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On the evening of May 31, 2009, 216 passengers and 12 crew members boarded an Air France Airbus 330 at Antonio Carlos Jobim International Airport in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The flight, Air France 447, departed at 7.29pm local time for a scheduled 11-hour flight to Paris. It never arrived. At 7 o’clock the next morning, when the aircraft failed to appear on the radar screens of air traffic controllers in Europe, Air France began to worry, and contacted civil aviation authorities. By 11am, they concluded that their worst fears had been confirmed. AF447 had gone missing somewhere over the...

HE was one of Air France's "company babies": a dashing 32-year-old junior pilot - and a keen amateur yachtsman - who had been qualified to fly the airline's ultra-sophisticated Airbus A330 jet for barely a year. Yet despite his inexperience, Pierre-Cedric Bonin found himself responsible for the lives of 228 passengers and crew members on June 1, 2009, when the cockpit of his $190 million aircraft lit up with terrifying and contradictory alarm signals en route from Rio de Janeiro to Paris. While Bonin held on to the plane's “side-stick” controller and looked at his instruments in disbelief, his co-pilot,...

Cruising at 35,000 feet and nearly four hours into what seemed a routine overnight flight to Paris from Rio de Janeiro, an Air France cockpit crew got a stall warning and responded by doing what even weekend pilots know to avoid: They yanked the nose of the plane up instead of pointing it down to gain essential speed. Apparently confused by repeated stall warnings and reacting to wildly fluctuating airspeed indications, pilots of Flight 447 continued to pull back sharply on the controls—contrary to standard procedure—even as the Airbus A330 plummeted toward the Atlantic Ocean, according to information released Friday...

"Black box recordings from Air France Flight 447, which crashed into the Atlantic Ocean two years ago, revealed new details about the plane’s final moments. But the report did not assign blame or give an explanation for the crash, which killed all 228 people aboard."

What happened on board the Air France jet that crashed into the Atlantic en route from Rio to Paris? According to information obtained by SPIEGEL from the analysis of flight recorder data, pilot Marc Dubois appears not to have been in the cockpit at the time the deadly accident started to unfold. The fate of Air France Flight 447 was sealed in just four minutes. That short time span began with the first warning message on one of the Airbus A330 aircraft's monitors and ended with the plane crashing into the Atlantic between Brazil and Africa, killing all 228 people...

Following operations to open, extract, clean and dry the memory cards from the flight recorders, BEA Safety Investigators were able to download the data over the weekend. These operations were filmed and recorded in their entirety. This was done in the presence of two German investigators from BFU, an American investigator from NTSB, two British investigators from AAIB and two Brazilian investigators from CENIPA, as well as an officer from the French judicial police and a court expert. These downloads gathered all of the data from the Flight Data recorder (FDR), as well as the whole recording of the last...

Wreckage from Air France jet found in Atlantic Wreckage from an Air France jet lost over the Atlantic nearly two years ago with 288 people on board has been found, French investigators say. With the cause of the crash still unknown, a fourth attempt to locate the plane's voice and data recorders got under way last month. Searchers located wreckage during the past 24 hours, investigators in Paris said, without giving details. Flight 447 from Rio de Janeiro to Paris came down in a storm on 1 June 2009. A French judge recently filed preliminary manslaughter charges against Air France...

Search teams recovered the memory unit of one of the “black boxes” of the Air France Rio-Paris plane that crashed in the Atlantic in June 2009, investigators said Sunday. The crash had killed all 228 people on board. AP - France’s air accident investigation agency says an undersea search has located the flight data recorder from the 2009 Air France flight that went down in the mid-Atlantic. In a statement, the BEA said the black box was “localized and identified” on Sunday morning. The statement included photos of the recorder - a red cylinder partially buried in sand on the...

The remains of up to 100 victims of the worst crash in Air France's history must not be recovered from the sea bed because it is too traumatic for their families, judges have ruled. Two bodies still strapped to their plane seats were last week raised from the wreckage of Air France flight 447, which crashed two years ago killing all 228 people on board. Experts say the victims have been preserved as 'waxworks' by the extreme cold, darkness and water pressure almost three miles below the Atlantic Ocean. Robotic underwater cameras have shown many victims still intact in their...

Victims' families are closer to the truth this week: Voice and data recorders from flight AF447 have been pulled from the ocean floor, and investigators hope to unlock their contents. But experts and family members remain at odds over whether newly discovered bodies should be brought to the surface. -snip- The remains of 50 passengers were recovered and identified on the surface of the water in the days after the flight disappeared in a storm on June 1, 2009. But underwater robots recently discovered the wreck and photographed a number of bodies still fastened in their seatbelts on the Atlantic...

PARIS (AP) — Underwater search teams have found pieces of an Air France plane that crashed in the Atlantic in 2009, killing all 228 people on board, French investigators said Sunday. (snip) The French air accident investigation agency B.E.A. said in a statement on Sunday night that a team aboard the expedition ship Alucia had found pieces of the plane in the previous 24 hours. The agency did not identify what parts of the plane were found, or where.

PARIS (AP) — The French government said Thursday it will conduct a fourth search for the flight recorders of an Air France jetliner that crashed into the Atlantic Ocean while flying from Rio de Janeiro to Paris 18 months ago. All 228 people aboard Flight 447 died, and families of some victims have demanded that France not give up the hunt for the flight recorders — and answers about what caused the plane to plunge into the ocean during a large thunderstorm on June 1, 2009. Transport Minister Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet and Junior Transport Minister Thierry Mariani said a fourth search...

France has found what could be the first concrete clues to the location of black boxes missing from last year's Atlantic jet disaster, but warned on Thursday there was no guarantee the breakthrough would lead to their recovery.The defense ministry said the boost had come through detailed follow-up analysis of sonar readings taken in the first few weeks after an Air France jet crashed into the Atlantic killing 228 people on June 1 last year. Finding the black boxes is seen as essential to help crash experts and relatives understand exactly what caused flight 447 to plunge into a remote...

Resumption of the search for the flight recorders from crashed Air France flight AF447 has been delayed, but French investigators expect a US detection vessel to arrive in Brazil next week. The Bureau d'Enquetes et d'Analyses states that the vessel, the Anne Candies, is predicted to reach Recife around 24 March. Its departure for the scene had been held up by "administrative and technical difficulties", says the BEA, as well as poor weather conditions. Recovery teams are planning to use deep-water search equipment in a bid to find the wreckage of the Airbus A330 which came down in the South...

Since the publication of the first Interim Report on 2 July 2009, the investigation has continued, still in close association with foreign investigation organisations and the companies involved and in coordination with those responsible for the judicial investigation. The working groups have continued their work of gathering and analyzing information useful to the investigation. Their activity has focused on * the elements of wreckage recovered, * the meteorological situation, * the maintenance messages transmitted by ACARS, * the certification and the continuing airworthiness of the Pitot probes, * events where speed inconsistencies were encountered in cruise. This second interim report...

PARIS - French investigators are unlikely to establish the exact cause of a fatal Atlantic plane crash in a report this week but may recommend ways to help locate black boxes more easily, sources familiar with the incident said. France's BEA accident investigation authority is due on Thursday to issue its final report into the Air France crash in which 228 people died. Flight AF 447 from Rio de Janeiro to Paris crashed into the Atlantic on June 1 after flying into stormy weather. The ‘black box' flight recorders remain missing and only small parts of the wreckage have been...

Crash: Air France A332 over Atlantic on Jun 1st 2009, aircraft impacted ocean The BEA have released their preliminary reports in both English (3MB - without attachments) and French (13MB) reporting, that the airplane had taken off from Rio de Janeiro at 232.8 tons near its maximum takeoff weight (233 tons) at 22:29Z. The airplane was subsequently cleared to FL350. At 01:35Z the crew contacted Brazil's Atlantic air traffic control control on the HF frequency reporting, they had just overflown waypoint INTOL, giving estimates for waypoints SALPU at 01:48Z and ORARO at 02:00Z. The crew also transmitted their SELCAL code...

PARIS (Reuters) - The state of the wreckage from Air France flight AF 447 from Rio de Janeiro to Paris, which crashed on June 1 with 228 people on board, suggest the plane was not destroyed in mid-air, French investigators said on Thursday. Alain Bouillard, who leads the investigation on behalf of France's BEA air accident board, said the search for the flight recorders, or black boxes, from the Airbus A330 aircraft would continue until July 10.

These days, it seems only George W. Bush and global warming can cause tragedies. Guess which one is being blamed for the June 1 crash of Air France Flight 447? Russian climatologist Aleksey Kokorin, head of Russia's World Wildlife Fund Climate Program, postulates the Airbus A330-203 broke up over the Intertropical Convergence Zone because of decades of emissions from tailpipes and smokestacks. But like the global-warming applesauce, his theory is based firmly in the future. "A consequence of global warming is that the frequency and severity of such (severe weather conditions) will be higher," he told an interviewer. "Unfortunately, the...

SAO PAULO (AFP) — Eleven of the 50 bodies recovered from an Air France jet that plunged into the Atlantic three weeks ago have been identified by fingerprints and dental records, Brazilian officials said Sunday. The bodies were identified as "10 Brazilians and one foreigner," officials in the northeastern Brazilian state of Pernambuco said in a statement. Five of the Brazilians were male, the other five were female and the foreigner was male, it added. The officials, part of a task force that also includes Brazilian police and forensic specialists conducting autopsies in the city of Recife, did not give...