With airplane crash headlines being dominated by Air Malaysia this year, it’s quite refreshing to talk about the Air France crash, back in 2009.

It took over two years to recover bodies and the voice recorder from the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. All 228 passengers died, and the fault is being put on the three pilots of the plane.

Excerpts from the last moments of the flight tell how two of the three pilots were asleep (which they’re allowed to do), and that a newbie was on the controls.

“If the captain had stayed in position through the Inter-tropical Convergence Zone, it would have delayed his sleep by no more than 15 minutes, and because of his experience, maybe the story would have ended differently.”

The plane suffered a loss of lift and its airspeed sensors malfunctioned. It only took 1 minute and 38 seconds for the captain to come back into the cockpit, but by that time it was too late.

“F***, we’re going to crash! It’s not true! But what’s happening?

F***, we’re dead.”

It was said for a while that the captain, 58-year-old Marc Dubois, was sleeping off a good night in Rio. Air France has since denied that its pilots “were incompetent” but have upped the training of manual flying.

Check out Sky News