French air accident investigators have highlighted gaps in flight crew training and management in the latest report into the June 2009 crash of an Air France Airbus A330-200 on a flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris. The third interim report from the Bureau d’Enquetes et d’Analyses agency (BEA), published in Paris on July 29, focused mainly on inputs from AF447’s cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder, which crews recovered from the Atlantic Ocean in May. It also proposed the addition of an angle of attack indicator and several changes related to flight data recording.
The report confirmed that the A330’s airspeed indicator and displays had not functioned correctly, partly due to obstruction of pitot tubes by ice crystals. Investigators reported that the two copilots flying the aircraft while its captain rested had not received training to handle the aircraft manually at high altitudes in “unreliable indicated airspeed” situations. They also suggested that the crew had not clearly communicated their respective tasks when the captain left the cockpit for rest, and had also not explicitly acknowledged the stall warning or subsequent stall itself.
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