For two years a team of investigators scoured a pitch-black area of ocean floor, half the size of Belgium, hunting a reinforced cylinder barely as big as a coffee pot, in the hope that it still contained the frozen echo of a French national disaster.
Few accidents have etched a flight number so firmly in the mind as the disappearance of Air France flight 447. The resulting story of determination set against desperate odds, and the timing of the flight recorders' discovery in the month before the Paris air show, could have been lifted from the pages of a film script.
Given the public and judicial interest, and with so much at stake for the reputations of Air France and Airbus, the chances that the recorders' contents would stay under wraps were minimal.
The investigators' decision to release a detailed picture of the accident sequence ended the mystery for many who had followed AF447's extraordinary story since the A330 vanished in an Atlantic storm in June 2009. But even as the riddle of AF447's sudden disappearance is being solved, two new puzzles emerge.
One centres on the adequacy of understanding over the icing phenomenon. Just 18 months before the loss of AF447, the wrecking of another long-haul aircraft - a British Airways Boeing 777 - revealed that this nemesis of aviation was still capable of behaving unexpectedly and outwitting modern certification criteria.
The other focuses on harmony between pilot and machine and whether flying skills, even flying knowledge, are being weakened by the crutch of automation.
While disclosure of the circumstances that led to the A330's predicament has yielded few surprises - an anemometric upset of sorts had been suspected within a week of the disappearance - it has yet to answer the real question: why could AF447 not be saved? The preliminary flight recorder data provides harsh fact with sparse context. But there appears little doubt that over 20,000h of collective cockpit experience was somehow insufficient to rescue a flyable airliner from the most basic of aerodynamic hazards - the loss of lift caused by a stall, a situation which private pilots are taught to recognise within hours of stepping into a light aircraft.
Investigators turned up several instances of similar stall scenarios, two of which happened in the same week as AF447 - one on the same Rio-Paris route.
There but for the grace of God? Or there but for the grace of thorough training, hands-on experience, and true understanding of what keeps an aircraft flying?
Source: Flight International
