THE PLANE THAT FELL FROM THE SKY

At 22:29 UTC on May 31, 2009, Air France Flight 447 lifted off from Rio de Janeiro–Galeão International Airport, bound for Paris Charles de Gaulle. It was a routine, if long, overnight transatlantic crossing: roughly eleven hours in the air, the kind of flight most of the 216 passengers aboard would spend asleep. Twelve crew were on board: three pilots and nine cabin crew.

In command was Captain Marc Dubois, 58, with nearly 11,000 flight hours, more than 1,700 of them on the A330. Beside him in the cockpit were two first officers: David Robert, 37, a highly experienced pilot with over 6,500 hours who also held a supervisory training role within Air France, and Pierre-Cédric Bonin, 32, the most junior of the three with roughly 2,900 hours. It was a three-pilot crew because the flight was long enough to require rotating rest breaks; on a widebody like the A330, that meant at any given moment, one of the two first officers would be alone at the controls with the other, or with the captain.

The moment the autopilot disconnected, the A330's flight control computers also dropped out of "normal law," the mode in which software firmly prevents a pilot from stalling or over-stressing the aircraft, and into a degraded backup mode called "alternate law," in which many of those same protections are no longer guaranteed. Both first officers were told this was happening, in real time, by the aircraft's own automated voice and visual alerts. Neither had ever practiced hand-flying a widebody at cruise altitude in this exact combination of conditions, because almost no airline training program at the time asked pilots to.

Bonin, hand-flying for the first time in the emergency, reacted immediately, and reacted wrong. Within about ten seconds he pulled the side-stick back, pitching the nose up sharply, a nose-up input he would sustain, in one form or another, for nearly the entire remainder of the flight. Robert, reading the aircraft's warning messages aloud, correctly identified that they had lost valid airspeed and that the aircraft's protections were degraded. Neither pilot said the word that mattered most in the next few seconds: slow down the climb, lower the nose, fly pitch and power. Both of them had been trained for years to trust the aircraft's automation more than their own hands. In this moment, hands were all they had.

Four seconds before the recorders stopped, the Ground Proximity Warning System began sounding "sink rate," then "pull up," alarms designed for aircraft flying too low over terrain, not for a widebody falling out of the base of a storm at cruise-descent speeds into open ocean. There is no evidence any of the three pilots ever spoke the word "stall" aloud during the entire four minutes and twenty-three seconds between the autopilot disconnecting and the recorders going silent.

The aircraft struck the surface of the Atlantic Ocean nose-up, wings roughly level, moving forward at about 107 knots and descending at about 108 knots, a combined impact more violent than either number alone suggests. It broke apart on contact. Investigators later concluded the forces involved would have killed everyone aboard instantly; there was no survivable window, no interval of the fall in which the outcome was still in doubt by the final seconds. All 228 people on board Flight 447 died in that instant, roughly 1,070 kilometers (665 miles) northeast of Fernando de Noronha, Brazil, in open ocean more than three miles deep.

On April 3, 2011, less than a week into the new search, the Woods Hole team's sonar found what nearly two years of searching had missed: a debris field on the ocean floor roughly 3,900 meters (about 12,800 feet, more than two miles) down, consistent with the crash site. Remotely operated vehicles were sent down to confirm the find and begin the painstaking work of locating the two flight recorders among the wreckage.

On April 27, 2011, the flight data recorder's case was recovered, though its memory module, the part that actually holds the data, was found separately and brought up a few days later, on May 1. The cockpit voice recorder followed on May 1–2. Both recorders, remarkably, were successfully downloaded once returned to BEA laboratories in France; nearly two years in freezing, crushing deep-ocean pressure had not destroyed the data inside their protected memory modules. Between May and June 2011, search vessels also recovered 104 more victims from the wreckage, along with much of the aircraft's structure, though 74 people were never recovered at all.