[imagesource: Air France]

An Air France Boeing 777 was about to land in Paris on Tuesday when air traffic control heard distressed voices coming from the aircraft’s cockpit.

In audio authenticated by the French aviation safety investigators, the Bureau d’Enquêtes et d’Analyses (BEA), and verified by CNN, you can hear one of the pilots calling for a thus-far unidentified someone or something to ‘Stop! Stop! Stop it!’.

All the while, alarms are sounding off in the background and the pilot can be heard, completely alarmed, grunting and breathing heavily as he tries to land the plane.

The recording ultimately revealed the moments the Air France pilot lost brief control of the Boeing 777-300ER during an aborted landing at Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris, after flying in from New York.

The privately run, aviation-focused website AIRLIVE managed to get hold of the recording, and edited the audio to focus on the near-disaster:

CNN has more:

In an audio recording of air traffic control that French officials say is of the incident, a pilot says, “the airplane was just kind of out of control.”

The incident happened on Tuesday, April 5, according to a BEA tweet that reported “instability of flight controls on final, go-around, hard controls, flight path oscillations.”

Thankfully, the pilot managed to land the plane on the second attempt.

The BEA released a statement on Wednesday, saying that it would be investigating what it described as a “serious incident”:

The Boeing aircraft had encountered “instability of flight controls on final approach, a go-around, hardness in the controls, flight path oscillations,” it said.

A 777-300ER usually has a capacity of 396 passengers, Business Insider reported, but it has not been revealed how many passengers were on board this particular flight.

One passenger described the scene to CNN though, saying that as the plane was approaching the airport, everyone felt “two or three sudden jolts”:

“There were people shouting in the cabin” at the time of the incident, he said.

“Afterwards, the plane came back up. We circled for 10 minutes above the airport, and the second attempt was really gentle. We weren’t jostled like the first one,” the passenger added.

It is at times like this that we can be grateful that the cockpit is separate from the rest of the plane.

[sources:businessinsider&cnn]