Captain of Air France Flight 447 was son of pilot
PARIS — Marc Dubois grew up to be a pilot, just like his dad.
The younger Dubois was last heard from Sunday night, when the Air France Flight 447 he was captaining encountered fierce thunderstorms over the mid-Atlantic and plunged into the ocean with 228 people on board.
Marc Dubois, 58, had been flying jets for Air France for more than 20 years after joining the airline from rival French domestic carrier Air Inter in 1988, according to colleagues.
His father, Jean-Paul Dubois, had also been an Air France pilot, and died last March at age 89, according to the La Nouvelle Republique newspaper.
Marc Dubois had 11,000 hours of flying time for Air France, and in February 2007 he became qualified to fly the Airbus A330, the same kind of aircraft as the one that crashed on the flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris. Since then, he’d accumulated 1,700 hours flying the wide-body, twin engine aircraft, according to Air France.
Air France has declined to name the pilots or crew members lost in the catastrophe, but the pilots’ identities were confirmed by a member of Air France’s main pilots’ union, who asked not to be named because of the sensitivity of the situation.
Dubois’ co-pilots on Flight 447 were David Robert and Pierre-Cedric Bonin.
Robert, 37, joined Air France in 1999 and had 6,600 flight hours with the airline, becoming qualified to fly A330s seven years ago, in April 2002.
Bonin, 32, joined Air France in 2004. He had 3,300 flight hours and had qualified to fly A330s last June.
Bonin’s wife Isabelle, 38, had joined him on the voyage to Brazil and was on the flight that crashed, according to the Bordeaux high school where she taught.
In addition to the pilots, Air France said Flight 447 had a cabin crew of nine people, including eight French citizens and one Brazilian.
The head of the cabin crew was Anne Grimout of Ermenonville, France, a 49-year-old who had worked for Air France for nearly 25 years, the pilot union official said.
There was no immediate information on the other cabin crew members.
Family and friends of the captain and crew and passengers of Flight 447 attended an ecumenical ceremony Wednesday at Paris’ Notre Dame cathedral. Reporters were not allowed.
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