Air France Flight 447 was a scheduled international transatlantic passenger flight from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport, France. On 1 June 2009, inconsistent airspeed indications and miscommunication led to the pilots inadvertently stalling the Airbus A330. They failed to recover the aircraft from the stall, and the aircraft crashed into the mid-Atlantic Ocean at 02:14 UTC, killing all 228 passengers and crew on board.[2]

The Brazilian Navy recovered the first major wreckage and two bodies from the sea within five days of the accident, but the investigation by France's Bureau of Enquiry and Analysis for Civil Aviation Safety (BEA) was initially hampered because the aircraft's flight recorders were not recovered from the ocean floor until May 2011, nearly two years after the accident.[3]

The BEA's final report, released at a press conference on 5 July 2012, concluded that the aircraft suffered temporary inconsistencies between the airspeed measurements—likely resulting from ice crystals obstructing the aircraft's pitot tubes—which caused the autopilot to disconnect. The crew reacted incorrectly to this, causing the aircraft to enter an aerodynamic stall, which the pilots failed to correct.[2]: 79 [4]: 7 [5] The accident is the deadliest in the history of Air France.