Air France Crash Criminal Probe Shows Scope of Crew Errors

Air France Flight 447’s crew reacted badly to an autopilot shutdown and misread instruments including a gauge indicating how fast the plane was losing height as it plunged into the Atlantic killing 228 people, a report shows.

“I’ve lost VSI,” the junior co-pilot said of the Airbus’s vertical-speed indicator, according to a recording detailed in the report from court-appointed experts. In fact, the instrument was functioning normally, its analog needle immobilized at the lower limit because the plane was hurtling toward the ocean at 15,000 feet a minute, the document seen by Bloomberg News shows.

Flight 447 from Rio de Janeiro to Paris crashed on June 1, 2009, after ice-blocked speed sensors shut down the autopilot and the crew incorrectly reacted by pulling the jet into a steep climb until it slowed to an aerodynamic stall, France’s BEA accident investigation bureau said in May. The interim report from the criminal probe broadly endorses those findings.

“The aircraft’s stall went completely unnoticed by the crew, who made no reference to it,” according to the report, which was presented to victims’ families yesterday. Faced with unusual readings, the two co-pilots, alone at the controls while the captain was on a rest break, “rejected them en masse.”

Interface Issue

The document identifies no fault with the Airbus SAS A330, beyond the failure of Thales SA airspeed sensors which caused the autopilot shutdown. Manslaughter charges have been filed against Paris-based Air France and Toulouse, France-based Airbus as part of the criminal investigation, which could increase damages payouts if any criminal liability is established.

“This is an interim report and it’s impossible to draw any conclusions at this stage,” Air France lawyer Fernand Garnault said by phone yesterday. “The real focus of this investigation is the man-machine interface, and why the pilots didn’t have everything they needed to understand what was happening.”

Airbus spokesman Stefan Schaffrath said the manufacturer had no comment on the judicial report or the issues raised.

Air France had earlier suggested that a stall alarm confused the A330’s pilots by initially sounding when the jet began to lose lift and then shutting down as it slowed to a point where the computer was receiving no useful information, before coming back on again when the air-speed picked up -- misrepresenting what was actually a positive development.

In reality, the junior copilot began pulling the nose up again -- an inappropriate action -- before the alarm resumed, the criminal report suggests.

No Detour

While referring to the aircraft’s artificial horizon as they struggled to keep its wings level, the copilots disregarded its indications that the jetliner was at a dangerous nose-up angle, the document says.

The criminal report also notes the captain’s failure to consider a detour around bad weather shown on the radar, despite concerns repeatedly voiced by a copilot, and questions his decision to take a break while crossing the so-called inter- tropical convergence zone, which is generally stormy.

While the captain broke no regulations by leaving the cockpit, the report says, staying put would have been “the safety-minded choice.”

 (Via Bloomberg)