What Happened to Air France Flight 447?
The vanishing of Flight 447 was easy to bend into myth. No other passenger jet in modern history had disappeared so completely — without a Mayday call or a witness or even a trace on radar. The airplane itself, an Airbus A330, was considered to be among the safest. It was equipped with the automated fly-by-wire system, which is designed to reduce human error by letting computers control many aspects of the flight. And when, in the middle of the night, in the middle of the ocean, Flight 447 seemed to disappear from the sky, it was tempting to deliver a tidy narrative about the hubris of building a self-flying airplane, Icarus falling from the sky. Or maybe Flight 447 was the Titanic, an uncrashable ship at the bottom of the sea.
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Source:
The New York Times
Published: May 4, 2011
Length: 30 minutes (7,615 words)