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Finding Air France 447Members of the Brazilian Air Force preparing to tow part of the wreckage of Air France flight 447 in June 2009. The plane, carrying 228 people, crashed during a flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris.(more)
Top Questions
What happened to Air France flight 447?
How long did it take to find the wreckage of Air France flight 447?
While some wreckage was found in the mid-Atlantic within days of the flight’s disappearance, it took nearly two years to find most of the fuselage and the plane’s flight data recorders, which were on the ocean floor.
What was the main issue that led to the crash of Air France flight 447?
The crash was linked to the failure of the pitot probes, which track airspeed. The failure caused the autopilot to disengage, forcing the pilots to manually adjust the plane’s speed. Contradictory actions in the cockpit in the wake of the failure doomed the plane.
What did the crash investigators believe about the landing of Air France flight 447?
Investigators believed that there was a high probability that the aircraft landed in one piece in the Atlantic Ocean.
What was the outcome of the trial against Air France and Airbus?
In 2023 Air France and Airbus were found not guilty of involuntary manslaughter, as no clear causal link between their actions and the crash was proved. However, the decision was appealed, and in 2026 a Paris appellate court ruled that Air France and Airbus were guilty of corporate manslaughter.
About 1:35 am on June 1, 2009, the pilots of Air France flight 447 contacted Brazilian air traffic control to routinely report their location over the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. They were never heard from again.
There was no Mayday call; there were no witnesses. One of the airplane industry’s safest jets—an Airbus A330—simply vanished en route from Rio de Janeiro to Paris with 228 passengers and crew on board.
In the weeks immediately after the flight’s disappearance, members of the French and Brazilian navies found 50 bodies and some 3,000 pieces of debris. But the vast majority of the plane, its occupants, and the flight data recorders (“black boxes”) that might explain what had happened could not be found. It would take nearly two years and tens of millions of dollars to locate the plane and its lost souls and to begin to solve one of the great mysteries of modern aviation: What happened to flight 447?
Search for the aircraft
For almost two years after the crash of flight 447, missions were undertaken to find and raise the plane. After all, how could a plane with a wingspan of 198 feet (60.3 meters) and weighing half a million pounds (227,000 kg) not be found? The initial search area was some 6,500 square miles (17,000 square km) of ocean. In early 2011 a group from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, a research center responsible for helping find the Titanic, began its last-ditch effort, finding most of the wreckage spread across some 45 square miles in an underwater mountain range “as big as the Alps,” an aviation expert told CNN.
In April 2011 scientists from Woods Hole, examining 15,000 photographs taken by a submarine, recognized sections of a fuselage, landing gear, seats, and bodies. Flight 447 had been found. It would take more weeks to locate the flight data recorders and even more time to analyze the data on them. But some answers were becoming clear.
Details of the accident
Before flight 447 took off from Rio de Janeiro, there were no known or documented mechanical issues. While there were storms over the Atlantic that night, other planes had safely navigated around them. It seemed that flight 447 had flown into the clouds. That decision probably disabled relatively minor sensory devices called the pitot (pronounced “PEE-toe”) probes, which track airspeed. Without airspeed monitors, the plane’s autopilot would have been disabled, forcing the pilots to adjust the plane’s speed manually. Go too fast and the plane would nosedive; go too slowly and the plane would stall. They would need to make these adjustments while flying more than 500 miles (805 km) per hour at an altitude of 35,000 feet (10,668 meters). The flight voice recorders revealed that once the sensors failed, the pilots took contradictory actions and failed to communicate with each other.
Details from what was found on the ocean floor painted a harrowing picture of flight 447’s final moments. Elements of the wreckage, including food carts found largely intact, and the fact that oxygen masks had not deployed, led one of the crash investigators to tell The New York Times: “There is a high probability that the aircraft landed in one piece.” The chief medical examiner who supervised most of the autopsies found that about 90 percent of the victims suffered fractures, but there was an absence of burns on the bodies. “I believe the pilot tried to land in the water,” he told The Times. That assessment raised the possibility that some people on the plane may have survived the impact and died waiting to be rescued. It took about 13 hours for rescue teams to reach the site of the crash.
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Criminal case
More than 13 years after the crash, Air France and Airbus were tried in France on charges of involuntary manslaughter. Both companies blamed the pilots for not being able to overcome the loss of the pitot probes. Yet, in the wake of the accident, it came to light that issues with the pitots were known by Airbus and Air France and that an upgrade had been ordered. When flight 447 took off from Rio de Janeiro, it still had the problematic pitots.
The trial ran from October to December 2022 and ended in a verdict of not guilty, with the judges saying in April 2023 that even if errors had been made by the companies, “no certain link of causality” between the mistakes and the crash had been proved.
The families of the crash victims—who had waited so long for answers—were distraught. Philippe Linguet, whose brother died aboard flight 447, said the verdict marked “a day of infamy, mourning, sadness and shame.”
Quick Facts
Date:
June 1, 2009
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Prosecutors appealed the decision, and in May 2026 the Paris Appeals Court found that Airbus and Air France were guilty of corporate manslaughter. Both companies were fined approximately $260,000.