Graham Braithwaite: Poor weather conditions made Air France crew's job tougher

All pilots are trained from day one to prioritise aviation, navigate, communicate.

In other words, their first priority would be to try and control the aircraft to ensure the speed did not fall off or the angle of attack become too great, as either of these can result in the aircraft stalling.

But overspeeding causes other problems and needs to be avoided too, so the pilots would be doing all they could to stay within these parameters whilst troubleshooting which pieces of the data are reliable. Flying at night, in poor weather and over water where there is no local lighting makes this difficult.

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If the aircraft did reach some of the angles that were identified in the flight data, then the passengers would have known that there was something wrong. It is unlikely that the crew would have time to communicate with them about the situation - this would not be their priority; all efforts would have been focused on regaining control of the aircraft.

A crash landing would not have been a consideration and there would have been nothing the cabin crew could have done other than ensure passengers were in their seats with their seat belts fastened. This may well have already been the case if they were flying into known turbulence or bad weather.

Without the full cockpit voice recorder, it is difficult to know what actually happened in the cockpit - though announcements made by the cabin crew to the passengers may not have been recorded.

• Graham Braithwaite is a professor of safety and accident investigation at Cranfield University. It trains many of the world's air accident investigators