May 29, 2011
Sailors from Brazil's navy recover debris in June 2009 from the Air France flight 447 that plunged into the Atlantic Ocean. Picture: AP Source: AP
HE was one of Air France's "company babies": a dashing 32-year-old junior pilot - and a keen amateur yachtsman - who had been qualified to fly the airline's ultra-sophisticated Airbus A330 jet for barely a year.
Yet despite his inexperience, Pierre-Cedric Bonin found himself responsible for the lives of 228 passengers and crew members on June 1, 2009, when the cockpit of his $190 million aircraft lit up with terrifying and contradictory alarm signals en route from Rio de Janeiro to Paris.
While Bonin held on to the plane's “side-stick” controller and looked at his instruments in disbelief, his co-pilot, David Robert, 37, began troubleshooting. The captain, Marc Dubois, 58, was napping outside the cockpit.
According to a newly-released report by French investigators - which finally answers some of the questions surrounding the mystery of Flight 447 - a fatal sequence of events had already been triggered when the plane's external speed sensors suddenly gave inconsistent readings, possibly because of ice.
This is thought to have caused the autopilot to disengage, which in turn brought warning of an “aerodynamic stall”.
That is when Bonin - who remained at the controls while Robert shouted with increasing desperation for the captain - did something that aviation experts have described as inexplicable: he pointed the nose of the Airbus upwards, causing it to slow down dramatically. He kept doing this for at least one minute until the plane had climbed 3,000ft to 38,000ft.
This one rudimentary mistake, according to the initial findings of France's aviation safety authority, might have been responsible for the aircraft no longer having enough air flow over its wings to remain aloft, although no blame has yet been officially assigned.
Regardless of fault, the aviation authority says data from Flight 447's “black box” recorders show it suffered an irrecoverable stall over the Atlantic, meaning the plane fell out of the sky after a sickening 40-degree roll.
Bonin's wife, Isabelle, was among those who died in the main cabin. Their two children were at home with their grandfather.
The question being asked in the industry is why, given that there was a 50,000ft thunderstorm near the plane's flight path, the youngest of the three pilots, with the least flying time, was at the controls.
“It seems as though they were just clueless,” says Mike Doerr, a former Airbus A320 captain who charters private jets in California. “The response to the invalid speed data doesn't make any sense unless they also had a Mach warning (that the plane was going faster than its mechanical limits).”
So far, there has been no such evidence. At night and in bad weather, however, there is also the possibility the pilots had become disoriented, or did not know which instruments to believe and therefore which warnings to prioritise.
“I don't have any more indications,”
“ Bonin is heard saying on the cockpit voice recorder, his voice still calm.
In a statement, Air France said its pilots “demonstrated a totally professional attitude and were committed to carrying out their task to the very end”.
Doerr said he doubted that American pilots, who typically come from military backgrounds, would have been overwhelmed. “The European airlines select people with virtually no flight time at all and train them pretty much from the ground up,” he said.
“They are 'company babies' who rise up through the organisation. Whereas if you get your experience in the navy or air force, there's an emphasis on trial by fire.”
Online criticism has been even blunter. “It seems reasonable to conclude that the instruments failed then the pilots screwed up,” wrote Henry Blodget, an influential former Wall Street analyst, on his US website Business Insider. “First thing you learn in flight school is when there is any question about having enough airspeed, you push the nose down.”
Others agreed. “An inexcusable, arrogant waste of life,” wrote one commentator, while another offered: “At 37,000ft, it shouldn't be terribly tough to recover from a stall. Push the nose down, gain some speed, then level the damn thing out and try to figure out what the hell just happened.”
Although Flight 447 plunged towards the Atlantic at almost 11,000ft per minute over 3 and a half minutes, some experts say that because the plane was relatively level and falling at a consistent speed, the doomed passengers might not have been aware they were experiencing anything worse than bad turbulence.
Others argue the rate of descent was so extreme that some on board would have lost consciousness before the impact, which scattered bodies and debris over 80 kilometres before they sank to the seabed far below.
“It's actually very comforting for me, knowing that they didn't suffer,” said Patricia Coakley, from Whitby, North Yorkshire, whose husband Arthur, an engineer, was killed while returning from working on a Brazilian oil rig.
“I don't feel anything either way in terms of who's to blame,” she said. “I'd rather have my husband here - but that's not going to happen.”
Prosecutors will find plenty of interest in this weekend's report, which documents Bonin's repeated attempts to push the nose of the aircraft up even though it had slowed so much that the computer regarded the speed as “invalid”.
In the final chaotic moments, both Bonin and his co-pilot attempted to simultaneously operate their side-sticks, before the 32-year-old seemed to give up. “Go ahead, you have the controls,” were his last words, possibly directed to the captain, who had woken up and rushed into the cockpit, but was too late to do anything.
Chris Ayres The Sunday Times
