An Air France Boeing 777 from New York nearly crashed on landing at Roissy-Charles de Gaulle Airport. During the final approach, the aircraft stopped responding to the pilots’ commands.
Terror in the cockpit and among the passengers of an Air France Boeing 777, Tuesday, April 5, above Roissy-Charles de Gaulle airport. Shortly before the landing of flight AF011, the aircraft stopped responding to the pilots’ commands during its final approach. When the crew was finally able to go around and fly the plane, they got close to the crash, which happened several tens of meters away.
In a video published on YouTube by the AIRLIVE channel, we can hear the particularly panicked dialogue of the crew with the control tower of the Paris airport. We also see exchanges between the two Boeing pilots gasping with stress as the audible alarms sound in the Boeing cockpit.
“We’ve gone over the throttle, 4,000 feet, we’ll service them, we’ll call you back,” the panicked pilot describes. He mentions a few minutes later “a problem with flight control, the plane did almost everything.”
Flight AF011 was entering the latter part of its approach phase, descending in the runway axis, when the pilots noticed the aircraft was no longer responding to the controls and was drifting to the left. The aircraft, then at an altitude of 1,200 feet (about 370 m), according to air journalhad to perform an emergency restart.
The Air France Boeing 777-300 (F-GSQJ, built 2005) was on its last approach to runway 26L at Paris-CGD International Airport (LFPG) when pilots reported control problems. Flight #AF11 from New York went around and returned about 20 minutes later for a safe landing. pic.twitter.com/zbgxSHkPjZ
— JACDEC (@JacdecNew) Apr 5, 2022
According to an Air France spokesperson, quoted by the site of Daily mail, it would be a “technical incident”. “The restart is defined by the authorities, the aircraft manufacturers and Air France as a normal procedure,” this spokesperson told our British colleagues.
Next Wednesday, April 6, the BEA (Bureau Research and Analysis for the Security of Civil Aviation) will organize announces in a press release that it is opening “a security investigation”. It describes a “serious incident”, with “flight control instability on the last, go-around, hard checks and trajectory oscillations”.
The data recovered Tuesday and Wednesday is being “analyzed,” the BEA said. For the time being, the reasons for this outage remain unknown.
u26a0ufe0f (1/2) Serious incident of @BoeingFrance #777 @AirFranceFR registered F-GSQJ on 05/04/22 at @ParisAeroport #CDG / Flight control instability on final, go-around, controls hardness and flight path oscillations / @BEA_Aero initiates a security investigation.
— BEA u2708ufe0f u2699ufe0fud83dudd2cud83cuddebud83cuddf7 (@BEA_Aero) Apr 6, 2022