Airline passenger news and views

French air accidents investigator bureau BEA reveals first facts established by the study of data recovered from the AF flight 447, in which 228 people died on the early hours of 1 June 2009.

The recent discover of two black box recorders 12,800ft below the Atlantic's surface in early May had helped to beginning to understand the events that ended with the crash into the ocean of the flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris two years ago.

That night the plane dropped 38,000 feet in three and a half minutes before slamming nose-up into the ocean, according to the note published by the French agency - which relates the devastating chronology of events since the plane took off at 22:29 on 31 May 2009 in Rio to the stopping of the recordings at 2:14am.

A shocking revelation is that  the accident was not due to engines failure or any other major malfunction. - "The engines were operating and always responded to crew commands." - The disaster was indeed triggered by faulty speed sensors, that lead to a pilot to reduce the speed when thinking the plane was going too fast. That decision took the plane out of the so called "coffin corner," a narrow range of velocities in which planes only can flight at very high altitude.

The BEA paper highlights the problems with the speed measures: "There was an inconsistency between the speeds displayed on the left side and the integrated standby instrument system (ISIS). This lasted for less than one minute."

Guy Gratton, of Brunel University and a member of the Royal Aeronautical Society, told The Guardian that passengers shouldn't have noticed what was going on during the final minutes. "The aeroplane probably felt more or less under control. The passengers probably would have felt their ears popping as it descended but the aircraft was held in a consistent pattern until it hit the sea."

"Je ne comprends rien" ("I don't understand a thing") was reportedly cried out by one of the pilots moments before the crash.

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