The plane was an Airbus A330, a fully fly-by-wire wide body jet with an impeccable safety record since its introduction in 1994, the type had never had a fatal accident in passenger service. Three hours earlier in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 216 passengers and 12 crew boarded Air France flight 447 for an overnight flight to Paris.
#The tube paper airplane license
The pilots of flight 447, probably pictured in their license photos. Its lessons could not be more important, even for those who believe themselves above the doomed crew of flight 447, as the boundary between the responsibilities of man and machine grows ever dimmer.
#The tube paper airplane code
But there is a reason, written between the lines of the cockpit voice recorder transcript, hidden away within the mysterious code that governs human behavior, a key to the secrets of the profoundly irrational. How could such a thing happen? To this day, most people still struggle to understand it. Through a series of increasingly misguided control inputs, they sent flight 447 plummeting towards the ocean, all the while trying desperately to understand what was wrong, only grasping too late that they themselves were the problem.
A brief interruption to their airspeed indications, lasting less than a minute, had thrown two trained Air France pilots into a state of paralyzed agitation. When the recorders were finally found in May 2011, they revealed a story at once more prosaic and more inexplicable than anyone had imagined. What could have brought down a modern passenger jet, flying for a world class airline, during what should have been the safest part of the flight? For two years, the world could only speculate, as search teams scoured a vast area of the ocean floor in search of the elusive black boxes. The Airbus A330 with 228 people on board had vanished into the night without a distress call, leaving behind little to explain its sudden and dramatic end. In the early hours of the first of June 2009, Air France flight 447 from Rio de Janeiro to Paris disappeared in a radar dead zone over the mid-Atlantic. Searchers recover the tail section of Air France flight 447 from the Atlantic on June 7th, 2009.