Turn on desktop notifications for breaking stories about interest? The A330, considered among the safest in the skies, has flown over 800 million passengers across the world and there are 865 planes in operation today, according to Airbus's website. That system disconnected at high-altitude when a speed sensor, called a pitot tube, froze over, sending inconsistent readings to the plane's computers.
"That means the first time in your career you will ever feel what an aircraft feels like at 35,000 feet is when it's handed to you broken [if something goes wrong and the automated system disengages]." "Airbus is proud of the fact, they like to say that their plane is 'pilot-proof,'" said aviation lawyer James Healy Pratt. Air France Flight 447 took off from Rio de Janeiro International Airport for the flight to Paris at 7.29 p.m. Brazilian time. "No one was trained for high-altitude stall recovery in the cockpit," said Voss. The family of one of the victims, Eithna Walls, has settled its lawsuit. "We moving towards automated operations where the pilot isn't even permitted to fly," Voss said. Troadec said the agency withheld it from the public because the tape contained "personal conversations that is not useful to understand the accident." As co-pilot Cedric Bonin pulled continuously up on the controls, the stall alarm sounded for 54 seconds straight. A final report on the crash of Air France Flight 447 shows a combination of faulty sensors and the wrong response by the pilots was the cause of the crash which killed all … "The 330 has accumulated seven million flights and over 37 million flight hours," said Bozin at Airbus. "The computer is thinking 'this doesn't make any sense, we must be on the ground. But as Flight 447 went deeper into its catastrophic stall, the alarm cut in and out intermittently, the black box tapes revealed. Air France flight 447 tragically crashed on 1 June, 2009. The Airbus A330 is designed to be flown by a crew of two pilots. But questions have also been raised about the A330’s automated control systems.Everything pointed to a routine flight, two years ago. But this decision led many people, including the victims' families, to suspect that the BEA was not telling the whole story. Air France declined ABC News' request for an interview, pending the July release of the final report from France's investigation. In the first part of the flight, the captain was in the left seat, while first officer Bonin was in the right seat. The crash, which killed all 228 passengers and crew on board, is considered one of the worst -- and most mysterious -- aviation disasters in modern history. The last words on the recording are Bonin saying, "But what's happening?" That part of the tape was later leaked. Black box tapes were recovered from the wreckage two years later in April 2011 and, amazingly, still worked. At the time, the plane was about to fly into a thunderstorm, one that other flights that night had steered around. But in modern aviation, these planes almost fly themselves. I can't believe it."
Airbus claims the stall alarm on Flight 447 "was performing as designed," and said there is rationale behind its design. When the pitot tube fails, the Airbus's automatic pilot system disengages, shifting control back to the pilot. About 180 victims' family members have sued Air France and Airbus over the crash. Air France Flight 447 was en route from Rio de Janiero to Paris on May 31, 2009, for an overnight trip, when it vanished.
"It seems that the pilots did not understand the situation and they were not aware that they had stalled," said Jean-Paul Troadec, the director of BEA, the French authority conducting the investigation into the Flight 447 crash. When the Airbus A330 goes into a stall as severe as what happened to Flight 447, Voss said the plane's computer rejects the data it's receiving, thinking the plane couldn't possibly be flying in such a radical condition, and then shuts off the stall alarm. Co-pilot David Robert is heard on the tape recording saying, "Oh my God, we're going to crash. According to the tapes, First Officer Cedric Bonin, a 32-year-old pilot who had fewer than 5,000 flight hours under his belt, was at the controls but had never been in this situation before at high-altitude. At the heart of the heated debate over so-called "automation addiction," which is when pilots are overly dependent on computers to fly their planes, is the question of whether pilots are actually learning how to properly fly large commercial aircraft. We'll notify you here with news about This is a really big deal."