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An Air France flight from New York to Paris was forced to attempt a second landing on Tuesday.
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Cockpit audio reveals the pilot was struggling to make the Boeing 777 land.
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French aviation officials said Wednesday they were investigating the incident.
A tense cockpit recording revealed the moments anAir France pilot struggled to control his Boeing 777 during an aborted landing in Paris on Tuesday.
The aircraft, a Boeing 777-300ER, landed on a second attempt at Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris on Tuesday morning after an overnight flight from New York.
Radio communication between air traffic controllers and one of the aircraft pilots was first published by industry news site AirLive and has since been verified to CNN by the French aviation safety investigators, the Bureau d’Enquêtes et d’Analyses (BEA).
It suggests the pilots could not control the plane as it approached the runway for landing. In the audio, one of the pilots can be heard grunting and panting as alarms sound in the cockpit.
“Stop it, stop it,” he is heard saying.
The air traffic controller then says that he has noticed that the plane has veered left away from the runway and instructs the pilot to “stop approach … immediately.”
“I call you back,” the pilot says.
After several seconds, the pilot informs air traffic control that he has stabilized the aircraft but was forced to perform a go-around after it “didn’t respond.”
You can listen to the audio here:
Air France did not immediately respond to Insider’s request for comment, and a Boeing spokesperson referred questions by Insider to the BEA.
In a statement on Wednesday, BEA said that it had opened an investigation into 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.
It is unclear how many people were aboard the plane when the incident happened. The 777-300ER has a capacity of 396 passengers, according to Boeing. One passenger on the plane told CNN there were “people shouting in the cabin” after “two or three sudden jolts.”
“Afterwards, the plane came back up,” he added. “We circled for 10 minutes above the airport, and the second attempt was really gentle. We weren’t jostled like the first one.”
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