Minutes before Air France Flight 447 crashed into the sea of Brazil in 2009, two out of three pilots had fallen asleep, leaving only a rookie to handle the controls, Indo-Asian News Service reported. The horrific accident killed all 228 passengers on board.
A disturbing new investigation into doomed Flight 447 revealed the terrifying details of the last moments before the plane crashed into the Atlantic Ocean, with one of the pilots allegedly shouting, "F**k, we're dead" as the plane spiraled down, according to Vanity Fair's October edition.
As the plane was traveling from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to Paris on the fateful day, 37-year-old David Robert and Marc Dubois, the 58-year-old captain of the plane, had been sleeping when the Airbus 30 experienced difficulty after running into a tropical storm, according to recorded conversations between the two pilots and 32-year-old Pierre-Cedric Bonin.
The report said the findings "raised terrifying questions about safety aboard civilian passenger jets" and the "culture" of the Air France pilots on board. It was known that the veteran captain only got one hour of sleep the previous night, spending most of his time with his travel companion, an off-duty flight attendant and opera singer, UK MailOnline reported.
"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," chief investigator Alain Bouillard was quoted as saying.
"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," he added.
Having left Bonin, dubbed the "Company Baby" with only a few hundred flight hours under his belt, in charge of the plane, both Robert and Dubois were sleeping when disaster struck.
"According to the investigation, the plane was suffering from a loss of lift and its airspeed sensors had malfunctioned. But instead of following procedures and lowering the plane's nose, the junior pilot raised it," New York Post reported.
After the pivot tubes malfunctioned, Dubois entered the cockpit at one minute and 38 seconds, but it was already too late to save the plane.
Robert could be heard saying, "F**k, we're going to crash! It's not true! But what's happening?"
Then either Robert or Bonin said: "F**k, we're dead" before the plane crashed into the sea.
According to Vanity Fair, the turbulence and malfunction should have been a "non-event" that could have been easily handled. However, the "airplane was in control of the pilots, and if they had done nothing, they would have done all they needed to do."
It took two years to retrieve bodies and essential records such as the flight's voice recorder from the bottom of the sea, the report stated.
Meanwhile, after going through detailed investigations, both Air France and Airbus are facing manslaughter charges.
