The conversation corresponds to the last minutes just before impact. It has the voices of 58-year-old Captain Dubois (11,000 hours of flight time), 37-year-old pilot David Robert (6500 hours) and 32-year-old Junior Pilot Pierre-Cedric Bonin (2900 hours). Bonin and Robert were on the controls trying to save the plane when the Captain stormed into the cabin and tried to save the situation.
It was too late:
Robert: ‘What’s the altitude?’
Captain Dubois: ‘What do you mean what altitude?”‘
Robert: ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, I’m descending right?’
Captain Dubois: ‘Get your wings horizontal’
Robert: ‘Level your wings’
Bonin: That’s what I’m trying to do… What the …how is it we are going down like this?’
Robert: ‘See what you can do with the commands up there, the primaries and so on… Climb climb, climb, climb.’
Bonin: ‘But I have been pulling back on the stick all the way for a while.’
Dubois: ‘No, no, no, don’t climb.’
Robert: ‘OK give me control, give me control.’=
Dubois: ‘Watch out you are pulling up’…
Robert: ‘Am I?’
Bonin: ‘Well you should, we are at 4000.’
On board computer: ‘Sink rate. Pull up, pull up, pull up’.
Dubois: ‘Go on: “pull”.’
Bonin: ‘We’re pulling, pulling, pulling, pulling.’
Captain Dubois: ‘Ten degrees pitch’ (in a very cold, calm voice)
The recording in the black box stops right there, half-a-second later.
nobody
Tuesday, August 9, 2011 at 4:32 PMstupid morons. in a stall, you pitch down and accelerate. How the hell did these guys graduate flight school?
John Jeffreys
Wednesday, August 10, 2011 at 7:54 AMIt sounds like the voice warning on the plane was telling the pilot to “Pull Up” (gain altitude)but the plane was apparently not flying (stalled) and needed to nose down and gain speed first. I guess the pilot(s) really should have know this but it is counter intuitive and more and more pilots expect to be told exactly what to do by the plane’s flight computer to recover from these sorts of rare situations. The “Pull up” warning is not helpful when the forward speed is inadequate.