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TVTranscript
00:00Four kilometers below the waves, the biggest challenge was the depth.
00:06At the bottom of the Atlantic, investigators search for the remains of Air France Flight
00:11447.
00:12This was a major commercial airline.
00:17What the hell are you doing?
00:18It had a plane suddenly drop out of the sky in four and a half minutes.
00:21228 people are gone.
00:23It was a real shock.
00:25We need to contact Brazil and Senegal air traffic control right away, please.
00:31Air crash investigators face a monumental task.
00:35We absolutely had to understand why this accident happened.
00:39The easiest explanation is that the bomb blew it out of the sky.
00:46That would explain it.
00:48The answers may lie in the wreckage, but finding that evidence will take years.
00:55They had to do whatever it took.
01:25Air France Flight 447 is crossing the Atlantic Ocean.
01:36The Airbus A330 is flying an 11-hour direct route from Rio de Janeiro to Paris.
01:44Fifty-eight-year-old Captain Mark Dupois is in command.
01:52Here's the new forecast.
01:54He's been a pilot for well over half his life and is now one of the most senior captains
01:59at Air France.
02:00It's hard to see anything in this plane with this lighting.
02:04First officer Pierre-Cedric Bonin is 32 years old.
02:08He's been flying the A330 for about a year.
02:12We are arriving at Tintor.
02:19Thirty-seven-year-old relief pilot David Robert is on standby.
02:25The three pilots fly in shifts to stay alert.
02:32There are 216 passengers on the overnight flight, including Canadian business executive
02:40Brad Clemmes.
02:41I talked to my brother on a Sunday morning, and we talked about our children, and then
02:46I talked to him right up to the time that he got onto the plane.
02:49Like so many of these air warriors, or whatever they call them, he flew all the time.
02:54He was quite used to it, and I think he probably even enjoyed it.
02:57With the autopilot holding the plane steady at 35,000 feet, the crew communicates with
03:07Brazilian air traffic control.
03:13As they fly, an onboard computer monitors the engines, hydraulics and other systems.
03:19It also sends progress reports to Air France headquarters.
03:25Every ten minutes, the computer transmits the plane's position, along with any maintenance
03:30data.
03:35The goal of the maintenance messages is simply to help the ground teams prepare for any repairs
03:40to the plane that are needed for the next departure.
03:55Three hours into the flight, the captain reports reaching a navigational waypoint off the coast
04:00of Brazil.
04:01Air France 447 position in tow.
04:02Maintain flight level 350.
04:03Okay, will do.
04:04So we've got a thing up ahead?
04:15Yes, I saw that.
04:22At 1.49am, the A330 leaves Brazilian radar surveillance and enters a communications dead
04:29zone over the mid-Atlantic.
04:36Two hours later, an air traffic controller in Senegal tries to contact the flight.
04:42Air France 447, this is Dakar, do you copy?
04:46Come in, Air France 447.
04:48He can't reach the crew, so he alerts Air France.
04:52Dakar, Air France, have you heard from Air 447, over?
05:00Negative.
05:01Hold for Air France, please.
05:03No one has heard from the crew of flight 447.
05:07The only communication, 24 maintenance messages transmitted by the plane hours earlier.
05:15An Air France maintenance worker tries to make contact, but his message bounces back.
05:21What the hell?
05:23Perhaps the communication system has failed.
05:26HF radio, especially at night, is not terribly reliable.
05:31So for some of the time that it was missing, everybody was saying, well, I hope it's just
05:38a communication problem.
05:40By the time the plane should have reached French airspace, controllers still can't make
05:45contact.
05:48At Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris, the 11.10am arrival time comes and goes with no
05:53sign of flight 447.
05:56The A330 would have run out of fuel by now.
06:01The airline begins notifying families.
06:05The plane has almost certainly crashed at sea.
06:08I had an infinitesimally small hope that he might have been on a different plane, because
06:13we weren't 100% sure when other flights might be coming back that he could possibly be on.
06:18By the afternoon of June 1st, the world learns that flight 447 from Rio to Paris has mysteriously
06:25vanished.
06:27It was a real shock to me and the whole industry that a modern aircraft like an Airbus A330,
06:39operated by a world-class airline like Air France, could just go missing without a word.
06:46Searchers scramble to the mid-Atlantic to look for the plane and survivors.
06:51The plane had been missing 11 or 12 hours at this stage, without any communication whatsoever.
06:59It's one of the worst accidents in the history of commercial aviation.
07:03An advanced passenger jet is gone.
07:06228 people are presumed dead.
07:19French President Nicolas Sarkozy announces there's almost no chance anyone survived.
07:31The job of solving this mystery falls to the BEA, France's air safety agency.
07:38It's under enormous pressure to come up with answers.
07:42We absolutely had to understand why this accident happened, and with that plane and that airline.
07:50Alain Bouillard takes charge of the investigation.
07:54He's a pilot and aeronautical engineer with almost 20 years' experience as an air crash investigator.
08:06I had worked on other important investigations like the Concorde, so I was conscious of the
08:11fact that the investigation would be difficult.
08:14But I was calm and I surrounded myself with competent people.
08:20French systems engineer Leopold Sartorius also joins the team on day one.
08:28From the beginning we expected a long and complicated investigation.
08:38Their first goal, find what's left of flight 447.
08:44It disappeared from radar without sending a distress signal, and for many days there
08:49was no trace on the surface of the ocean.
08:57This is the last time they sent our position.
09:04Positional messages sent by the plane every 10 minutes allowed us to be sure enough of
09:07the zone, a large zone where the plane might be found.
09:14Sartorius doesn't know what direction the plane flew after sending that last report.
09:20He only knows how fast it was flying.
09:23There's a huge area to search.
09:25I say we start here.
09:28Thousands of square kilometers of open water.
09:34Air and naval forces scan the ocean looking for any sign of flight 447.
09:43Finally, after five days of searching, a Brazilian pilot spots a few scattered pieces of floating
09:49debris, wreckage from an A330, but no survivors.
09:56The find erases any lingering doubts about the crash.
10:00Everyone aboard flight 447 is dead.
10:05Your world collapses.
10:06It was absolutely horrible.
10:07You know, he was a wonderful person, I was very close to him, and it was just the most
10:15horrible thing that you could think of.
10:17The families of 227 others are in the exact same position.
10:23They all need answers.
10:32What brings an airbus down from 35,000 feet?
10:36Nothing.
10:41The loss of an airplane during cruise is always rare.
10:47We're more used to events taking place during take-off or landing.
10:51So this event raised a lot of questions.
10:59One of the most pressing and disturbing questions.
11:02Has the world just witnessed a deadly terrorist attack?
11:14I think a terrorism scenario was thoroughly plausible, you know, very simply because this
11:23is a very modern airplane with a very good safety record.
11:28The easiest explanation is that something, that a bomb blew it out of the sky.
11:34That would explain it.
11:39Atlantic currents have spread floating aircraft debris over 500 square kilometers of ocean.
11:54Every piece recovered is carefully catalogued, photographed, and sent ashore for analysis.
12:02But it's the wreckage lost at the bottom of the sea that investigators need most.
12:07Wreckage that includes the vital flight recorders.
12:12If we didn't find the flight recorders, we would never understand what happened.
12:18The two flight recorders capture important details of what the pilots say and do during
12:27the flight.
12:31The black boxes are so vital, they're equipped with a locator beacon to help investigators
12:36find them, even underwater.
12:39But the clock is ticking.
12:41The beacon can only send a signal for 30 days.
12:48What's more, the mid-Atlantic ocean is four and a half kilometers deep in some places.
12:56Deeper than the remains of the Titanic.
13:03Technicians listen for the signal.
13:06At this depth, we need to get right over them.
13:08While crisscrossing search area of 17,000 square kilometers.
13:14It was an immense area.
13:20It was a real race against time.
13:22We only had 30 days.
13:25While the BEA scours the ocean floor for the flight recorders, other team members are scrutinizing
13:31the only hard evidence they have so far.
13:34I will pull up all the messages they sent.
13:37The 24 maintenance messages sent by Flight 447's Aircraft Communication Addressing and
13:42Reporting System, ACARS.
13:46This is the first serious accident to a modern airliner where we'd had some ACARS data.
13:53ACARS messages are highly technical.
13:56They're not designed to reveal what the crew saw, said or did during the flight.
14:04To have only the maintenance messages to work with is really unusual.
14:09We had parcels of information that gave us, in fact, very little information.
14:15But they do provide an intriguing lead.
14:22One of the maintenance messages notes a failure in the device that measures airspeed.
14:27The pitot tube.
14:31The ACARS messages had given us the first piece of the puzzle.
14:35We knew that there had been a clogging problem in the pitot tubes.
14:40Pitot tubes are small side the body of the plane.
14:43As air rushes through the tubes, they calculate airspeed.
14:47But sometimes pitot tubes temporarily fail.
14:51In an environment with very dense ice crystals, all the ice crystals clogged the tube and
14:56stopped the air from entering.
15:00Air France and other airlines were in the process of replacing pitot tubes to prevent
15:05just this kind of problem.
15:07The tubes were freezing all the time.
15:10Annoying, but certainly not dangerous.
15:14A frozen pitot tube is considered far from catastrophic.
15:19If you lose a pitot tube, you don't fall out of the sky.
15:23The pilots knew about the issue and how to respond to it.
15:28The company had notified its pilots with an OSV, an information bulletin, that described
15:33the phenomenon and the appropriate measures to take.
15:39We are concludes that frozen pitot tubes alone cannot explain the crash.
15:44There is more to this story.
15:49We were certain of this right away.
15:51We would have to look elsewhere.
15:59While the frozen pitot tubes may not have been to blame, Bouillard wonders if extreme
16:03weather may have played a role.
16:08Strong turbulence can damage a plane or even cause the loss of an aircraft by rupturing
16:12a wing or damaging the onboard systems.
16:19Astronomers consider the possibility that flight 447 flew through violent weather strong
16:24enough to bring down the plane.
16:28Turbulence might explain what caused the accident.
16:37Even at that altitude, it may have been impossible for the pilots to recover from a storm brought
16:42on by a violent storm.
16:44The forces could have torn the plane apart.
16:50On a plane, the main danger from turbulence is structural breakage, like losing a piece
16:55of the tail or losing a wing in an extreme case.
17:01And that would lead to the loss of the aircraft.
17:13Flight 447 disappeared in a volatile region where trade winds from the two hemispheres
17:18converge, creating violent storms.
17:23They were in the intertropical convergence zone, which often has very strong turbulence.
17:36Other planes changed their route that night to avoid storms in the area.
17:41What kind of weather did flight 447 encounter?
17:47What were the actual conditions?
17:49What was the actual environment around this plane?
17:51It was a real question.
17:55Beyond turbulence, thunderstorms pose other threats to aviation.
17:59Perhaps lightning was to blame for the crash.
18:09If there had been some deficiency in the insulation of the plane, and the systems
18:13were damaged, we likely would have seen a lot of problems.
18:18Did lightning bring down flight 447?
18:27So far, the only evidence Bouillard has is floating debris, including some unused life
18:33jackets, indicating that passengers didn't have time to put them on.
18:41Recovering the life jackets in their original packaging told us that the event happened
18:45very quickly.
18:49The passengers weren't ready for the impact with the surface of the water.
18:56The unopened life vests hint at a sudden catastrophe.
19:02But other debris suggests just the opposite.
19:10The recovery of the tail was a very important element.
19:17The pattern of fragmentation can reveal important clues about when the tail broke off.
19:25All the ruptures were static in nature.
19:27There was no trace of fatigue damage.
19:36The tail was connected to the fuselage at the moment of impact.
19:40It didn't come apart in flight.
19:45If the A330 hit the water in one piece, it wasn't brought down by a bomb or by turbulence.
19:53Scientists are no closer to solving this mystery.
20:01It has been three weeks since flight 447 disappeared into the Atlantic Ocean.
20:08In just days, the recorder's battery-powered locator beacons will go dead.
20:18With only floating debris to study, specialists pour over a section of flight 447's galley.
20:29Looks like the pressure was vertical, like this.
20:32They make a key discovery.
20:34The plane landed flat and at high speed.
20:42Examining the galley confirmed that there was an enormous vertical acceleration the
20:46instant the plane hit the surface of the water.
20:51Everything inside the plane was flattened, like a car in a metal crusher.
20:56They realized that the airplane had not nosedived into the sea.
21:01It was almost certain that it had belly flopped into the sea.
21:06And how that could have happened to a modern airliner, nobody could think of.
21:15Under these circumstances, it was essential to find the recorders to understand the accident
21:20and explain why it happened.
21:24The search at sea hits day 30, with no sign of the A330.
21:30The locator beacon is presumed dead.
21:33Bouillard turns to high-tech sonar to continue the search.
21:40From that moment on, sonar was the only way we could detect metal on the ocean floor and
21:45have some chance of finding the wreckage.
21:51But steep underwater mountains and valleys make the ocean floor difficult to scan.
21:57The search area really hadn't been seen before.
22:00It was the size of Switzerland and you were running up through the Alps, trying to find
22:05this thing.
22:06So that's what the terrain looked like, basically, in a general sense.
22:11After months of searching, they've scanned more than 22,000 square kilometers of ocean
22:16bed and found absolutely nothing.
22:22The absence of the flight recorders and wreckage felt very frustrating and like a failure.
22:28To us, it was inconceivable in 2009, 2010, that we could lose a major airliner and not
22:36be able to find it, not be able to understand even remotely what had happened and why 228
22:42people had lost their lives.
22:45Investigators are determined to succeed.
22:48They turn to the same automated underwater vehicles that found the Titanic.
22:53It's probably the first time AUVs have been run on that terrain, that steep, to look for
22:59something this small.
23:00You know, it's a big plane when you stand next to it, but when you're searching the
23:04ocean, it's a very small target.
23:07Still no sign of any wreckage at the bottom of the sea.
23:15It's as if the plane simply disappeared.
23:23Eighteen months after Flight 447 goes missing, Weir realizes that the odds of finding what
23:30he's after are growing slim.
23:33At the end of 2010, we'd already spent 22 million euros.
23:39Continuing the search will cost millions more, with no guarantee of success.
23:45We weren't sure we could find the wreckage, and if we did find the recorders, we weren't
23:50sure we'd be able to read them.
23:55The black box is not designed to stay in such deep water for two years and still function
24:00afterwards.
24:03The boxes may have already been crushed by the tremendous underwater pressure.
24:08At four kilometers below the surface, they're up against a punishing force of over 5,800
24:13pounds per square inch.
24:16Investigators may be fighting a losing battle.
24:23Nearly two years after the Air France disaster, Weir has little to show for his efforts.
24:29No significant wreckage, and no black boxes.
24:33But he refuses to give up.
24:35We can't stop.
24:36We can find the boxes.
24:37I know we can.
24:39For the BEA, it was their job to find out what happened, so obviously they wanted to
24:44find the black boxes.
24:46But can you imagine what it would be like for Airbus not to know for sure what caused
24:51this accident, only ever to be able to theorize about it?
24:58Authorities of the victims are also desperate for answers.
25:01It was extremely important for us that they find the black boxes and find out what happened,
25:05and we were determined to put as much pressure as we could on the authorities to ensure that
25:10the search continued.
25:14On March the 25th, 2011, the BEA begins one final search.
25:20Again, they launch AUVs to scour the ocean floor.
25:25They focus on a 37-kilometer-wide circle around the plane's last known position.
25:32The AUV is separate from the vessel, so once you launch it, it runs its 20 or 24-hour mission
25:39independent of the vessel.
25:40If the weather gets rough, the AUV is still tracking back and forth and it doesn't care.
25:46One week into the search, a submersible captures a sonar image of something huge on the ocean
25:52floor.
25:54We are's gamble may have just paid off.
25:57It sure looks like a plane.
26:03The crew immediately sends down another submersible, this time to take high-resolution digital
26:08images.
26:09I never thought I'd see the day.
26:20The crew sends the images straight to Bouillard's office in Paris.
26:32Two years of his life have been devoted to this moment.
26:36I don't believe it.
26:43Thank God.
26:48Receiving the photographs was a moment we had waited for, for two years.
26:54It conjured up indescribable emotions, very strong.
27:01On April the 3rd, 2011, the wreckage of Air France Flight 447 has finally been found.
27:12It lies 12 kilometers northeast of the plane's last reported position, at a depth of almost
27:184,000 meters.
27:22Locating the wreckage was already something exceptional and very significant in the life
27:26of an investigator.
27:30With the crash site pinpointed, a second hunt begins.
27:36An operator guides a robotic submersible as it peers through the darkness in search of
27:40the two black boxes.
27:43It's just like a junkyard.
27:47It's just nothing but aircraft debris everywhere.
27:52Things are on top of each other, there's fuselage skin, there's engines, there's all sorts of
27:57things all over the place.
27:59Days pass with no sign of the recorders.
28:03Investigators know that even if they find what they're looking for, two years underwater
28:07may have rendered the devices useless.
28:10We had no idea whether the flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder would be in a working
28:16order.
28:18Then Bouillard gets the break he's been hoping for.
28:21Stop, stop there.
28:24Zoom in on that.
28:31Incredible.
28:33Absolutely incredible.
28:42Those are moments that are difficult to describe.
28:45Those are moments in your career that you can't forget.
28:50An unmanned sub first recovers the flight data recorder, then the cockpit voice recorder.
28:56Once it's on deck, the gendarmerie take it and they put it in the box and secure it.
29:01Up then, everybody's like holding their breath.
29:03And at that point, you know you have it.
29:05So it's really a tremendous feeling.
29:15French gendarmes escort the flight data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder to Leo Sartorius's
29:22lab in Paris.
29:25After countless hours of searching and theorizing, the world may finally understand what happened
29:31on board flight 447.
29:34The answer to what went wrong may be locked in these watertight containers.
29:41There was a lot of concern that we might take a false step that would lead to the loss
29:47of the information.
29:50They must be handled with great care.
29:53One wrong move and a two-year search costing almost 32 million euros will have been for
29:59nothing.
30:02Starting with the cockpit voice recorder, they carefully open the protective casing,
30:09looking for the memory card inside.
30:17The worst thing would have been for the actual memory cards to be broken, physically broken.
30:24This isn't good.
30:25I don't see the damage.
30:27Transmitters look broken.
30:32We quickly noticed that there were small parts that were broken, so we weren't sure that
30:36everything was in working order.
30:39If technicians can't fix the broken CVR, there may be no way to know what was going on in
30:44the cockpit just before the crash, or even who was flying the plane.
30:50Look at the FDR card.
30:53A close examination of the second box, the flight data recorder, brings better news.
30:59It's fine.
31:01No problems.
31:04I think we all looked at each other and said,
31:06it's incredible that they're in this state.
31:08It's incredible.
31:13The memory card was in excellent condition.
31:16We were able to read the data very quickly.
31:20While technicians try to repair the cockpit voice recorder, Sartorius carefully plots
31:25the flight recorder data.
31:28We're cruising safely at 35,000 feet.
31:32FDR data reveals that the pitot tubes did, in fact, freeze.
31:37The pitot tubes freeze here.
31:42The frozen tubes produce erratic airspeed readings,
31:45causing the autopilot to shut off automatically.
31:50Autopilot shuts off.
31:52The pilot takes control of the plane.
31:55It warns the pilots very loudly.
31:57That can be a bit of a surprise, a bit of a shock.
32:01It definitely was a shock to these pilots,
32:03and it was their reaction to this warning
32:07which was the key to everything else that followed.
32:10The crew has been taught that a frozen pitot tube
32:13should clear itself in less than a minute.
32:15The pitots on the aircraft, they were only subject to the clogging
32:19for about 56 seconds, and after that,
32:22the airspeed readings were back to normal again.
32:25The pilot only needs to hold the plane steady,
32:28and the problem will disappear.
32:31He doesn't know that you don't know the airspeed.
32:34All the airplane wants is power to keep it going forward
32:37and the same attitude to keep it in level flight.
32:40But he does not hold steady.
32:42Whoever was flying the plane pulled back
32:44and pitched the nose up instead.
32:50When the autopilot disconnected,
32:52the pilot in command changed the pitch of the plane.
32:55It climbs more than 2,500 feet.
33:00If you pull the nose of an airplane up,
33:02it's going uphill, it's going to slow down.
33:06Here, their speed dropped more than 90 knots
33:09in less than a minute.
33:11This triggered a stall warning here.
33:18Raising the nose of the plane at high altitude
33:21put the plane into a stall very quickly.
33:25In an aerodynamic stall,
33:27the wings lose lift and the plane drops from the sky.
33:33It was the pilot's actions that led to the stall.
33:36They fell at more than 12,000 feet per minute.
33:42Inexplicably, the pilot continued to pull back
33:45when he should have been pitching the plane's nose down
33:48to gain speed and lift.
33:51The more you raise the nose,
33:54the more the lift will be destroyed.
33:56And that's what was happening to Air France 447.
34:01We had a plane that was practically falling like a rock.
34:09Only the cockpit voice recorder
34:11can reveal why the pilots acted as they did.
34:16In our laboratory, there were a few hours of agony
34:19because we weren't sure we could read the data.
34:22All this effort, all this money spent...
34:25Will it play?
34:27I don't know.
34:30Investigators are up against the wall.
34:33They have just one hope remaining
34:35in their long quest to know
34:37what caused the worst disaster
34:39in Air France's history.
34:41Everything they've worked for
34:43now depends on repairs
34:45made to one small electronic device.
34:52The moment of truth.
34:57Air France 447.
34:59Air France 447, go ahead.
35:02Air France 447, contact Atlantic Center.
35:05Atlantico, Atlantico...
35:07Forty minutes before the accident,
35:09Captain Dubois is in his seat.
35:12Air France 447, Atlantico, go ahead.
35:15Air France 447, position in tow.
35:19The CVR allowed us to understand
35:22who was piloting the plane,
35:24who was monitoring the parameters.
35:26Maintain flight level 350.
35:28OK, will do.
35:30First officer Pierre-Cédric Bonin
35:32is in the right-hand seat.
35:35So we've got a thing up ahead.
35:39Yes, I saw that.
35:42And the two men are heading towards a storm.
35:45Looks like we're entering a cloud.
35:49Normally, the crew would try to fly above a storm.
35:54But at this stage in the transatlantic flight,
35:57it's not safe to do that.
35:59It would be good if we can climb that way.
36:03Yeah.
36:04At 35,000 feet,
36:06the air outside is too thin
36:09for the fuel-heavy plane to climb any higher.
36:13The pilots have only two choices.
36:16Fly straight through the storm
36:18or try to navigate around it.
36:41You get some sleep?
36:43Sort of.
36:46Well, then, I am out of here.
36:52Captain Dubois takes his scheduled rest.
36:56First officer David Robert
36:58relieves the more experienced captain.
37:01Robert has almost 4,000 hours more
37:03flying the A330
37:05than the other first officer on the flight deck.
37:08First officer Robert is in the left-hand seat.
37:12First officer Bonin is the pilot
37:14flying in the right-hand seat.
37:16Investigators now know that minutes before the crash,
37:19the captain left the cockpit for his break.
37:22You maybe want to go to the left a bit?
37:24But it's unclear which of the two remaining pilots
37:27is in command.
37:28Excuse me?
37:29Can we possibly go a bit to the left?
37:32The way they acted when the captain had left the flight deck
37:36was not as if one of them was definitely in charge
37:43and the other one was definitely the supporting pilot.
37:49The confusion over their roles becomes critical
37:52when the plane hits a column of ice crystals in the cloud.
37:58The ice crystals pound the plane.
38:05Ice envelops the pitot tubes.
38:08The ice crystals are filling the pitot tubes.
38:13Airspeed readings are no longer valid.
38:16Suddenly, the pilots can't be sure how fast they're flying.
38:21That is the autopilot disconnecting.
38:24I have the controls.
38:31Stall warnings begin to blare in the cockpit
38:34as Bonin lifts the nose.
38:36Finally, investigators know which pilot
38:39put the plane into a stall.
38:41First officer Bonin is pulling back and stalling the plane.
38:44Incredibly, neither pilot can figure out
38:47why the warning is sounding.
38:49Officer Robert doesn't understand what's happening.
38:52He sees the airplane going up
38:54and he sees the airspeed dropping
38:56and he says, hey, watch your airspeed.
38:59We've lost the speed.
39:03The pilots need to push the plane's nose down to gain speed.
39:07But Bonin inexplicably is pulling back
39:11lifting the nose.
39:13OK, OK, OK.
39:15I'm going back down.
39:17I count in two or three, you're going up.
39:19So go back down.
39:21The pilots struggle to regain control of their plane.
39:27But they seem completely paralysed by their own confusion.
39:33They're doing everything wrong.
39:35It should be obvious what to do.
39:41Desperate to save his 216 passengers,
39:44first officer David Robert summons the captain.
39:51Bonin increases thrust to maximum power
39:54but it's no use.
40:00Do you understand what's happening?
40:02I'm losing all control of the plane.
40:06When they get here, they're falling at 90 degrees.
40:09When they get here, they're falling at more than 6,200 feet per minute.
40:13So they still have about two minutes left to figure out what's happening.
40:18First officer Robert decides to take control.
40:21Control's to the left.
40:23He tries to push the nose of the plane down,
40:26a key step for recovering from a stall.
40:29But incredibly, Bonin is still pulling back on his controls.
40:34They can use their side sticks at the same time.
40:37If both go in different directions,
40:39they have a tendency to cancel each other out.
40:43The fact that the two pilots were making different
40:46and sometimes opposite inputs to the side stick controls
40:49was pretty surprising.
40:51The two pilots were not coordinating their thinking or their actions.
40:5590 seconds after the crisis began, the captain returns.
40:59What the hell are you doing?
41:02We've lost all control of the airplane.
41:04We don't understand anything.
41:06We've tried everything.
41:08Because they weren't believing the situation that they were now in,
41:12they just went back to basic instinct,
41:16which is, I want to go up.
41:18I want to stop falling.
41:20Let's pull the nose up.
41:22Dubois scans the instruments, trying to see what's gone wrong.
41:26What do you think? What do we need to do?
41:28I don't know. It's going down.
41:32The captain doesn't have enough time to assess the situation.
41:37We're at 9,000 feet.
41:39Climb, climb, climb, climb.
41:42But I've been at maximum nose up for a while.
41:46Finally, Dubois understands.
41:48First officer Bonin is causing the stall by pulling the nose up.
41:54No, no, no, don't climb.
41:57By the time they figure it out, it's too late.
42:02Robert can't get enough lift to recover from the stall.
42:07At 2,000 feet, sensors detect the ocean's surface and trigger new alarms.
42:17We're going to crash.
42:19This can't be true.
42:23What's happening?
42:26The aircraft hits the water at almost 200 kilometers an hour.
42:32Hearing the conversations on the cockpit voice recorder for the first time was a big moment.
42:38It left us speechless.
42:50Alan Bouillard was all pale.
42:52At that moment, he understood the distress the crew was in
42:56during the last moments of the flight.
42:59By the summer of 2011, salvage crews recover 104 bodies
43:04from the submerged wreckage of Flight 447,
43:07including that of Brad Clemmons.
43:11My brother was amongst those that were raised,
43:14so it enabled us to recover him,
43:17to bring him home and to conduct a service properly
43:20and to say our goodbyes properly.
43:22So it was a big moment.
43:25More than three years after the accident,
43:28Alan Bouillard announces that the downing of Flight 447
43:32was not caused by the frozen pitot tubes,
43:35but by the crew's failure to understand and rectify the situation.
43:40This can't be true.
43:42But what's happening?
43:45There was a feeling that these planes were so sophisticated
43:49they could fly by themselves.
43:51The pilots weren't even trained to fly this type of plane
43:54on manual at high altitudes
43:56because the thought was that they would always be on autopilot,
43:59so there was no reason for the pilot to know how to fly it.
44:02New training is now in place to teach crews
44:05how to deal with unreliable airspeed
44:08and how to recover from a stall at high altitudes.
44:12The airlines have to be prepared
44:15to spend a lot of time on the ground
44:19and be prepared to spend more money
44:22on fundamental manual flying training
44:25and cognition training for their pilots.
44:30Air France 447 is just the accident
44:33where you can't ignore it any longer
44:36and changes have to come.
44:44They're big, they're furry and very, very cute.
44:48Join the efforts to get captive pandas back to the wild
44:51in a brand new film over on Nachio Wild tonight at 8.