French accident investigator BEA has released a transcript of flight deck conversation between the pilots of Air France flight 447 as they fought to save the aircraft. The transcript makes it chillingly clear that they did not believe that the aircraft was stalled, despite stall warnings, so their attempts at recovering control were doomed to be unsuccessful.
The transcript shows the pilots tried to blast their way out of the low speed regime by using power alone, without attending to the aircraft's nose-up attitude, and their verbal exchanges indicate that they did not understand why their actions were not producing the results they expected to see.
When the problem first occurred, two copilots were managing the flight, while the captain rested in the crew rest compartment. But when the captain returned to the flight deck the aircraft was stalled and in a high rate of descent, and he was not able to contribute a strategy for recovering the aircraft before it hit the sea.
Source: Flight International
