Air France 447 and the Silence over the South Atlantic

Late on the evening of May 31, 2009, Air France Flight 447 lifted off from Galeão International Airport in Rio de Janeiro on the long overnight crossing to Charles de Gaulle in Paris. The aircraft was an Airbus A330-203, registered F-GZCP, three years and ten months old at the time of departure. There were 216 passengers and twelve crew aboard. The flight followed the standard intercontinental track north-eastward across the Atlantic, into a region of equatorial weather known to all transatlantic operators for its powerful thunderstorm activity in the southern hemisphere autumn.

Just before two in the morning Coordinated Universal Time on June 1, AF 447 entered the Intertropical Convergence Zone at the cruising altitude of 35,000 feet. At three minutes past two, a series of automated maintenance messages was transmitted from the aircraft’s central maintenance computer, indicating that the airspeed indicators had begun reporting inconsistent values. The messages continued for approximately four minutes. After the last of them, the aircraft was not heard from again. There was no distress call. No SOS. No final transmission of any kind.

When AF 447 failed to make its scheduled position report at the Atlantic-Africa transition point, search aircraft and ships from Brazil, France, and the United States began converging on the last known position. It would be five days before the first wreckage was sighted, and almost two years before the bulk of the aircraft was recovered from the seabed.

A Disappearance into Open Ocean

The early phase of the search recovered floating debris and approximately fifty bodies, but the main wreckage and the flight recorders proved elusive. The aircraft had crashed into approximately four kilometres of water in a region of the seabed characterised by underwater mountains, deep canyons, and powerful currents. Three successive expeditions failed to locate the recorders. The fourth, in April 2011, finally located the bulk of the airframe at a depth of 3,900 metres and recovered both the cockpit voice recorder and the flight data recorder in working condition.

The official Bureau d’Enquêtes et d’Analyses report, released in July 2012, attributed the loss to the icing of the aircraft’s pitot tubes in heavy weather, the consequent loss of reliable airspeed information, and a series of pilot inputs that placed the aircraft in a high-altitude stall from which the crew failed to recover. The technical explanation was complete and well documented. It did not, however, satisfy every observer.

The Folklore of Disappearance

In the days between the loss of contact and the recovery of the first wreckage, AF 447 was briefly absorbed into the long tradition of aircraft and ships that have vanished without trace over equatorial seas. Brazilian and French press coverage drew comparisons with the Bermuda Triangle hundreds of miles to the north, with the Carroll A. Deering of 1921, and with the older losses of military aircraft over the South Atlantic during the Second World War. UFO researchers, particularly in Brazil where the Colares wave of the late 1970s had established equatorial atmospheric anomalies as part of the local paranormal culture, raised the possibility of an encounter with an unidentified phenomenon during the aircraft’s transit of the convergence zone.

These speculations were largely retired once the flight recorders were recovered and analysed. The cockpit voice recording revealed a clear sequence of human factors and instrument failures, with no indication of external interference. The wreckage showed damage patterns consistent with high-rate impact in a deep-stall configuration. Whatever AF 447 met in the Intertropical Convergence Zone, it was the weather and not a phantom.

The Lingering Strangeness

What has continued to haunt the case is not the cause of the loss but the manner of the disappearance. For four years, between the failure of the maintenance reports in 2009 and the publication of the final BEA report in 2012, AF 447 occupied a particular kind of silence. Two hundred and twenty-eight people had vanished into the deep ocean without a final word, in a class of aircraft considered among the safest in the world, on a route flown thousands of times each year. The recovery operation cost nearly forty million euros and required the deployment of remotely operated submarines at depths comparable to those at which the wreck of the USS Indianapolis was eventually located in the Pacific.

A small subset of the families of the lost passengers have reported, in the years since, dreams and waking impressions of their relatives consistent with the broader literature of crisis apparitions. The most thoroughly documented of these accounts come from the German and French members of the passenger list, where the records of the European Society for Psychical Research and the Institut Métapsychique International have collected interviews with surviving family members over the past decade.

These reports are not evidence of paranormal involvement in the loss of the aircraft. They are evidence of the human response to a disaster that left, for a long time, no body to bury and no certain place at which to grieve.

A Memorial in Open Water

The location of the wreckage of AF 447 is now well established in the records of the BEA, of Air France, and of the relatives of the dead. The position is approximately 3 degrees north and 30 degrees west, in a region of the equatorial Atlantic that no commercial vessel has reason to cross. Memorial flights are held annually on the first of June. The aircraft itself, after the recovery of its critical components, was left where it lay.

For students of the modern record of mass aerial disappearance, AF 447 stands as the case in which the deep ocean was finally compelled to give up its evidence. The phantom narratives that briefly attached to the loss have since dissipated. What remains is the technical record, the families, and a particular silence over a particular patch of sea.

Sources

• Bureau d’Enquêtes et d’Analyses pour la Sécurité de l’Aviation Civile. Final Report on the Accident on 1st June 2009 to the Airbus A330-203 Registered F-GZCP Operated by Air France Flight AF 447 Rio de Janeiro - Paris. Paris, July 2012.
• Palmer, Bill. Understanding Air France 447. Self-published, 2013.
• Wise, Jeff. The Plane That Wasn’t There. Popular Mechanics, December 2011.
• Institut Métapsychique International, post-disaster family interview archive, Paris.