French investigators have said that the crew of Air France's Rio-Paris flight, which crashed into the Atlantic two years ago, ignored repeated stall warnings and failed to follow textbook procedures.
France's BEA authority issued ten new safety recommendations aimed at avoiding a repeat of the crash, which killed 228 people, including three Irish women.
The recommendations included more training on flying aircraft manually - a skill that industry critics say has been eroded by computers.
The BEA report into the final minutes of flight AF 447 found that pilots failed to discuss 'stall' alarms as their Airbus jet plummeted 38,000 feet into the ocean, killing everyone on board.
It revealed passengers were not given any warning as pilots struggled to avoid the crash in the early hours of 1 June 2009.
The updated account, based on recently recovered black boxes, confirmed a finding in May that the crew responded to stall warnings by doing something that has mystified aviation experts ever since - pointing the nose up instead of down.
'It seems obvious the crew didn't recognise the situation they were in, for whatever reason, and more training could have helped,' said Paul Hayes, safety director at UK consultancy Ascend Aviation.
An aerodynamic stall - not to be confused with stalled engines - is a dangerous condition that occurs when wings are unable to support the aircraft.
The textbook way of responding is to point the nose downwards to capture air at a better angle.
But a stall of a commercial aircraft is a rare event and especially so at high altitude, for which crash investigators have made clear there is little or no specific training.
The report appears likely to spark a battle between Air France and EADS unit Airbus over whether the pilots' actions in failing to respond to a stall or whether faulty flight equipment were most to blame.
'At this stage, there is no reason to question the crew's technical skills,' Air France said in a statement, blaming the 'misleading stopping and starting of the stall warning alarm' for complicating their attempts to analyse the situation.
