We’ll never know what it was like to be aboard Air France Flight 447 as it plunged into the Atlantic Ocean on May 31, apparently killing all 228 aboard. For now, the closest we may get is listening to the passengers on a similar Airbus 330 jet whose flight computer put it into an uncommanded dive over northwestern Australia last October.
Qantas Flight 72 had been airborne for three hours, flying uneventfully on autopilot from Singapore to Perth, Australia. But as the in-flight dinner service wrapped up, the aircraft’s flight-control computer went crazy. The plane abruptly entered a smooth 650-ft. dive that sent dozens of people smashing into the airplane’s luggage bins and ceiling. More than 100 of the 300 people on board were hurt, with broken bones, neck and spinal injuries, and severe lacerations splattering blood throughout the cabin.
“It was horrendous, absolutely gruesome, terrible,” passenger Jim Ford told Australian radio. “The worst experience of my life.” Passenger Nigel Court said he was terrified to watch people not wearing seat belts — including his wife — fly upward. “She crashed headfirst into the roof above us,” he told a reporter. “People were screaming,” said Henry Bishop of Oxford, England. A Sri Lankan couple said they were thrown to the ceiling when their seat belts failed. “We saw our own deaths,” said Sam Samaratunga, who was traveling with his wife Rani to their son’s wedding. “We decided to die together and embraced each other.”
After seemingly an eternity — in reality, the nosedive lasted 20 very long seconds — the flight crew wrested control of the plane from its wayward computer and made an emergency landing at a remote military and mining airstrip 650 miles short of Perth.
