He desperately attempts to fix the error by trying to switch off the engines

Cockpit camera footage of Virgin Galactic's doomed space flight shows pilot Michael Alsbury breaking out in a panic after realising a deadly mistake has been made by activating the ship's wings.

In the footage, he appears to realise pulling a lever activating the wings is a mistake before desperately attempting to rectify it by switching off the engines - seconds before the ship disintegrates.

The revelation he recognized there was an error comes as the former president of Virgin Galactic stated the crash was caused by nothing 'other than pilot error'.

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A piece of debris from Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo lies in the Mojave desert after it disintegrated in mid air

Investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board check out the site of the downed spaceship

These images show the space craft ascending then detaching from its mothership before it begins to break up

Co-pilot Alsbury, 39, was killed in the crash, while pilot Peter Siebold, 49, survived a 10mile parachute back to earth with only a shoulder injury.

Investigators have stated the spacecraft's 'feathering' system - which rotates the tail to create drag - was activated before the craft reached the appropriate speed.

Cockpit footage taken in the seconds leading up to the disaster shows Mr Alsbury pushing the lever to unhook the wings at 30 seconds past 10.07am, The Guardian reported.

Panic sets in as he instantly realises his mistake and desperately attempts to turn the engine off.

This is unsuccessful - the wings begin to deploy only four seconds later - and at that point the video, and all other data, is lost.

Will Whitehorn, former president of Virgin Galactic, said it looked likely the crash was due to pilot error

Former Virgin Galactic President Will Whitehorn told the paper: 'There's nothing that tells me that this was anything other than pilot error, sadly.

'I think he just unlocked at a time he shouldn't have.

'The [National Transportation Safety Board] are trying to understand why he did that, was there something in the system that told him he should do it, or did he just make a mistake, and I think it's going to be the latter.'

A Virgin Galactic spokesperson declined to comment on the contents of the footage.

Meanwhile federal investigators who have been in the Mojave Desert trying to find out why the experimental spaceship crashed are wrapping up their work in Southern California.

National Transportation Safety Board spokesman Peter Knudson said that yesterday, investigators left the area about 120 miles north of Los Angeles where SpaceShipTwo broke apart on October 31.

The safety board will take months more to finish interviews and analysis of physical evidence before publicly stating what it thinks caused the crash.

Authorities say Mr Alsbury unlocked the system before planned, but this was one of two steps necessary to change the craft's configuration and was not enough on its own to do so.

Activating the feathering system requires the pulling of a lever, not unlike a gun that fires only when the trigger is pulled, not just because the safety has been disengaged.

But unlocking the system may have set off a chain of events that led to disintegration of the craft.

Virgin Galactic is building a replacement spaceship and says test flights could resume as early as next summer if it finishes building a replacement craft.

The sleek composite shell and tail section of the new craft are sitting inside the company's manufacturing facility in Mojave, California.