Faulty readings led to ’09 crash

Associated Press

PARIS

Two co-pilots facing faulty instrument readings and a stall fought to regain control of an Air France flight before the plane slammed into the Atlantic in a 31/2 minute fall, killing all 228 people aboard, accident investigators said Friday.

A preliminary report into the crash of Flight 447 from Rio de Janeiro to Paris also revealed the captain was on a routine rest break when the trouble began June 1, 2009, and he never retook the controls. The new information came from data gleaned from the Airbus 330’s black boxes, which were recovered in early May.

But the report does not answer the key question: What caused the crash?

Asked whether faulty sensors, other mechanical issues or the crew’s actions were responsible for the disaster, air-accident investigation agency director Jean-Paul Troadec said: “It’s a combination of all of this.”

Friday’s report by the French air-accident investigation agency BEA was a factual description of the chain of events beginning with takeoff in Rio de Janeiro until recordings fell dead nearly four hours later.

Some families of victims who said they were given information in a meeting with the agency said it was possible their loved ones went to their deaths unaware of what was happening because apparently there was no contact between the cockpit and cabin crew in the 31/2 minutes.

“It seems they did not feel more movements and turbulence than you generally feel in storms,” said Jean-Baptiste Audousset, president of a victims’ solidarity association. “So, we think that until impact they did not realize the situation, which for the family is what they want to hear — they did not suffer.”

The report revealed that the plane’s captain, Marc Dubois, was out of the cockpit on a routine rest break when the problems began.

The data flight recorder and cockpit recorder were dredged from the ocean in April, along with some bodies, in the latest effort by investigators to explain the disaster. Both of the boxes were readable.

They show inconsistent speed readings, two co-pilots working methodically to right the plane manually and a resting captain returning to the cockpit amid what moments later became an irretrievably catastrophic situation. The data also showed that the plane went into an aerodynamic stall — a loss of lift brought on by too little speed.

Investigators only provided partial quotes from the voice recorder in Friday’s report.

The report confirmed that two sets of instruments on the plane were giving conflicting speed readings. On the voice recorder, one co-pilot is heard to say “so we’ve lost the speeds” about four minutes before the crash.