Air France Flight 447, an Airbus A330-203 flying from Rio de Janeiro to Paris, disappeared over the Atlantic Ocean in the early hours of June 1, 2009. All 228 people aboard — 216 passengers and 12 crew — were killed.
About three and a half hours into the flight, the aircraft passed through a storm system and ice crystals blocked its pitot tubes, making the airspeed indications unreliable. The autopilot and autothrust disconnected, and the handling of the aircraft in the minutes that followed put it into an aerodynamic stall. Although the stall warning sounded repeatedly, the crew did not recognize the stall or recover from it, and the aircraft fell from 38,000 feet, striking the ocean at high speed in a nose-up attitude.
Floating wreckage and bodies were found within days, but the main wreckage was not located on the ocean floor until April 2011, nearly two years after the accident. The flight recorders were recovered the following month and provided the answers investigators had been missing.
The final report of the French BEA (report f-cp090601, published on July 5, 2012) concluded that the crew’s inappropriate control inputs destabilized the flight path after the autopilot disconnected, that the stall was neither recognized nor recovered, and that the crew had never been trained to fly the aircraft manually at high altitude in such a situation. The icing of the pitot probes — a known issue on the type — had started the sequence, and inconsistencies in the stall warning added to the crew’s confusion.
The accident led to directives replacing pitot probes across the Airbus fleet, new rules extending the battery life of underwater locator beacons so wreckage and recorders can be found sooner, and worldwide changes to pilot training for high-altitude stalls and manual flying.