| LOST: THE MYSTERY OF FLIGHT 447
Final BBC Master, 21st of May 2009
Alternate Lines Recorded by Tony Stephens Highlighted in Grey
Reconstruction Captions (5) Shown in Red.
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Time Code
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Sync
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00:03
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The early hours of the 1st of June, 2009.
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00:07
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Air France Flight 447 from Rio de Janeiro to Paris, makes its final radio transmission.
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00:16
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Then all contact - is lost.
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00:23
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Flight 447 has vanished into thin air.
FRENCH OFFICIAL. We wait, we pray, we will know more this afternoon.
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00:37
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Aviation experts are baffled.
MARTIN ALDER. Why would a well-operated aircraft with a well-trained crew suddenly disappear?
JOHN COX. The thing that we know is that we don’t know.
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00:50
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The missing aircraft is a state of the art Airbus A330.
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00:56
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It has never suffered a single passenger fatality.
TONY CABLE – The big question of course is, where is the aircraft?
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01:04
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5 days later, the shattered wreckage is finally discovered, floating in the Atlantic.
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01:11
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228 passengers and crew are dead.
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01:17
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No-one has given a full explanation as to what happened.
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01:23
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Until now.
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TITLE
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LOST: THE MYSTERY OF FLIGHT 447
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01:37
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One year after Flight 447 was lost, a 28 million Euro, Atlantic search operation has failed to recover the all-important black boxes.
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01:51
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The missing Flight Data and Cockpit Voice Recorders, would provide the only definitive proof of the aircraft’s fate.
TONY CABLE. These have not been found yet, they’re clearly on the bottom with the rest of the wreckage, a very, very big handicap to the investigation.
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02:11
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The official French investigation is not prepared to make its final report until the black boxes are found.
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02:18
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Two interim reports set out a tantalising array of known facts, but are unwilling to draw specific conclusions.
With nearly seven hundred A330’s in service worldwide, passenger safety experts are impatient for answers.
JOHN COX. We move basically the population of the planet every three years. We, we just can’t accept unknowns any longer.
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02:52
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This film brings together an independent team of leading air crash investigators.
Their combined expertise will provide the first credible solution to the mystery of Flight 447.
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03:07
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With their own tests and simulations, they plan to piece together a convincing accident scenario - from the few clues scattered in the official reports.
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03:21
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Veteran crash investigator Tony Cable will build a case from just a few fragments of evidence.
TONY CABLE. Any accident is a chain of events and each of the links needs to be in place.
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03:32
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He will joined by an aviation meteorologist…
JOHN WILLIAMS. We really are limited to using mostly satellite data to understand what’s going on.
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03:41
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…and a highly respected structural engineer.
JIM WILDEY. You’re going to be forced to just look at whatever recovered pieces of the structure that you have.
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03:51
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Completing the team - 3 expert pilots, specialising in aviation safety.
MARTIN ALDER. It’s very unlikely that one single thing would bring down an aircraft.
PAUL COMTOIS. There’s an unfortunate alignment of many things that cause a problem.
JOHN COX. As you piece it together the weight and significance of each piece of that evidence becomes more and more clear and that’s how you develop the theory that leads to, to the truth.
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04:22
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The investigation team faces a daunting challenge.
The lost aircraft left hardly a trace behind.
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04:38
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Tony Cable is a veteran of 32 years in the UK Air Accidents Investigation Branch.
He was a senior investigator on the Concorde crash…
…and the Lockerbie bombing.
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04:57
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As he kick-starts our independent investigation, he knows physical evidence is limited.
TONY CABLE. The normal way of investigating an accident of course is to look at the crash site and the wreckage. In this case it’s likely there’s only a small amount of floating wreckage.
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05:19
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5 days after it disappeared, the first wreckage from Flight 447 was found …
...floating 750 miles off the coast of Brazil.
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05:32
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But most of the aircraft had sunk, two and a half miles down to the ocean floor.
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05:40
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Tony Cable’s task - to somehow make sense of the few fragments that were recovered.
TONY CABLE. It is possible if you know the wreckage, to work out quite a lot about how it crashed, whether it broke up in the air.
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05:54
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The first thing to eliminate – the possibility of a terrorist attack.
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TONY CABLE. The possibilities that immediately come to mind would be a bomb or a structural break-up.
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06:08
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In the hunt for evidence of a mid-air explosion and break-up, Cable is joined by one of the world’s leading aviation safety consultants.
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06:18
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For John Cox, the key technique is reconstruction.
JOHN COX. Dealing with wreckage is literally a jigsaw puzzle, but you don’t know how many pieces you have and you usually don’t have all of them.
JOHN COX. Are both wings attached to the airplane, is the nose there, is the tail there, the quote, “four corners”?
JOHN COX. You have to take what wreckage you have and reassemble it, so that you can then begin to understand the forces that were acting on the airplane in its last moments of flight.
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06:50
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A similar jigsaw puzzle was solved in this way when TWA Flight 800 crashed off the coast of New York in 1996.
The aircraft broke apart in mid-air, then large fragments of fuselage floated slowly down to the water, without further major damage.
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07:10
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The National Transportation Safety Board were able to conclude that a fuel explosion due to faulty wiring was the cause.
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07:18
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Engineer Jim Wildey was Chief of the investigation’s Materials Lab.
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07:27
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But with Flight 447, he faces a jigsaw with most of the pieces missing.
JIM WILDEY. In this case there is only a limited amount of structure that’s recovered, it fortunately does tell enough of a story to at least give a clue as to what’s going on with the airplane.
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07:43
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Two of Flight 447’s four corners were recovered.
Wildey turns first to the nose cone.
JIM WILDEY. If this piece was to come off the airplane and float to the water by itself, it wouldn't be going fast enough so that when it hit the water it would be damaged really in any way.
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08:06
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Instead, the nose cone shows signs of a high speed impact with the water.
JIM WILDEY. What we see here is that this piece has been flattened, it’s been crushed, it’s been torn, and so this is a very clear sign that this piece was on the airplane, when the airplane hit the water.
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08:23
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It looks like the nose cone only broke off on impact.
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08:27
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The second jigsaw piece - the tail fin – tells the same story.
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08:35
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The official report suggests a mid-air break up could not have wrenched it from the fuselage like this.
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08:43
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Only a massive impact - when the aircraft hit the ocean – would have sufficient force.
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08:50
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Nose cone and tail fin suggest Flight 447 stayed intact, until it hit the water.
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08:57
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The last piece of the puzzle – a floor section from the cargo compartment - can even tell Wildey which way the aircraft was pointing as it fell.
WILDEY. What we see here is curvature damage on both sides of this piece, with a fracture down the middle. This damage is consistent with the airplane hitting relatively flat and with very high hydraulic pressure coming up from below and deforming this piece in the manner that is shown here.
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09:25
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Flight 447 hit the water intact and level.
JIM WILDEY. Whatever the cause of the accident is, it better take into account the fact that this airplane is hitting the water relatively flat at a high rate of speed.
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09:41
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The first, solid conclusion.
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09:44
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Flight 447 didn’t explode in mid-air - it simply fell out of the sky.
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09:55
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But if there was no explosion – then what did happen?
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10:03
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The investigators turn their attention to the safety of the aircraft itself.
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10:12
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The A330 is a jewel in the crown of European aerospace giant, Airbus.
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10:18
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With nearly seven hundred in service, there had never been a single passenger fatality before Flight 447.
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10:24
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This history of reliability rests on a highly computerised flight control system – Fly By Wire.
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10:34
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The design philosophy - that safety is greatly enhanced by automation.
JOHN COX. They’re highly automated, they’re fly-by-wire, they’re some of the leading edge technology in aviation even today.
MARTIN ALDER. If the pilot were to lose control for some reason the fly-by-wire system would save the aeroplane.
CO-PILOT. V1, Rotate.
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11:01
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Captain Martin Alder is a former chairman of the British Airline Pilots’ Flight Safety Group…
MARTIN ALDER. Gear up.
…and a highly experienced Airbus instructor.
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11:13
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In the flight simulator, he shows how automation can keep an aircraft under control - even with no help at all from the pilot.
MARTIN ALDER. Well in a conventional aeroplane, instead of this side-stick, I’d have quite a big control column here. You need plenty of leverage to apply the mechanical forces you need to move the control surfaces to control the aeroplane.
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11:37
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In a conventional aeroplane, the pilot pulls mechanical levers to operate a powered, hydraulic control system.
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11:45
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But with Fly By Wire, the heavyweight gear is replaced by electronics.
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11:50
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Now a flight computer carries out the pilot’s wishes.
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11:56
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The computer keeps the aircraft under precision control during any manoeuvre - even a simple turn.
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MARTIN ALDER. So if I want to go to the left, stick to the left. Round to the left.
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12:13
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The Flight Computer adjusts the wing, and the aircraft rolls to the left.
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12:21
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Ordinarily, this would cause the A330 to descend.
So the computer compensates by increasing engine thrust and pitching the nose up to maintain a steady altitude.
The end result - totally automatic control.
MARTIN ALDER. I take my hands off, and there we are, it’s flying round, vertical speed zero, 25 degrees of bank, 240 knots. It’s going to fly around at 25 degrees of bank, and keep doing this until we get bored.
When auto-pilot is switched on, the plane literally flies itself.
MARTIN ALDER. Ninety-nine percent of the time when you’re sitting as a passenger flying at thirty-five thousand feet, the auto-pilot’s flying the aeroplane.
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13:12
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CAPTION: RECONSTRUCTION
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13:13
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Flight 447 would have been safely on auto-pilot as it headed out over the Atlantic.
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13:21
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The pilots, settling in for the long haul…
…the aircraft, making continuous automatic adjustments…
…to keep them on course for Paris.
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13:42
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Tony Cable tracks their progress…
…using Air Traffic Control transcripts.
TONY CABLE. The only thing to go on in this case in the early stage is to look at the last position report, which in this case is the last crew conversation with Air Traffic Control.
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14:03
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Three hours out from Rio de Janeiro, Flight 447 was still on the intended flight path.
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14.11
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CO-PILOT. AIR FRANCE FOUR FOUR SEVEN, by checking INTOL zero one three three, level three five zero, SALPU zero one four eight, next ORARO zero two zero zero, Selcall check Charlie Papa Hotel Quebec.
But at 1:35 a.m., all radio communications - ceased.
TONY CABLE. There is nothing to say what’s happened to it after that last position report.
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14:40
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The last known position, 350 miles off the coast of Brazil.
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14:49
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But now, the mystery deepens.
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14:52
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For another thirty five minutes, Flight 447’s computer continues to send out automatic position reports, by satellite.
TONY CABLE. The reason for the automatic position reports is so that the operator can follow the progress of the flight and know whether it’s going to be early or late, to help with its scheduling effectively.
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