Could Air France Flight 447 Have Been Saved?

two years after Air France flight 447 suddenly disappeared the planes black boxes were recovered in tax intact they hold the clues to the series of unthinkable events that brought down the plane and for the first time shed disturbing light on what really happened in the cockpit in those final desperate moments here again is ABC's Elizabeth Vargas it is three and a half hours into the flight it's almost 11 p.m. and the airplane is still cruising at 37,000 feet when Captain Mark Dubois a veteran Air France pilot makes a fateful decision though his airbus a330 is heading into a thunderstorm 800 miles off the coast of Brazil he gets up to take a scheduled rest break he makes his first mistake of the evening when he fails to leave proper instructions to the to co pilots who are now in charge of the flight it is only a few minutes later that the planes pitot tube a piece of equipment that reads the airspeed suddenly fails this means the automatic pilot system shuts off it is now 11:10 p.m. now control of the aircraft and the lives of the 228 people on board is in the hands of the least experienced of the three-man crew Cedric Bonin and the captain is sitting where I'm sitting right now kept storming the left side bill Vasa the flight safety foundation and two test pilots joined us in an a330 flight simulator to recreate what happened in the final crucial moments the autopilot disconnect the other pilot disconnects so let's see how that looks there's a warning the aircraft is now in my control I have to fly it manually all of a sudden the computers are not in charge Cedric Bonin just 32 years old is at this point captain Bonin makes his first mistake he should have just kept the plane flying exact he shouldn't have changed anything but instead what did he do he pulled the nose of the plane up a fairly dramatic pitch up raising the nose of the plane is precisely the wrong thing to do it essentially caused the airplane to start falling out of the sky it is the most baffling and disastrous minute of the flight soon the plane stall warning goes off but no one seems to pay any attention though though actually sounded for total of 54 seconds which is a long time as the stall gets worse the plane becomes harder to fly on the black box recordings Bona says I don't have control of the airplane at all by now the other co-pilot is calling for the captain where is he he asks at one point and then again is he coming it keeps saying repeatedly what's happening what's happening where's the captain they call for the captain six times yeah we're on an a330 does the captain go how far away from the cockpit it's only a few feet away I mean you can get back in ten seconds we don't know why but it took captain Dubois more than a minute 60 crucial seconds to return to the cockpit two sources tell ABC news that he was traveling socially with an off-duty flight attendant were they together Yura speaking of the private life of the pilot as ba we are not interested on that but if the pilot is distracted because he's traveling with somebody potentially isn't that part of the investigation I don't think it could be an explanation of accident when captain Dubois does finally enter the cockpit he finds a scene of utter chaos what's happening the captain asks I don't know what's happening one of the copilot's answers what does that tell you about what's going on in that cockpit it seems that the pilots did not understand the situation and they were not aware that had stalled within seconds the plane has entered such a deep stall it is plummeting at 120 miles an hour in the dark belly first with the nose slightly up and in the confusion copilot Bona thinks his instruments are wrong he is so befuddled that he asks am I going down by now the plane is pitching and shuttering as it falls Oh bowl I got the chance to experience what that felt like in the air bus simulator now we're going down right sole goal in the cockpit confusion has turned to chaos both co-pilots are now trying to fly the plane in opposite directions the point of exactly that's the desperation where you actually have a bit of the discipline breaks down and they actually have both pilots trying to apply inputs of the aircraft at what point at what altitude was this jumbo jet beyond saving this aircraft got into a position where no one had ever designed it to be realistically someone the area of 10 to 15,000 feet they were really running out of options it is too late but it is not until the final seconds that the pilots realized the plane is doomed and the very last words we hear on the cockpit voice recorder are from the pilot bow nap who says but what's happening exactly yeah just a complete confusion those last words were not released by French investigators at the be EA they only became public when they were leaked last year why did you leave parts out well you know you have some personal conversation that is not useful to understand the accident but it's not personal well maybe a little it is decisions like that which have led many people including victim's families to suspect that French authorities aren't telling the whole story about what happened to flight 447

Channel: ABC News

Views: 585,300

Rating: 4.7421508 out of 5

Keywords: Air France, 447, Plane, Crash, Oceanic, 815, Lost, Elizabeth Vargas, Nightline, ABC, ABCNews, News, US, World

Id: 4pYCctsdN9Q

Length: 6min 12sec (372 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 06 2012