As a person who doesn't often sleep well on overnight flights, this terrifies the heck out of me -- read the article, it's your worst nightmare. The full report is still a few months away but it now appears that human error may have been the reason for the crash. Air France generally has an excellent reputation in the airline industry for the quality of their pilots but they may need to update their training program.
Confronted with faulty instrument readings and alarms going off in the cockpit, the pilots of an Air France jetliner struggled to tame the aircraft as it went into an aerodynamic stall, rolled, climbed and finally plunged 38,000 feet into the Atlantic Ocean in just 3 1/2 minutes.
But the passengers on that doomed Rio de Janeiro-to-Paris flight were probably asleep or nodding off and didn't realize what was going on as the aircraft plummeted nose-up toward the ocean, the director of the French accident investigating bureau said after releasing preliminary data from flight recordings that provide new insight into the June 1, 2009, disaster.
