Brazilian Navy sailors pick a piece of debris from Air France flight AF447 out of the Atlantic Ocean, a week after the crash happened on June 1, 2009.
The pilots of Air France flight AF 447, which crashed into the Atlantic three years ago, ignored basic rules of flying, but were also misled by faulty computer indicators. Experts say pilots have become excessivley accustomed to automated flying and need to learn how to fly planes by hand.
What happened in the cockpit of Air France flight AF 447 in the fatal minutes before the crash? For a long time, it was a mystery. Aviation experts couldn’t understand the behavior of the French pilots whose Airbus A330 hurtled into the Atlantic during a tropical storm on June 1, 2009.
“It’s as if someone raced towards a wall and stepped on the gas,” says American flight safety consultant William Voss, president of the Flight Safety Foundation, referring to the apparently inexplicable behavior of the French pilots who crashed the Airbus A330 into the Atlantic on the night of June 1, 2009.
But now they appear to have found an explanation. Late last week, the French air accident investigation agency (BEA) presented its final report on the accident. It now seems clear why the crew pulled up their plane when they should have brought the nose down.
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Not that I know anything about flying but I think the best pilots are those that are trained as military pilots first. You have to think and be cool under pressure and be able to problem solve without the computer. When they come to civilian aviation they have a knowledge and hands on experience that a flight simulator will never achieve. Cheers.