Pilot's chilling final words before plane crashed into the sea killing 228 people
Callum Jones
Featured Image Credit: Getty Stock Images / Forca Aerea Brasileira via LatinContent via Getty Images
The final words of a pilot before the plane he was flying crashed into the sea are as chilling as it gets.
On 1 June, 2009, Air France Flight 447 departed Rio de Janeiro set for Paris.
However, the Airbus A330 never made it to its final destination as it plummeted towards the Atlantic Ocean.
All 228 onboard - made up of 12 crew members and 216 passengers - were tragically killed.
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Days later, debris from the Air France jet was found floating among the waves, something which sparked a two-year search of the depths of the sea.
Search crews discovered black box recorders, which held key information about what had occurred in the air prior to the plane crashing.
The recording devices revealed that the plane's speed sensors had become blocked and iced up as the plane tried to make its way through a storm.
This resulted in the plane's systems producing faulty data for the flight.
The autopilot on the Airbus A330-203 was disabled, while the pilots also had to deal with trying to make sense of confusing data regarding their speed and altitude.
Subsequently, they decided to resume manual piloting.
But due to the plane system's not operating properly, captain Marc Dubois, 58, and his two co-pilots David Robert, 37, and Pierre-Cédric Bonin, 32, were being guided by incorrect navigation data while battling through a tropical storm.
The plane entered an aerodynamic stall, which led to trio mistakenly pointing the nose of the jet upwards instead of down.
The flight then started to tumble from the sky as the pilots had a panicked conversation.
Excerpts from recorded conversations reveal that two of the pilots on the Air France flight were asleep when the plane got into difficulty.
"We’ve lost our speeds!" one pilot began.
"I don’t know what’s happening," another voice was heard saying.
Bonin then was later heard screaming: "Let’s go! Pull up, pull up, pull up!"
"F***, we're going to crash! It's not true! But what's happening?" Robert then exclaimed.
And the fate of the aircraft was seemingly known when an unknown individual shouted: "F***, we're dead."
So, could the fatal situation have played out any differently?
As per the Daily Mail, chief investigator Alain Bouillard said: "If the captain had stayed in position through the Inter-tropical Convergence Zone, it would have delayed his sleep by no more than 15 minutes, and because of his experience, maybe the story would have ended differently.
"But I do not believe it was fatigue that caused him to leave. It was more like customary behavior, part of the piloting culture within Air France.
"And his leaving was not against the rules. Still, it is surprising. If you are responsible for the outcome, you do not go on vacation during the main event."
In 2023, a court in Paris ruled that Air France and Airbus were not guilty of manslaughter for the deaths of those on board.