As Air France pilots fought for control, an Airbus A330 passenger jet plummeted from 38,000 feet for four minutes, its engines running but its wings unable to seize enough air to fly.
The doomed jet, weighing 205 tonnes, was in freefall after entering an aerodynamic stall. The ordeal ended in tragedy in the early hours of June 1, 2009, mid-way from Rio de Janeiro to Paris during an Atlantic storm, killing all 228 people on board.
As relatives mark the disaster’s tenth anniversary, the aviation industry is still implementing lessons learned from Air France flight 447 even as it faces a new crisis over the two-month-old global grounding of Boeing’s 737 MAX aircraft.
