Fatal Flight 447: Chaos In The Cockpit

The loss of Air France Flight 447 is one of the biggest aviation mysteries of all time. On May 31st 2009, 228 passengers and crew boarded Flight 447 from Rio de Janeiro to Paris but within hours, they would all be dead. On board were passengers from 32 different countries, including five Britons as well as eight children. One of them was a young 11 year old boy travelling alone back to school in England.  

It has remained a mystery to how the Airbus 330, one of the world's most technologically advanced planes, had just dropped out of the sky and plummeted into the ocean, killing all on board. Two years after the accident, following a painstaking search, the plane's black box recorders were found at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. Miraculously, they had remained intact, preserving an extraordinary record of the conversations that took place between the pilots as a routine flight turned into disaster.

For the first time on television, this remarkable one-off documentary can reveal what really happened on board this doomed airliner. On the day, Captain Mark Dubois and his co-pilots David Robert and Pierre Bonin were flying a state-of-the-art plane with built in safety features and a computer system so highly automated some claim it could almost fly itself. This documentary captures their shock and disbelief in a second-by-second account and reveals what happened in the cockpit during their final minutes as they struggled to understand the catastrophe unfolding before them.

Based around the black box recordings, Fatal Flight 447: Chaos In The Cockpit features aviation experts, industry insiders and bereaved relatives to unlock the truth about one of the most infamous flights in aviation history, whilst asking what lessons have been learnt from the disaster.

Production Company: Minnow Films

Executive Producers: Louise Norman and Morgan Matthews