On June 1, 2009, flight AF447 Rio-Paris crashed off the Brazilian coast, taking with it the 228 people on board. Thirteen years after the disaster, the second of nine weeks of hearings in the crash trial before the Paris Criminal Court began with the broadcast of the sound recording of the last four minutes of the flight in the cockpit from the black boxes found at 4 000 meters deep.
>> Rio-Paris flight crash: three questions about the trial of Airbus and Air France, which opens thirteen years after the tragedy
The public and the journalists were asked to leave the courtroom: the president had decided on a closed session. Only lawyers and civil parties were allowed to hear this sensitive audio. And all of them had to leave their laptops at the entrance to the room, to avoid leaks.
At the exit, the faces are serious and some civil parties remained paralyzed, frozen by these four minutes of exchanges between the pilots. We hear no cry, no panic of the passengers, some relatives of victims want to believe that at two o’clock in the morning, most were asleep and were mowed down in their sleep. In the cockpit, the recordings reveal the intensity of the last moments experienced by the pilots of the aircraft.
“We hear bad weather, we hear hail, and it’s getting louder and louder, we can’t hear anything about what’s going on in the cabin, explains, moved, Ophélie Touillou, who lost her brother in the crash and wanted to hear this audio. I don’t think we’ll ever get an answer on that. We hear the pilots who fought until the end: closing my eyes, at that moment, I said to myself ‘the poor’…”
“I felt very sorry for them because you can feel them so hard at work, fighting against the machine. That’s what I feel: they fought against a machine, but they lost .”
Ophelie Trouillouat franceinfo
“I have a part of me that is relieved because it finally validates the thesis that we have in relation to what happened in this accident and that it was not ‘three idiots who were in charge’, those responsible, as we are led to understand, continues Ophélie Trouillou, whose voice is choking. When we hear these audios, we say to ourselves ‘Hats off guys, hats off!'”
The audio document does not bring any new elements: its written transcription was already known. But the sound of the intonations, of the alarms, is striking: the confusion of the pilots takes on its full reality in the face of the unexpected, the freezing of the Pitot probes which make it possible to indicate the speed of the plane. The autopilot disconnected but nothing deciphered this incident on the instrument panel. “It’s terrifying, because we hear pilots who have really tried everything in this tunnel phenomenon: they don’t understand anything, because the plane no longer speaks to them”underlines Me Alain Jakubowitz, lawyer of the association of victims Mutual aid and solidarity AF447, an association which counts among its members the families of two of the three pilots.
“They don’t know if the plane is going up or down, how high they are, how fast they’re going down. And they don’t know anything anymore and it’s not their fault.”
Me Alain Jakubowitzat franceinfo
“We hear, but we go up, we go down? They no longer know if they are going up, if they are going down. How fast they are, how high they are. They don’t know anything anymore and it’s not their fault. Hearing those alarms all over the place, and that ‘Stall!, stall!, stall!, stall!’, [“décrochage”], it remains engraved in my head: when we still come today to claim that these pilots would be responsible for this disaster, what Airbus tells us, it is absurd.
“You have to hear them to realize all that they have done until the last moment, concludes Me Jakubowitz. They try to apply the procedures they have learned, but which do not work. And they are calm! It is definitely giving back their honor to these drivers that we are trying to trample.”
Only reaction on the defense side this afternoon: that of Airbus, which evokes a recording “extremely strong” and “joins the rekindled suffering of the relatives of victims”. On Monday morning, Airbus broadcast to the audience a video filming in a simulator two pilots reacting to each alarm, to each incident, as it would have been appropriate to react, according to them, to avoid the worst. The manufacturer never deviates from its thesis: that of a pilot error.