled with great care one wrong move and a two-year search costing almost 32 million euros will have been for nothing with the cockpit voice recorder they carefully open the protective casing looking for the memory card inside the worst thing would have been for the actual memory cards to be broken physically this isn't good see the damage transmitters look broken we quickly noticed that there were small parts that were broken so we weren't sure that everything was in working order if technicians can't fix the broken cvr there may be no way to know what was going on in the cockpit just before the crash or even who was flying the plane and look at the ftr card a close examination of the second box the flight data recorder brings better news it's fine no problems i think we all looked at each other and said it's incredible that they're in this state it's incredible the memory card was in excellent condition we were able to read the data very quickly while technicians try to repair the cockpit voice recorder sartorius carefully plots the flight recorder data we're cruising safely at 35 000 feet the fdr data reveals that the pitot tubes did in fact freeze the pizza tubes freeze here the frozen tubes produce erratic airspeed readings causing the autopilot to shut off automatically autopilot shuts off and the pilot takes control of the plane it warns the pilots very loudly that can be a bit of a surprise a bit of a shock and it definitely was a shock to these pilots and it was their reaction to this warning which was the key to everything else that followed the crew has been taught that a frozen pitot tube should clear itself in less than a minute the pitots on the aircraft they were only subject to the clogging for about 56 seconds and after that the airspeed readings were back to normal again the pilot only needs to hold the plane steady and the problem will disappear the airplane doesn't know that you don't know the airspeed all the airplane wants is power to keep it going forward and the same attitude to keep it in level flight but he does not hold steady whoever was flying the plane pulled back and pitched the nose up instead of automatically when the autopilot disconnected the pilot in command changed the pitch of the plane he climbs more than 2500 feet if you pull the nose of an airplane up it's going uphill it's going to slow down here their speed dropped more than 90 knots in less than a minute this triggered a stall warning here situation raising the nose of the plane at high altitude put the plane into a stall very quickly does in situations in an aerodynamic stall the wings lose lift and the plane drops from the sky it was the pilot's actions that led to the stall they fell at more than twelve thousand feet per minute inexplicably the pilot continued to pull back when he should have been pitching the plane's nose down to gain speed and lift the more you raise the nose the more the lift will be destroyed and that's what was happening to air france 447 we had a plane that was practically falling like a rock only the cockpit voice recorder can reveal why the pilots acted as they did in our laboratory there were a few hours of agony because we weren't sure we could read the data after all this effort all this money spent will it play i don't know investigators are up against the wall they have just one hope remaining in their long quest to know what caused the worst disaster in air france's history everything they've worked for now depends on repairs made to one small electronic device the moment of truth 40 minutes before the accident captain dubois is in his seat air france 447 position the cvr allowed us to understand who was piloting the plane who was monitoring the parameters okay we'll do first officer pierre cedric bonner is in the right hand seat so we've got a thing up ahead yes i saw that and the two men are heading towards a storm looks like we're entering the cloud normally the crew would try to fly above a storm but at this stage in the transatlantic flight it's not safe to do that it would be good if we can climb now yeah at 35 000 feet the air outside is too thin for the fuel heavy plane to climb any higher the pilots have only two choices fly straight through the storm or try to navigate around it you get some sleep so so well then i am out of here captain dubois takes his scheduled rest first officer david robert relieves the more experienced captain robert has almost four thousand hours more flying the a330 than the other first officer on the flight deck first officer robert is in the left-hand seat first officer is the pilot flying in the right-hand seat investigators now know that minutes before the crash the captain left the cockpit for his break you maybe want to go to the left of it but it's unclear which of the two remaining pilots is in command excuse me you can possibly go a bit to the left the way they acted when the captain had left the flight deck was not as if one of them was definitely in charge and the other one was definitely the supporting pilot the confusion over their roles becomes critical when the plane hits a column of ice crystals in the cloud the ice crystals pound the plane ice envelops the pitot tubes the ice crystals are filling the pitot tubes air speed readings are no longer valid suddenly the pilots can't be sure how fast they're flying that is the autopilot disconnecting i have the controls stall warnings begin to blare in the cockpit as bonner lifts the nose finally investigators know which pilot put the plane into a stall first officer baldner is pulling back and installing the plane incredibly neither pilot can figure out why the warning is sounding officer roberto doesn't understand what's happening he sees the airplane going up and he sees the airspeed dropping and uh he says hey watch your air sp we've lost the the speed the pilots need to push the plane's nose down to gain speed but bonner inexplicably is pulling back lifting the nose okay okay okay i'm going back down a counting two or three are going up so go back down the pilots struggle to regain control of their plane but they seem completely paralyzed by their own confusion they're doing everything wrong it should be obvious what to do [Music] desperate to save his 216 passengers first officer david robert summons the captain bona increases thrust to maximum power but it's no use you understand what's happening i'm losing our control of the plane [Music] when i get here they are falling at more than 60 to 100 feet per minute so they still have about two minutes left to figure out what's happening first officer robert decides to take control controls to the left he tries to push the nose of the plane down a key step for recovering from a stall but incredibly bona is still pulling back on his controls they can use their side sticks at the same time if both go in different directions they have a tendency to cancel each other out the fact that the two pilots were making different and sometimes opposite inputs to the side stick controls was pretty surprising the two pilots were not coordinating their thinking or their actions 90 seconds after the crisis began the captain returns what the hell are you doing we've lost all controls yet we don't understand anything and we've tried everything because they weren't believing the situation that they were now in they just went back to basic instinct which is i want to go up i want to stop falling let's pull the nose up dubois scans the instruments trying to see what's gone wrong what do you think what do we need to do i i don't know it's going down the captain doesn't have enough time to assess the situation we're at 9000 climb feet i've been at maximum nose up for a while finally dubois understands first officer bona is causing the stall by pulling the nose up no no no don't climb by the time they figure it out it's too late rob air can't get enough lift to recover from the stall at 2000 feet sensors detect the ocean's surface and trigger new alarms if we're going to crash this can't be true but what's happening the aircraft hits the water at almost 200 kilometers an hour the premier recruit hearing the conversations on the cockpit voice recorder for the first time was a big moment it left us speechless was all pale at that moment he understood the distress the crew was in during the last moments of the flight [Music] by the summer of 2011 salvage crews recover 104 bodies from the submerged wreckage of flight 447 including that of brad clemis my brother was amongst those that were raised so it enabled us to to recover him to bring him home and to conduct the service properly and and to say our goodbyes properly so it helped more than three years after the accident alam we are announces that the downing of flight 447 was not caused by the frozen pitot tubes but by the crew's failure to understand and rectify the situation this can't be true but what's happening there was a feeling that these planes were so sophisticated they could fly by themselves the pilots weren't even trained to fly this type of plane on manual at high altitudes because the thought was that they would always be on autopilot so there's no reason for the pilot to know how to fly it new training is now in place to teach crews how to deal with unreliable airspeed and how to recover from a stall at high altitudes the airlines have to be prepared to spend more money on on fundamental manual flying training and and cognition training for their pilots air france 447 is just the accident where you can't ignore it any longer and changes have to come [Music] you

Channel: On The Move

Views: 1,196,257

Keywords: on the move, cars, planes, trains, documentary, documentaries, full length documentaries, plane documentary, mayday series, mayday, plane disasters, airport, runway, plane pilot, pilot, hd documentary, 2021 documentary, united airlines, plane crash, air accident, air crash, air disaster, plane accident, air emergency, plane disaster, plane emergency, air france, france, atlantic, atlantic ocean

Id: E73yxZjAEY4

Length: 45min 3sec (2703 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 07 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/sloppyrock]

Video unavailable where I live.

I dont recall a time limit/specification regarding the hardened recorder module, just the battery for ULD.

There are depth, impact and temperature survive-ability specs they need to meet ie -20,000ft.

I have my doubts a recorder could survive for so long at great depth in seawater for so many years too, but we need to find out. If it is found seeing the debris may elicit clues and will offer the families some kind of conclusion.

[u/84JPG]

Air France 447 is just so crazy. The amount of things that had to go wrong for it to happen; and the amount of simple opportunities they had to correct course and turn it into a completely uneventful flight is just insane.

[u/TornadoEF5]

video unavailable where I live.... Uk whats wrong with england ?

[u/Acceleratio]

Damn it's already been that many years... I still remember that day. Just 3 days after i arrived in Indonesia. Flying was never the same for me since then