Featured Image Credit: NurPhoto / Contributor / MatusDuda / Getty
On June 1st 2009, Air France flight 447 was flying from Rio de Janeiro to Paris, when it tragically crashed into the Atlantic Ocean.
All 228 people on board were killed, including its crew of 12.
Following the disaster, it took a two-year search with incredible precision to eventually locate the wreck of the plane and recover its black box.
Black boxes are a crucial part of any investigation whenever a plane disappears or crashes, as they record and store huge amounts of onboard data.
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The information that they store is key to figuring out what happened, but they're often very difficult to recover.
When flight 447's black box was discovered, it was found to contain audio recordings from the plane's cockpit, letting investigators hear the last moments of the piloting team before the crash.
Captain Marc Dubois, 58, and his two co-pilots David Robert, 37, and Pierre-Cédric Bonin, 32, can all be heard panicking as the situation gets worse.
The black box revealed that the plane they were piloting, an Airbus A330-200, was having serious technical issues that ultimately led to the disaster.
Due to really adverse weather conditions, the plane's speed sensors - known as pitot tubes - had become blocked and iced up.
The plane had made its way through a storm, and the adverse weather conditions blocked and iced up the plane's speed sensors.
This then led to the whole plane's systems to give the pilots incorrect data and also meant that autopilot wasn't working.
The pilots then began to confuse data about both altitude and speed coming through on their instruments, and little to no visibility, this meant that the pilots were essentially flying in the dark.
Later, the plane reportedly began to stall, and the pilots mistakenly pointed its nose up instead of down in attempting to fix this.
Unfortunately, the plane began to lose altitude and fall out of the sky.
As this is happening, the the transcript is fairly horrifying. One pilot exclaims: "We’ve lost our speeds!"
"I don’t know what’s happening," another concerned voice says, and Bonin can later be heard exclaiming: "Let’s go! Pull up, pull up, pull up!"
"F***, we're going to crash! It's not true! But what's happening?"
It took over four minutes for the plane to reach sea level, which must have been a completely horrific period of time as it went out of control.
Over a decade later, in 2023, the data helped a court to rule that Air France and Airbus were not guilty of manslaughter for the deaths of all 228 people on board the flight.
