I. Into the Night

On the last day of May in 2009, as night enveloped the airport in Rio de Janeiro, the 216 passengers waiting to board a flight to Paris could not have suspected that they would never see daylight again, or that many would sit strapped to their seats for another two years before being found dead in the darkness, 13,000 feet below the surface of the Atlantic Ocean. But that is what happened. Air France Flight 447 carried a crew of nine flight attendants and three pilots—their numbers augmented because of duty-time limitations on a 5,700-mile trip that was expected to last nearly 11 hours. These were highly trained people, flying an immaculate wide-bodied Airbus A330 for one of the premier airlines of the world, an iconic company of which all of France is proud. Even today—with the flight recorders recovered from the sea floor, French technical reports in hand, and exhaustive inquests under way in French courts—it remains almost unimaginable that the airplane crashed. A small glitch took Flight 447 down, a brief loss of airspeed indications—the merest blip of an information problem during steady straight-and-level flight. It seems absurd, but the pilots were overwhelmed.

To the question of why, the facile answer—that they happened to be three unusually incompetent men—has been widely dismissed. Other answers are more speculative, because the pilots can no longer explain themselves and had slid into a state of frantic incoherence before they died. But their incoherence tells us a lot. It seems to have been rooted in the very advances in piloting and aircraft design that have improved airline safety over the past 40 years. To put it briefly, automation has made it more and more unlikely that ordinary airline pilots will ever have to face a raw crisis in flight—but also more and more unlikely that they will be able to cope with such a crisis if one arises. Moreover, it is not clear that there is a way to resolve this paradox. That is why, to many observers, the loss of Air France 447 stands out as the most perplexing and significant airline accident of modern times.

The crew arrived in Rio three days before the accident and stayed at the Sofitel hotel on Copacabana Beach. At Air France, the layover there was considered to be especially desirable. The junior co-pilot, Pierre-Cédric Bonin, 32, had brought along his wife for the trip, leaving their two young sons at home, and the captain, Marc Dubois, 58, was traveling with an off-duty flight attendant and opera singer. In the French manner, the accident report made no mention of Dubois’s private life, but that omission then required a finding that fatigue played no role, when the captain’s inattention clearly did. Dubois had come up the hard way, flying many kinds of airplanes before hiring on with Air Inter, a domestic airline subsequently absorbed by Air France; he was a veteran pilot, with nearly 11,000 flight hours, more than half of them as captain. But, it became known, he had gotten only one hour of sleep the previous night. Rather than resting, he had spent the day touring Rio with his companion.

Flight 447 took off on schedule at 7:29 P.M. with 228 people aboard. The Airbus A330 is a docile twinjet airplane with an automated cockpit and a computer-based fly-by-wire control system that serves up an extraordinarily stable ride and, at the extremes, will intervene to keep pilots from exceeding aerodynamic and structural limits. Over the 15 years since the fleet’s introduction, in 1994, not a single A330 in line service had crashed. Up in the cockpit, Dubois occupied the left seat, the standard captain’s position. Though he was the Pilot in Command, and ultimately responsible for the flight, he was serving on this run as the Pilot Not Flying, handling communications, checklists, and backup duties. Occupying the right seat was the junior co-pilot, Bonin, whose turn it was to be the Pilot Flying—making the takeoff and landing, and managing the automation in cruising flight. Bonin was a type known as a Company Baby: he had been trained nearly from scratch by Air France and placed directly into Airbuses at a time when he had only a few hundred flight hours under his belt. By now he had accumulated 2,936 hours, but they were of low quality, and his experience was minimal, because almost all of his flight time was in fly-by-wire Airbuses running on autopilot.