The thirty-three people aboard were not statistics, and the manifest reads like a map of the region the flight was crossing. Ten passengers were Mozambican, nine Angolan, five Portuguese, and the rest came from France, Brazil, and China - businesspeople, families, a crew doing a route they had flown many times. Mozambique declared a period of national mourning. In Maputo and Luanda, relatives gathered at airline offices waiting for a passenger list that, when it came, confirmed the worst. Whatever the investigation would later reveal about the cockpit, the grief on the ground was the same as after any disaster: ordinary people who had said ordinary goodbyes, expecting an ordinary arrival.

Radar tracked the Embraer the whole way down. It left cruising altitude and dropped at roughly 100 feet per second - a controlled, sustained descent rather than the chaos of a failing aircraft. The flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder, both pulled from the wreckage within four days and sent to the United States for analysis, told a stark story. The co-pilot had stepped out to use the lavatory. The captain then locked the flight-deck door, changed the autopilot's target altitude to a point below the ground, and held the aircraft in its dive. The recorder captured the alarms, the engines, and the sound of the co-pilot pounding on the door he could not open. Weather that day was poor, with heavy rain along the route, but the weather did not bring the plane down.

On 21 December 2013, the head of Mozambique's Civil Aviation Institute, João Abreu, presented preliminary findings stating that Captain Herminio dos Santos Fernandes had a "clear intention" to crash the jet - a determination of suicide by pilot. Investigators learned that Fernandes had suffered a series of personal losses; his son had died roughly a year earlier, and the anniversary fell almost exactly on the date of the crash. In April 2016 Namibia's Directorate of Aircraft Accident Investigations issued its final report, concluding that inputs to the autopilot by the person believed to be the captain, alone on the flight deck, caused the aircraft to leave cruise and descend until it crashed. Mozambique's air operators' association disputed the conclusion, and not every question was ever fully settled - a discomfort that still surrounds the case.

There is a quieter tragedy folded into this one. Aviation experts have noted that Flight 470 drew little international attention because it happened in a developing country, far from the world's news desks - and that the lessons it offered about a single pilot left alone in a locked cockpit were not acted on quickly enough. Sixteen months later, in March 2015, Germanwings Flight 9525 was deliberately flown into the French Alps under chillingly similar circumstances. Only then did airlines around the world widely adopt the "two-person cockpit" rule. Bwabwata's wilderness has long since reclaimed the crash site, but the flight is remembered now as a turning point that came, for 150 people on another continent, too late.