The captain of an Air France plane which crashed into the sea with the loss of all 228 people on board had just one hour’s sleep before setting off, it emerged Friday.
In a damning report which will worry long-haul flyers, it appeared that his co-pilots were also dangerously tired.
Five Britons and two Americans were among the dead when AF447 fell out of the sky as it travelled from Rio de Janiero in Brazil to Paris in June 2009.
As the Airbus A330 rolled from side to side in a tropical thunderstorm, 32-year-old Pierre-Cedric Bonin and David Robert, 37, were unable to bring it under control.
Even when Marc Dubois, the 58-year-old captain, returned from a rest break, his deputies were panicking too much to tell him what the problem was.
A detailed analysis of two black box flight recorders has established that airspeed sensors had malfunctioned - probably because they had frozen up.
But now a recording of Dubois has emerged in which he says: ‘I didn’t sleep enough last night. One hour – it’s not enough.’
There is much more to this story from The Daily Mail, to read about it CLICK HERE.
TXT 24
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