Air France A321 Landed at Paris With Its Stabilizer Trimmed Near the Nose-Down Stop, BEA Finds

France’s BEA has published its final report on Air France flight AF1749, the Airbus A321 registered F-GMZC that lost electric control of its horizontal stabilizer while descending toward Paris Charles de Gaulle on April 27, 2025. The flight from Malaga landed safely after the crew declared PAN PAN, and nobody on board was hurt.

The report’s real finding is about what happened after the warning. Misreading one checklist line, the pilots trimmed the stabilizer to 3.5 degrees nose-down, half a degree from its stop, while the flight computers quietly deflected the elevators nose-up to compensate.

The report was released in French in November 2026, with an English courtesy translation still to come. The BEA does not give the flight number; The Aviation Herald, which reported the final report on November 10, identifies the service as AF1749.

What happened on the descent

On board were 188 passengers, five cabin crew and two pilots. The captain, 57, had 13,800 flight hours and was the pilot monitoring, while the 42-year-old first officer, with 1,500 hours, was flying.

The first sign was an ELAC 2 pitch fault message near 30,000 feet. Then, around 23,500 feet, a cluster of alerts arrived at once: the autopilot disconnected, a STABILIZER JAM warning appeared, and the flight controls dropped from normal to alternate law.

The crew chose to declare an urgency and asked for a long runway, landing on 08L, which is about 13,600 feet (4,142 m) long. They set landing flaps first and lowered the gear early, to give themselves time to adapt once direct law kicked in.

Airbus simulations for the BEA found that, at this flight’s center of gravity, at least 5 degrees of elevator margin remained. A more forward center of gravity with the stabilizer on its stop would have cut that margin, but Airbus identified no scenario that would have made the flare hard to control.

Why trimming “like direct law” was the wrong move

An A320-family jet controls pitch with two elevators and a trimmable horizontal stabilizer, moved by a screwjack. Hydraulic motors drive it on electric commands from the flight computers, but pilots can also move it mechanically with trim wheels in the cockpit.

In normal and alternate law, the fly-by-wire sidestick asks for a load factor, not a control position, and the computers trim the stabilizer automatically. If that automatic trim is lost in alternate law, the computers still hold the requested load factor, but now only by moving the elevators.

Direct law is different: the stick moves the elevators directly, and the pilot trims to reduce the stick input needed. That is the only situation in which A320 pilots practice manual trim in the simulator, according to the report.

The STABILIZER JAM procedure asks the crew to check that manual trim works and then to “TRIM FOR NEUTRAL ELEV.” Its fuller wording, found only in the detailed manual, says to watch the flight control display and use the wheel to keep both elevators near neutral, preserving their full authority.

Instead, the first officer called out a direct-law checklist line, “USE MAN PITCH TRIM,” and trimmed to ease the stick inputs he thought he needed. Each nose-down turn of the wheel was offset by more nose-up elevator from the computers, and the BEA notes the airplane’s handling gave no hint of it.

The captain read the line as an instruction to set the stabilizer to zero, and did not monitor the trim closely as the workload climbed. Both pilots only noticed the unusual trim setting at the gate.

The BEA lists three contributing factors: no training in alternate law with manual-only trim, an unclear ECAM item, and incomplete monitoring by the captain. Training simulators cannot even reproduce that combination, the report says, and the similar wording of “MAN PITCH TRIM … USE” and “MAN PITCH TRIM … CHECK” invited the mix-up.

A misfitted pin, and Airbus’s fix

The electric trim cut out because the computers saw a gap of more than 0.6 degrees between the commanded and the measured stabilizer position. Bench tests of the stabilizer actuator at Collins Aerospace and of the ELAC 2 computer at Thales found nothing that explains the failure.

A later inspection by Air France and Airbus, without the BEA present, found an incorrectly installed pin on the first officer’s trim wheel, fitted to the jet since 2019, with rub marks on an aluminum plate nearby. The BEA says it may have briefly jammed the mechanical trim linkage, but the parts were not kept, so this cannot be confirmed.

Air France replaced the actuator and the ELAC 2, and the fault has not recurred on F-GMZC. Earlier this month another Air France crew drew scrutiny when AF28 turned the wrong way after takeoff from LAX.

Airbus issued an operator message in August 2025 covering this warning on the A320 family and its equivalent on the A330 and A340. In November 2025 it added a detailed STABILIZER JAM procedure to the training manual, and a troubleshooting task for the actuator is being improved for a future maintenance manual update.