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The Air France Flight 447 crash, considered one of the worst aviation disasters in history, could have been avoided, a top-ranking aviation safety expert said. "Absolutely, this accident didn't have to happen," said William Voss, the president and CEO of the Flight Safety Foundation. BEA, the French government's official accident investigators, conducted a three-year investigation into the crash, which killed all 228 people on board, including one married couple from Louisiana, when the Airbus A330 slammed into the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Brazil in 2009. In the agency's final report, which was released today, investigators determined that a...

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 pilots did it. Put bluntly, that seems to be what the latest report by French air crash investigators on the loss of Air France flight 447 two years ago is saying. More precisely, the pilots had not been trained to deal with the sudden emergency they faced and lost control. What the investigating body, France’s Bureau of Investigation and Analysis (BEA), are not saying, at least not overtly, is that the crash should never have happened–and, but for a technical failure, would not have. Air crash investigation reports always deliver a torrent of technical jargon that has been through...

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,...

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...

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 (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...

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.

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.

<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...

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...

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 — 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...

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...