In June 2009, Air France flight 447 crashed during its nighttime journey from Rio de Janeiro to Paris, killing all 228 people on board. In December 2011, Popular Mechanics magazine published an annotated version of the cockpit voice recorder transcript. If you are the least bit aviophobic, you shouldn’t read the transcript (or this post), as it could easily make you wonder and worry about every bump in the night during your next redeye.
If you are not, though, this transcript is one of the most helpful case studies for a discussion with your team about the responsibilities of leaders, the challenges of teamwork, and the importance of clear (over-)communication, especially in a crisis.
You remember the story of that tragic summer night.
Unlike other planes in the area, Air France 447 did not change course to avoid a system of tropical thunderstorms sitting off the coast of Brazil; instead, the plane, with an inexperienced co-pilot at the controls, headed directly into the storms. In the storms, the plane’s pitot tubes, essential sensors that report airspeed, iced over.
Unaware of how fast that the plane was going and being buffeted by the storms’ severe turbulence, the co-pilot inexplicably pulled back on the stick, putting the plane into a perilous steep climb (At one point, the plane climbed at a rate of almost 7,000 feet per minute; by comparison, the rate of climb for a 747 during takeoff is about 1,800 feet per minute.).
Almost immediately, the onboard computer sounded an alarm indicating that the plane had stalled. Even with its nose angled up, a plane drops when it stalls. Trained pilots know that the correction for a stall is to push forward on the stick, tipping the nose of the plane down, allowing it to recover airspeed and altitude and, yet, the co-pilot didn’t do this. In fact, he didn’t push the stick forward until the plane had dropped to an irrecoverable 2,000 feet above the Atlantic.
In reading the transcript, it is staggering to see that the cockpit “stall” alarm sounded 75 times before the plane crashed; yet not once did either co-pilot or the captain acknowledge or discuss the alarm. It is not that they could have ignored it. Apparently, it was piercing. But they didn’t mention it. Not once.
(With this in mind, imagine the conversation you could have with your team about these questions: What are the signs that are right in front of you that no one is noticing or that no one is discussing? What does this suggest about the responsibility of the leader to give the team permission to see and respond?)
Likewise, it wasn’t until the plane was a few thousand feet above the water’s surface that the one co-pilot mentioned to his cockpit colleagues that he was pulling back on the stick almost the whole time, even as they had been desperately trying to do the opposite. His action doomed the flight. The annotated transcript notes that, “Intense psychological stress tends to shut down the part of the brain responsible for innovative, creative thought. Instead, we tend to revert to the familiar and the well-rehearsed.”
The co-pilot did what was familiar, well-rehearsed -- comforting even -- though it was totally inappropriate against the backdrop of the given circumstances.
(Imagine here the conversation that you could have about how your team handles crises or, for that matter, how you handle everyday matters. How well do you communicate with each other? How well do you know what each other is doing? How, in a crisis, can you continue to seek innovative, creative solutions and resist the familiar and well-rehearsed when it would be defeating? How, in a crisis, can you continue to communicate and over-communicate in the interest of clarity and common cause?)
Fewer than 10 seconds to impact, one co-pilot cried out, “We are going to crash. This can’t be happening.” The other co-pilot -- the one who had been pulling back the stick the whole time -- replied, “But what is happening?” If he had asked earlier, if he had known the right answer earlier, 228 people may have been shaken up by a particularly bumpy flight but might have lived.
There are lessons there for us.
