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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...

For more than two years, the disappearance of Air France Flight 447 over the mid-Atlantic in the early hours of June 1, 2009, remained one of aviation's great mysteries. How could a technologically state-of-the art airliner simply vanish? With the wreckage and flight-data recorders lost beneath 2 miles of ocean, experts were forced to speculate using the only data available: a cryptic set of communications beamed automatically from the aircraft to the airline's maintenance center in France. As PM found in our cover story about the crash, published two years ago this month, the data implied that the plane had...

Airbus A340 grounded in Boston Large protective panel had to be screwed into place Air France blames mechanics in China An Air France jet flew for five days before ground crews noticed that 30 screws were missing from one of its wings. The Airbus A340 plane had undergone routine maintenance in China, before flying to Paris and then on to the US before the potentially disastrous blunder was finally spotted. The plane, which can carry up to 440 passengers, was grounded in Boston while a 'large protective panel' was screwed back into place. The gaffe was revealed in an internal...

Air France 'let only males serve Strauss-Kahn' (AFP) – 15 hours ago PARIS — Air France issued orders for only male staff to serve Dominique Strauss-Kahn when the former IMF boss -- accused of attempted rape in New York -- travelled on its planes, a report said Thursday. Le Parisien newspaper also said that lawyers of Strauss-Kahn's accuser were calling for testimony from Air France female stewards who allegedly suffered inappropriate behaviour by him. A spokesman for the airline however responded to the report by saying that "Air France formally denies having given any instruction about the composition of its...

LE BOURGET, France (AP) — A confused cockpit crew without proper training to head off high-altitude disaster flew toward it, instead, with wrong-headed maneuvers, no task-sharing and perhaps unaware their flight was about to end in the Atlantic Ocean. Screeching stall alarms and incoherent speed readings from faulty sensors, bad weather in a darkened sky and growing stress make up the chaotic cockpit scenario in the final moments of the Air France flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris on June 1, 2009. All 228 people aboard the plane were killed. Friday's third report by France's accident investigation agency, or...

"What do you think? What do you think? What should we do?" The 37-year-old Air France co-pilot with over 6,000 flying hours was running out of ideas as a stall alarm bellowed through the Airbus cockpit for the sixth time in exactly two minutes. His junior colleague with two years on the job was already in despair as he battled to control the jet's speed and prevent it rocking left to right in pitch darkness over the Atlantic, on only his second Rio de Janeiro-Paris trip as an A330 pilot. "I don't have control of the plane. I don't have...

The crew piloting a doomed Air France jet over the Atlantic did not realize the plane was in a stall, were insufficiently trained in flying manually, and never informed the passengers that anything was wrong before they plunged into the sea, according to new findings released Friday. Based on newly discovered cockpit recordings from the 2009 crash, the French air accident investigation agency is recommending mandatory training for all pilots to help them fly planes manually and handle a high-altitude stall.

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."

PARIS (Reuters) – Pilots wrestled with the controls of an Air France airliner for more than four minutes before it plunged into the Atlantic with its nose up, killing all 228 people on board, French investigators said Friday. The 2009 emergency began with a stall warning two and a half hours into the Rio-Paris flight and nine minutes after the captain had left the cockpit for a routine rest period. The Airbus A330 jet climbed to 38,000 feet and then began a dramatic three and a half minute descent, rolling from left to right, with the youngest of three pilots...

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...

The French political bigshot who heads the International Monetary Fund was arrested for allegedly sodomizing a Manhattan hotel maid today — hauled off an Air France flight just moments before takeoff from Kennedy Airport, police said.

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.

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...

PARIS (AFP) - – A French court fined Continental Airlines Monday over the 2000 Concorde crash in which 113 died, but did not jail anyone for the disaster that effectively ended commercial supersonic air travel. The court found the US airline criminally responsible for the Paris crash, caused by a piece of metal that fell from a Continental DC-10 and later shredded the supersonic jet's tyre, which led to a fire in the fuel tank.

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...

GONESSE, France (AP) — Families whose loved ones died in the fiery crash of a supersonic Concorde jet 10 years ago joined together near Paris on Sunday, laying flowers at a monument to the dead and wandering the breezy field where the plane went down. A French court is awaiting a verdict on who was to blame for the accident, which killed 109 aboard the plane and four on the ground, and devastated the reputation of the jet. The Concorde, which ferried the rich and famous across the Atlantic for three decades and could fly twice as fast as the...

Brazilian officials say an Air France jet has made an emergency landing due to a bomb threat. An airport authority spokesman reports that everyone on board has been safely evacuated. ....SNIP.... It was flying the same route as an Air France jet that crashed last June off Brazil's northeastern coast, killing all 228 on board. While no definite cause has been determined in that crash, authorities have repeatedly ruled out foul play.

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...

The crash of Air France flight 447 from Rio to Paris last year is one of the most mysterious accidents in the history of aviation. After months of investigation, a clear picture has emerged of what went wrong. The reconstruction of the horrific final four minutes reveal continuing safety problems in civil aviation.

The crash of Air France flight 447 from Rio to Paris last year is one of the most mysterious accidents in the history of aviation. After months of investigation, a clear picture has emerged of what went wrong. The reconstruction of the horrific final four minutes reveal continuing safety problems in civil aviation. One tiny technical failure heralded the impending disaster. But the measurement error was so inconspicuous that the pilots in the cockpit of the Airbus A330 probably hardly noticed it. snip . . .

Israeli legal group sues North Korea over 1972 terror attack By Zohar Blumenkrantz An Israeli human rights organization is filing a lawsuit against North Korea over a 1972 terrorist attack at Ben-Gurion International Airport that left more than 20 people dead and over 50 wounded, Haaretz has learned. The attack, known as the Lod Airport massacre, was carried out by three members of the Japanese Red Army on behalf of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. The victims included 16 Christian pilgrims from Puerto Rico, and Israeli professor and biophysicist Aharon Katzir. While two of the terrorists were...

Five people, including two Continental Airlines employees, face up to five years in prison if a French court finds them responsible for the crash of an Air France Concorde supersonic airliner near Paris almost 10 years ago. A four-month trial has begun into the July 25, 2000, crash that killed all 109 people on the airplane and four employees of the hotel the airliner, trailing a tongue of flame, hit when it crashed. The five, along with Continental itself, are charged with involuntary manslaughter. The case centers around investigators' findings that a piece of metal fell from a Continental DC-10...

US airline Continental will present an alternative cause of the 2000 Concorde crash when the carrier faces manslaughter charges in a French court next month. The airline, two of its staff and three other individuals are due to stand trial on February 2 accused of manslaughter over the July 2000 crash of the supersonic aircraft which claimed 113 lives. Air France Concorde flight 4590 takes off with fire trailing from its engine on the left wing Investigators have concluded that the cause of the accident was a metal strip left on the runway from a Continental plane. This strip -...

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...

In a strongly worded internal memo, Air France has warned its pilots to be more vigilant about safety procedures and upbraided those blaming flight equipment for the crash of Flight 447 into the Atlantic in June. No one knows what caused the accident, which killed all 228 people aboard and was Air France's deadliest crash. Pilots' unions said Saturday the company is trying to distance itself from blame — and shift attention to the possibility of human error — as the investigation drags on. "Enough Scandals and False Debates about Flight Security!" reads the memo, sent to pilots Tuesday and...

Yesterday, Paul-Emic, a conservative French Blogger (Politique, émois et moi) alerted our readers on the below Journal du Dimanche (JDD) articles that were causing quite an stir from Paris to Rio. I have attempted to translate from French to English each of the articles. Please remember Pilots are called “Drivers” in the translation. I have also included a You Tube video for a F14 “Flat Spin” to illustrate a “Flat Spin”. I seriously doubt the FO as well as most pilots would have been able to pull out of a flat spin. The best way to get out of a...

A French oceanographic survey ship has begun scanning the Atlantic Ocean floor, a new phase in the hunt for Air France Flight 447's black boxes now that they are no longer emitting signals, investigators said Thursday.

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...

<p>RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) — An American colonel says two ships searching for the black boxes of Air France Flight 447 are ending their hunt.</p> <p>A French nuclear submarine is continuing to look.</p> <p>U.S. Air Force Col. Willie Berges is the Brazil-based commander of American military forces supporting the effort. He says one ship towing a U.S. Navy listening device stopped searching Friday.</p>

Air France Flight 447 slammed into the Atlantic Ocean, intact and belly first, at such a high speed that the 228 people aboard probably had no time to even inflate their life jackets, French investigators said Thursday in their first report into the June 1 accident. ... Problematic speed sensors on the Airbus A330-200 jet that have been the focus of intense speculation since the crash may have misled the plane's pilots but were not a direct cause, Bouillard said... ;... The plane was flying from Rio de Janeiro to Paris when it went down in a remote area of...

The BEA press conference has finished in Paris. I watched on TV however I don’t speak French and I’m not sure at this time what they have told us. If anything new? I did not hear any mention of the toilet leak? Sounds like total BS out of Air France and BEA? As first reported on this site on June 21, 2009 from Le Post: Was Air France Flight 447 Disaster Caused By Leaking Toilet! As shown below, we need to be careful on translation from one language to another... The aircraft was not destroyed in flight, “said Alain Bouillard,...

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.

A Northwest Airlines jet traveling from Hong Kong to Tokyo last Tuesday suffered a series of equipment and computer malfunctions strikingly similar to those encountered by Air France Flight 447 just before it crashed into the Atlantic Ocean on May 31. The Northwest plane and its passengers, however, emerged unscathed. Details of the harrowing incident – described in a memo by one of the Northwest pilots and confirmed Friday by others familiar with the matter – highlight how cockpit crews can safely cope with something that is almost never supposed to happen: a system breakdown that prevented the crew from...

SAO PAULO — A weak signal from the flight data recorders of the Air France jet that crashed into the Atlantic killing all 228 people on board have been located, French newspaper Le Monde reported on its web site Tuesday. According to the report, French naval vessels picked up a weak signal from the flight recorders on Monday and that a mini submarine has been dispatched to try and find the "black boxes" on the bottom of the rugged ocean floor. An Air France spokeswoman told Reuters she could not confirm the report. The Transport Ministry and the air accident...

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...

Air France Airbus jets experienced at least nine incidents in which airspeed probes iced over in the past year, according to an internal company report obtained by AFP Friday. A probe into the June 1 crash of AF 447, in which an A330 jet flying from Rio to Paris plunged into the Atlantic with the loss of all 228 people on board, has focused on contradictory readings from its "pitot" speed probes. The probes, made by aerospace company Thales, were found to be faulty on flight AF 447. But French aviation investigators have played down the significance of the discovery...

PARIS (AP) — Air France will give about euro17,500 ($24,000) as an advance to the families of the victims of the crash of Air France Flight 447 from Rio de Janeiro to Paris, the company's chief executive said Friday.Air France lawyers are contacting the families of the 228 victims from 32 countries to make sure the money gets to them, Phillipe Gourgeon said in an interview broadcast Friday on RTL radio. Air France also is looking into holding a memorial for all the victims of the May 31 crash, Gourgeon said.Some families of French victims have accused Air France of...

Found: Galley kitchen from doomed Air France flight discovered floating intact in middle of Atlantic By Mail Foreign Service 18th June 2009 [Pics in URL] Floating in the middle of the Atlantic, this galley kitchen is the latest piece of Air France Flight 447 to be recovered by salvage crews. The wreckage is extraordinarily intact despite being part of an plane that experts believe broke apart in midair. Even some of the drawers, containing a selection of ready-meals for passengers, remained wedged securely inside the unit

THE GALLEY kitchen from doomed Air France Flight 447 was recovered from the Atlantic Ocean today. Navy divers hauled large chunks of the wreckage to the surface - and found metal draws containing ready-meals for passengers still securely wedged inside. Many of the dead suffered multiple fractures of the legs, hips and arms leading experts to believe the tragic jet broke up in mid air. Brazil's navy have now recovered 50 bodies from the 228 who perished on board the flight bound for Paris. The bodies have been found in choppy waters more than 50 miles apart. Retrieve ... diver...

Autopsies have revealed fractures in the legs, hips and arms of Air France disaster victims, injuries that — coupled with the large pieces of wreckage pulled from the Atlantic — strongly suggest the plane broke up in the air, experts said Wednesday. With more than 400 bits of debris recovered from the ocean's surface, the top French investigator expressed optimism about discovering what brought down Flight 447, but he also called the conditions — far from land in very deep waters — "one of the worst situations ever known in an accident investigation." French investigators are beginning to form "an...

Autopsies have revealed fractures in the legs, hips and arms of Air France crash victims, injuries that, along with the large pieces of wreckage pulled from the Atlantic, strongly suggest the plane broke up in the air, experts said Wednesday. With more than 400 bits of debris recovered from the ocean's surface, the top French investigator expressed hope that investigators would learn what brought down Flight 447, but he also called the conditions "one of the worst situations ever known in an accident investigation." French investigators are beginning to form "an image that is progressively less fuzzy," Paul-Louis Arslanian, who...

Flight AF 447 on 01 june 2009 A330-200, registered F-GZCP During the third Press Conference that was held on 17 June on the progress of the investigation into the accident to flight AF 447, the BEA presented the sea search operations that are under way. It contains a map of the locations of the airplane debris, including the fin, that were recovered from the surface of the sea. This debris field corresponds to a relatively small area with a drift towards the north. A targeted undersea search area has been established based on the position of the parts recovered –...

Autopsies revealed fractures in the legs, hips and arms of Air France disaster victims, a Brazilian official said Wednesday. Experts said those injuries — and the large pieces of wreckage pulled from the Atlantic — strongly suggest the plane broke up in the air.

SAO PAULO (AP) — Bodies recovered in the Air France disaster show multiple fractures in the legs, hips and arms, a Brazilian official said Wednesday. Experts said such injuries suggest the plane broke up in the air. "Typically, if you see intact bodies and multiple fractures — arm, leg, hip fractures — it's a good indicator of a midflight break up," Ciacco said. "Especially if you're seeing large pieces of aircraft as well." Jack Casey, an aviation safety consultant in Washington, D.C., who is a former accident investigator, said the lack of clothing could be significant: "In an in-air break...

Air France has finished replacing air speed monitors on all its long-haul Airbus aircraft even though the cause of the Flight 447 disaster remains a mystery, a pilots' union official said Monday. The search for the A330's black boxes was reinforced Monday with a high-tech U.S. Navy device that began listening for pings in the depths of the Atlantic Ocean. With the flight recorders still missing, the probe into the disaster that killed 228 people so far has focused on the possibility that external speed monitors iced over and gave false readings to the plane's computers.

Some details of a US carrier running one of the crash cause scenarios through its Airbus A330 flight simulators are being circulated on several private airline forums and on the public Pprune or Professional Pilots Rumour network. It has been a long standing habit of airlines with a serious interest in flight standards to do flight simulations based on probable causes or using factual data as it comes to hand. This is what happening in what is believed to have been a US flight simulator. Dear Ladies and Gentlemen, The scenario was conducted several times and the results at the...