LE BOURGET, France – French air accident investigators say that pilot errors and faulty speed and other readings led to the crash of an Air France jet over the Atlantic in 2009.
The BEA air accident investigation agency released its final report Thursday on the crash, which killed all 228 people aboard and was the airline's deadliest accident.
Chief investigator Alain Bouillard said the two pilots at the controls never understood that the plane was in a stall and "were in a situation of near total loss of control."
The report lists a combination of "human and technical factors" behind the crash.
The BEA says it has made many safety recommendations including better training for pilots based on the Flight 447 probe.
The pilot of an Air France jet that crashed into the Atlantic in 2009 nosed it upward during a stall -- instead of downward, as he should have -- because of false data from sensors about the plane's position, the father of a victim said.
Robert Soulas, who lost his daughter and son-in-law in the crash, says investigators said the flight director system indicated the "erroneous information" that the plane was diving downward, "and therefore to compensate, the pilot had a tendency to pull on the throttle to make it rise up."
Investigators had known the pilot nosed upward during the stall instead of down, which would have been the normal maneuver for stall recovery. Soulas' comments are the first indication of why the pilot made that decision.
The report is also expected to elaborate on why the pilot nosed upward at such a sharp angle, and why the two co-pilots in the cockpit at the time appeared to ignore dozens of stall warnings going off in the 4 1/2 minutes before the plane slammed into the ocean.
Barbara Crolow, a German who lost her son in the crash, said she was "disappointed" because she felt the report focuses too much on pilot error.
"I think this is not enough. ... There have been other reasons as well and they ignored them," she said.
Pilot Gerard Arnoux defended the pilots' actions, saying they were doing what they had been taught to do. "A normal pilot on a normal airliner follows" the signals on the flight director system, which tells them to go left, right, up or down, he said.
He noted that a European directive last year modified procedures to tell pilots to ignore the signals if they lose data on the plane's speed.
A preliminary report released last July described a confused Air France cockpit crew getting incoherent speed readings from faulty sensors, but it didn't draw a conclusion on what caused the crash.
It said the crew, who lacked the proper training to head off high-altitude disaster, flew toward it instead, with wrong-headed maneuvers, no task-sharing and perhaps unaware their flight was about to end in the Atlantic Ocean. Everyone aboard the plane was killed.
The BEA's findings last year raised worrisome questions about the reactions of the two co-pilots as the A330 went into an aerodynamic stall, and their ability to fly manually as the autopilot disengaged. Broader concerns were raised about training for pilots flying high-tech planes when confronted with a high-altitude crisis.
The report included a study of the plane's black box flight recorders, uncovered in a costly and extraordinarily complex search in the ocean depths.
In a separate French judicial investigation still under way, Air France and Airbus have been handed preliminary manslaughter charges.
