As the airliner entered the worst of the weather, Bonin told the cabin crew to prepare for turbulence. Eight minutes later, everyone on board would be dead. Bonin himself seems to have been spooked, calling attention to a metallic smell and an eerie glow in the cockpit. Robert reassured him that it was St Elmo’s fire, an electrical fluorescence not uncommon in equatorial thunderstorms. A few moments later the outside air temperature plummeted, the pitot tubes iced up and an alarm sounded briefly to warn that the autopilot had disengaged. From this moment, Bonin’s behaviour is strange. The flight recorder indicates that, without saying anything, he pulled back on the stick and, seemingly against all reason, kept the nose up, causing a synthesised voice to warn, “Stall! Stall!” in English as the airspeed began to drop dangerously. Robert took 20 or 30 seconds to figure out what was happening before ordering Bonin to descend. “It says we’re going up. It says we’re going up, so descend.” Seconds later Robert again called out, “Descend!” and for a few moments the plane recovered momentum and the stall warning ceased. But Robert was now anxious enough to call for the captain to return to the cockpit. Meanwhile, Bonin’s instinct was again to pull back on the control stick. He left it there despite the stall warning that blared out some 75 times. Instead of moving the stick forward to pick up speed, he continued to climb at almost the maximum rate. If he had simply set the control to neutral or re-engaged the autopilot, all would have been well.