The final report of what exactly happened in the 2009 crash of an Air France jet has been released. Investigators found that human and technical errors are to blame in the airline's deadliest crash.
In 2009, an Air France jet crashed into the Atlantic Ocean, killing all 228 passengers and crew on board. The plane was heading from Rio de Janeiro to Paris when it encountered a thunderstorm on June 1, 2009. A report released on Thursday showed that the crash was due to faulty sensors and mistakes made by poorly trained pilots.
The findings of what happened to Flight 447 are sparking much-needed improvements within the airline. Investigators are calling for better training of pilots and stricter plane certification rules.
The manufacturer of the A330 plane, Airbus said that they are also trying to improve the speed sensors on their planes to avoid a future crash. Air France blames to equipment failure as the cause of the crash. They told The Associated Press that the pilots "acted in line with the information provided by the cockpit instruments and systems. .... The reading of the various data did not enable them to apply the appropriate action."
However the Bureau for Investigations and Analysis believes that poor training was the main cause as the pilots may not have known how to handle a high-altitude crisis once they had to take over manually. This claim has landed Air France and Airbus in some legal trouble. The companies have received preliminary manslaughter charges.
Despite the accusations of the crash being caused by pilot inexperience, some family members of the crash victims disagree. The Associated Press reported that families think the pilots did all that they could but they were faced with faulty equipment information. They're calling for a closer look at the equipment rather than the pilots.
For instance, the report said that one of the pilots brought the nose of the plane upward instead of downward because of incorrect sensor data about the plane's position while it was in stall. The pilot's move contributed to the deadly crash. Chief investigator Alain Bouillard said that only a highly experienced pilot could have handled the situation correctly and the pilots on the Air France flight didn't understand that they were in a stall.
"In this case, the crew was in a state of near-total loss of control," he said.
One major technical problem was with the pitot tubes or speed sensors. The sensors were frozen over which blocked them from working. Robert Soulas, who lost his daughter and son-in-law in the crash, told MSNBC that this technical issue was common and that manufacturers knew about it for years but didn't do anything about it until after the crash.
Families or crash victims are still having a hard time dealing with their losses. Lais Seba, the mother of 31-year-old victim Luciana Clarkson Seba, told The Associated Press "it's going to be forever difficult" for survivors to deal with the loss of their loved-ones.
"We are surviving," she said. "We live one day at a time, with lots of pain, and always missing her."
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