BBC - Lost: The Mystery of Flight 447
Air France Flight 447 was a scheduled airline flight from Rio de Janeiro-Galeão (GIG) to Paris-Roissy (CDG) involving an Airbus 330-200 aircraft that crashed into the Atlantic Ocean on 1 June 2009, killing all 216 passengers and 12 aircrew. The investigation is still ongoing, and the cause of the crash has not yet been formally determined. An interim report from the BEA on 27 May 2011 revealed that the aircraft crashed following an aerodynamic stall. It further revealed that minutes prior to the crash, the pitot tubes (speed sensors) started to give inconsistent readings. The cause of the faulty readings is yet to be determined, but a theory is that ice formed on the pitot tubes, which would have caused them to freeze, giving inconsistent measurements owing to their reliance on air pressure measurements to give speed readings. Pitot tube blockage is suspected of having contributed to airliner crashes in the past — such as Birgenair Flight 301 in 1996. A later report from the BEA, released on 29 July 2011, indicated that the pilots had not been trained to fly the aircraft "in manual mode or to promptly recognise and respond to a speed-sensor malfunction at high altitude", and that this was not a standard training requirement at the time of the accident. The investigation into this accident was initially hampered by the lack of any eyewitness evidence and radar tracks, as well as by difficulty finding the aircraft's black boxes, which were located and recovered from the <b>...</b>
