PARIS — The pilots of a doomed Rio to Paris Air France plane fought with the controls for three and half minutes before the jet plunged into the Atlantic Ocean in June 2009, killing all 228 people on board, according to a new official report released Friday.
France’s BEA aviation safety group posted a brief statement on its website detailing information collected from two flight recorders, or black boxes, recovered from the plane’s sea-bed wreckage early this month using a robot submarine.
The new report shows that the alert began with two engine stall warnings just over two hours into the flight. The captain was resting at the time, with the two co-pilots in the cockpit. The captain was awoken and returned to the cockpit around a minute later, after the jet began its descent.
The BEA found that the pilots of the A330 were confused by a series of contradictory flight control alarms and invalid speed sensors.
“There was an inconsistency between the speeds displayed on the left side and the integrated standby instrument system (ISIS). This lasted for less than one minute,” the statement said.
It went on to make clear that “the engines were operating and always responded to crew commands,” since the autopilot had been disengaged.
En route from Rio de Janeiro to Paris on June 1, 2009, the flight ran into heavy turbulence and icing that could have generated erroneous airspeed data and warnings.
The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this week that Airbus had registered 32 instances of the same problem on similar aircraft between 2003 and 2009.
Investigators decided to release the statement “faced with the regular disclosure of partial and often approximate information since 16 May … so as to inform the families of the victims and the public about the first facts established,” the BEA statement said.
Both Airbus and Air France are being probed for manslaughter in the case. An interim report analyzing the black box data is due by the end of July. The date of the final report is unclear.
“Only after long and detailed investigative work will the causes of the accident be determined and safety recommendations issued, this being the main mission of the BEA. The latter will be included in the final report,” the BEA statement concluded.