Flight AF447 was down for 3 minutes and a half - Research

PARIS (Reuters) - The pilots of Air France Flight 447 struggled with the controls of the aircraft before the plane dropped from 3 minutes and a half in the Atlantic Ocean to collide with the nose pointing straight up, killing all 228 people aboard , French researchers said on Friday.

The crash of flight 2009 in Rio de Janeiro-Paris began with a warning of failure two and half hours after takeoff and nine minutes after the captain had left the cockpit for a routine rest interval.
The Airbus A330 has risen to 38 000 feet and then began a dramatic fall three and a half minutes, ranging from left to right, and the youngest of the three pilots gave the command to the second most experienced driver one minute before impact.
The sequence of events was described in a note from the BEA, the French body responsible for investigating accidents, which, however, still said to be hasty to point out the causes of the fall before a more complete report is expected in the coming months.
"So far these are just observations, not an understanding of the event," said the director of BEA, Jean-Paul Troadec told reporters.
The captain returned after "repeated attempts" to call him back to the cockpit, but he was not in control in the final moments, according to information from the black boxes.
When the pilot came back 58 years, just over a minute after the start of the emergency, the aircraft fell to 10 000 feet per minute with 15 degrees nose high and a too steep angle in relation to the air stream to allow a new upsurge.
BEA said that reading the black boxes removed from the Atlantic Ocean floor earlier this month suggest that the crew could not determine how fast the plane was flying.
This echoes previous findings that indicate that the Pitot probes, sensors or speed of the aircraft, may have frozen.
Air France said in separate statement that the initial problem would have been a fault in the probe of Airbus aircraft in speed, according to the report of the BEA.
"It seems that the cabin crew command was monitoring the changes in climate and then changed the route of flight that the initial problem was the failure rate of the probes that led to a disconnection of the autopilot and the loss of protection systems Pilot members and that the plane stalled at a high altitude, "said Air France on Friday.
According to BEA, the crew responded to the crash alert especially trying to lift the nose of the aircraft.
In a statement, Airbus said preliminary information released by the BEA are a "significant step" to understand the causes of the crash.
"BEA's work constitutes a significant step toward the complete identification of the chain of events that led to the tragic crash of Flight 447 Air France in 2009," Airbus said in a statement.