A French airliner plunged out of control for four minutes before crashing into the Atlantic in 2009, investigators said, in a report raising questions about how crew handled a “stall alarm” blaring out in the cabin.
Information gleaned from black boxes recovered almost two years after the disaster killed 228 people, confirmed that speed readings in the Airbus cockpit had gone haywire, believed to be linked to the icing of speed sensors outside the jet.
As Air France pilots fought for control, the doomed A330 dropped 11,582m, rolling left to right, its -engines flat out, but its wings unable to grab enough air to keep flying.
The plane crashed on June 1, 2009, en route from Rio de Janeiro to Paris. The black boxes stopped recording at 2:14am GMT.
France’s BEA crash investigation agency said in a detailed chronology of the crash that commands from the controls of the 32-year-old junior pilot on board had pulled the nose up as the aircraft became unstable and generated an audible stall warning.
Aviation industry sources said that this action went against the normal procedure which calls for the nose to be lowered in response to an alert that the plane was about to lose lift or, in technical parlance, “stall.”
This type of aerodynamic stall is nothing to do with a stall in the engines, both of which kept working as crew requested.
“A stall is the moment at which a plane stops flying and starts falling,” said David Learmount, operations and safety editor at the British aviation publication Flight International.
A top aircraft industry safety consultant said the standard guidance in the Airbus pilot manual called in this event for the pilot to lower the nose by pushing the control stick forward.
“The BEA is now going to have to analyze and get to the bottom of how crew handled this event,” said Paul Hayes, safety director at Ascend Aviation, a UK-based aviation consultancy.
“The big question in my mind is why did the pilot flying [the aircraft] appear to continue to pull the nose up,” he said.
French investigators said the emergency began with the autopilot disengaging itself two and a half hours into the flight and the junior pilot, who had been in control at take-off, picked up manually and saying: “I have control.”
The autopilot appears to have responded to a loss of reliable airspeed information. This was accompanied moments later by the disembodied voice of a recorded “stall” alert.
It is what happened next that is likely to fuel most theories on what preceded the crash, but Air France and its main pilots union insisted faulty speed probes were the root cause.
In a passage likely to attract particular scrutiny, the BEA said the pilot “maintained” the nose-up command despite fresh stall warnings 46 seconds into the four minute emergency.
“The inputs made by the pilot flying were mainly nose-up,” the report added.
The Airbus jet climbed 914m to 11,582m despite the crew having decided earlier against a climb, and then began a dramatic descent, with the youngest pilot handing control to the second most senior pilot a minute before impact.
The captain returned after “several attempts” to call him back to the cockpit, but was not at the controls in the final moments, according to information gleaned from the black boxes.
By the time the 58-year-old returned, just over a minute into the emergency, the aircraft was in serious trouble: plunging at 3,050m a minute with its nose pointing up 15 degrees and at too high an angle to the air to recapture lift.
The BEA did not provide extracts of the transcript for the last minute before the jet hit the water with its nose up.
It promised a fuller interim report which could say more about the causes of the crash in July.
CONFRONTATION: The water cannon attack was the second this month on the Philippine supply boat ‘Unaizah May 4,’ after an incident on March 5 The China Coast Guard yesterday morning blocked a Philippine supply vessel and damaged it with water cannons near a reef off the Southeast Asian country, the Philippines said. The Philippine military released video of what it said was a nearly hour-long attack off the Second Thomas Shoal (Renai Shoal, 仁愛暗沙) in the contested South China Sea, where Chinese ships have unleashed water cannons and collided with Philippine vessels in similar standoffs in the past few months. The China Coast Guard and other vessels “once again harassed, blocked, deployed water cannons, and executed dangerous maneuvers” against a routine rotation and resupply mission to
GLOBAL COMBAT AIR PROGRAM: The potential purchasers would be limited to the 15 nations with which Tokyo has signed defense partnership and equipment transfer deals Japan’s Cabinet yesterday approved a plan to sell future next-generation fighter jets that it is developing with the UK and Italy to other nations, in the latest move away from the country’s post-World War II pacifist principles. The contentious decision to allow international arms sales is expected to help secure Japan’s role in the joint fighter jet project, and is part of a move to build up the Japanese arms industry and bolster its role in global security. The Cabinet also endorsed a revision to Japan’s arms equipment and technology transfer guidelines to allow coproduced lethal weapons to be sold to nations
‘POLITICAL EARTHQUAKE’: Leo Varadkar said he was ‘no longer the best person’ to lead the nation and was stepping down for political, as well as personal, reasons Leo Varadkar on Wednesday announced that he was stepping down as Ireland’s prime minister and leader of the Fine Gael party in the governing coalition, citing “personal and political” reasons. Pundits called the surprise move, just 10 weeks before Ireland holds European Parliament and local elections, a “political earthquake.” A general election has to be held within a year. Irish Deputy Prime Minister Micheal Martin, leader of Fianna Fail, the main coalition partner, said Varadkar’s announcement was “unexpected,” but added that he expected the government to run its full term. An emotional Varadkar, who is in his second stint as prime minister and at
Thousands of devotees, some in a state of trance, gathered at a Buddhist temple on the outskirts of Bangkok renowned for sacred tattoos known as Sak Yant, paying their respects to a revered monk who mastered the practice and seeking purification. The gathering at Wat Bang Phra Buddhist temple is part of a Thai Wai Khru ritual in which devotees pay homage to Luang Phor Pern, the temple’s formal abbot, who died in 2002. He had a reputation for refining and popularizing the temple’s Sak Yant tattoo style. The idea that tattoos confer magical powers has existed in many parts of Asia