On the last day of May in 2009, as night enveloped the airport in Rio de Janeiro, the 216 passengers waiting to board a flight to Paris could not have suspected that they would never see daylight again, or that many would sit strapped to their seats for another two years before being found dead in the darkness, 13,000 feet below the surface of the Atlantic Ocean. But that is what happened.
And I thought that name sounded familiar. William is the son of Wolfgang Langewiesche, author of one of the books that taught me how to fly: Stick and Rudder.
A great article. I've read it a couple of times and this part always gets me:
"In the cockpit, the situation was off the scale of test flights. After Dubois arrived, the stall warning temporarily stopped, essentially because the angle of attack was so extreme that the system rejected the data as invalid. This led to a perverse reversal that lasted nearly to the impact: each time Bonin happened to lower the nose, rendering the angle of attack marginally less severe, the stall warning sounded again—a negative reinforcement that may have locked him into his pattern of pitching up, assuming he was hearing the stall warning at all."
His description of the "emotional inertia" that sets in is most terrifying of all. It really gives a feeling for the fear that grips. Instead of saying "they were afraid" he shows it. Good writing indeed.
On the last day of May in 2009, as night enveloped the airport in Rio de Janeiro, the 216 passengers waiting to board a flight to Paris could not have suspected that they would never see daylight again, or that many would sit strapped to their seats for another two years before being found dead in the darkness, 13,000 feet below the surface of the Atlantic Ocean. But that is what happened.
And I thought that name sounded familiar. William is the son of Wolfgang Langewiesche, author of one of the books that taught me how to fly: Stick and Rudder.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stick_and_Rudder