Featured Image Credit: NurPhoto / Contributor / MatusDuda / Getty
On 1st June 2009, what was meant to be a normal flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris turned into a harrowing tragedy.
When Air France flight 447 crashed into the Atlantic Ocean, all 228 onboard - made up of 12 crew members and 216 passengers - were tragically killed.
Days later, debris from the jet was found floating in the sea.
However, it took a two-year search in order to locate the remains of the plane and the black box.
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Black boxes are a vital part of any investigation whenever a plane disappears or crashes - they record and store huge amounts of onboard data.
This information is key to figuring out what happened, but they're also often very challenging to recover.
After discovering the black box recorder, investigators were able to make a chilling discovery - The box contained audio recorded from the plane's cockpit.
This meant that they were able to hear the last moments of the piloting team before the crash, which would help them piece together what happened, and most importantly what lead to the tragedy.
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 recording revealed that the plane, an Airbus A330-200, was suffering from serious technical issues.
The plane's speed sensors - known as pitot tubes - had become blocked and iced over due to poor weather conditions.
This meant that the whole plane's systems began to malfunction, giving the pilots incorrect data.
Alongside this, it also meant that autopilot wasn't working.
With confusing data about both altitude and speed coming through on their instruments, and little to no visibility, the pilots were essentially flying in the dark.
Recordings also showed that the plan apparently entered into a stall, and in an attempt to fix this, the pilots mistakenly pointed its nose up instead of down.
This caused the plane to suddenly lose altitude and fall out of the sky, with the piloting crew's reaction caught on audio.
The transcript is chilling.
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!"
Tragically, it soon becomes clear that there's no saving the plane, Rober screams: "F***, we're going to crash! It's not true! But what's happening?"
Over a decade later, though, the data helped a court to reach the verdict that Air France and Airbus were not guilty of manslaughter for the deaths of all 228 people on board the flight.
