title: Number sign

text: One of the uses in computers was to label the following text as having a different interpretation (such as a command or a comment) from the rest of the text. It was adopted for use within internet relay chat (IRC) networks circa 1988 to label groups and topics. This usage inspired Chris Messina to propose a similar system to be used on Twitter to tag topics of interest on the microblogging network; this became known as a hashtag. Although used initially and most popularly on Twitter, hashtag use has extended to other social media sites.


title: Number sign

text: When # prefixes a number, it is read as "number". A "#2 pencil", for example, indicates "a number-two pencil". The abbreviations 'No.' and '№' are used commonly and interchangeably.


title: Number sign

text: When # is after a number, it is read as "pound" or "pounds", meaning the unit of weight. The text "5# bag of flour" would mean "five pound bag of flour". The abbreviations "lb." and "" are used commonly and interchangeably. But it is "not" a replacement for '£'.


title: Number sign

text: The latter usage is rare outside North America. The sign is not used to denote pounds as weight ( or is used for this), and certainly not for pounds currency. The use of as an abbreviation for "number" is common in informal writing, but use in print is rare. Where Americans might write "Symphony #5", British and Irish people usually write "Symphony No. 5". British typewriters and keyboards have a key where American keyboards have a key. Many computer and teleprinter codes (such as BS 4730 (the UK national variant of the ISO/IEC 646 character set) substituted '£' for '#' to make the British versions, thus it was common for the same binary code to display as on US equipment and on British equipment. ('$' was not substituted due to obvious problems if an attempt was made to communicate monetary values.)


title: Number sign

text: In Unicode, several # characters are assigned. Other attested names in Unicode are: pound sign, hash, crosshatch, octothorpe.


title: Number sign

text: On the standard US keyboard layout, the symbol is . On standard UK and some other European keyboards, the same keystrokes produce the pound (sterling) sign, symbol, and may be moved to a separate key above the right shift key. If there is no key, the symbol can be produced on Windows with , on Mac OS with , and on Linux with .


title: Air France Flight 447

text: Air France Flight 447 (AF447 or AFR447) was a scheduled international passenger flight from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to Paris, France. On 1 June 2009, inconsistent airspeed indications led to the pilots inadvertently stalling the Airbus A330 serving the flight, failing to recover from it and eventually crashing into the Atlantic Ocean at 02:14 UTC, killing all 228 passengers and crew on board.


title: Air France Flight 447

text: The Brazilian Navy recovered the first major wreckage, and two bodies, from the sea within five days of the accident, but the investigation by France's Bureau of Enquiry and Analysis for Civil Aviation Safety (BEA) was hampered because the aircraft's flight recorders were not recovered from the ocean floor until May 2011, nearly two years later.


title: Air France Flight 447

text: The BEA's final report, released at a news conference on 5 July 2012, concluded that the aircraft suffered temporary inconsistencies between the airspeed measurements—likely resulting from ice crystals obstructing the aircraft's pitot tubes—which caused the autopilot to disconnect, after which the crew reacted incorrectly and ultimately caused the aircraft to enter an aerodynamic stall, from which it did not recover. The accident is the deadliest in the history of Air France, as well as the deadliest aviation accident involving the Airbus A330.


title: Air France Flight 447

text: The aircraft involved in the accident was a 4-year-old Airbus A330-203, with manufacturer serial number 660, registered as F-GZCP. Its first flight was on 25 February 2005, and it was delivered 2 months later to the airline on 18 April 2005. At the time of the crash, it was Air France's newest A330. The aircraft was powered by two General Electric CF6-80E1A3 engines with a maximum thrust of (take-off/max continuous), giving it a cruise speed range of Mach 0.82–0.86 (), at of altitude and a range of . The aircraft underwent a major overhaul on 16 April 2009, and at the time of the accident had accumulated about 18,870 flying hours.


title: Air France Flight 447

text: , and the aircraft's indicated airspeed dropped sharply from to . The aircraft's angle of attack increased, and the aircraft subsequently began to climb above its cruising altitude of 35,000 ft (FL350). During this ascent, the aircraft attained vertical speeds well in excess of the typical rate of climb for the Airbus A330, which usually ascend at rates no greater than 2000 feet per minute (10 m/s). The aircraft experienced a peak vertical speed close to , which occurred as Bonin brought the rolling movements under control.


title: Air France Flight 447

text: At 02:10:34 UTC, after displaying incorrectly for half a minute, the left-side instruments recorded a sharp rise in airspeed to , as did the integrated standby instrument system (ISIS) 33 seconds later. The right-side instruments were not recorded by the flight data recorder. The icing event had lasted for just over a minute, yet Bonin continued to make nose-up inputs. The trimmable horizontal stabilizer (THS) moved from 3 to 13° nose-up in about one minute, and remained in the latter position until the end of the flight.


title: Air France Flight 447

text: At 02:11:10 UTC, the aircraft had climbed to its maximum altitude around . At this point, the aircraft's angle of attack was 16°, and the engine thrust levers were in the fully forward takeoff/go-around (TOGA) detent. As the aircraft began to descend, the angle of attack rapidly increased toward 30°. A second consequence of the reconfiguration into ALT2 was that the stall protection no longer operated, whereas in normal law, the aircraft's flight-management computers would have acted to prevent such a high angle of attack. The wings lost lift and the aircraft began to stall.


title: Air France Flight 447

text: Confused, Bonin exclaimed, "I don't have control of the airplane any more now", and two seconds later, "I don't have control of the airplane at all!" Robert responded to this by saying, "controls to the left", and took over control of the aircraft. He pushed his side-stick forward to lower the nose and recover from the stall; however, Bonin was still pulling his side-stick back. The inputs cancelled each other out and triggered an audible "dual input" warning.


title: Air France Flight 447

text: At 02:11:40 UTC, Captain Dubois re-entered the cockpit after being summoned by Robert. The angle of attack had then reached 40°, and the aircraft had descended to with the engines running at almost 100% N (the rotational speed of the front intake fan, which delivers most of a turbofan engine's thrust). The stall warnings stopped, as all airspeed indications were now considered invalid by the aircraft's computer because of the high angle of attack. The aircraft had its nose above the horizon, but was descending steeply.


title: Air France Flight 447

text: Roughly 20 seconds later, at 02:12 UTC, Bonin decreased the aircraft's pitch slightly. Airspeed indications became valid, and the stall warning sounded again; it then sounded intermittently for the remaining duration of the flight, stopping only when the pilots increased the aircraft's nose-up pitch. From there until the end of the flight, the angle of attack never dropped below 35°. From the time the aircraft stalled until its impact with the ocean, the engines were primarily developing either 100% N or TOGA thrust, though they were briefly spooled down to about 50 percent N on two occasions. The engines always responded to commands and were developing in excess of 100 percent N when the flight ended. Robert responded to Dubois by saying, "We've lost all control of the aeroplane, we don't understand anything, we've tried everything". Soon after this, Robert said to himself, "climb" four consecutive times. Bonin heard this and replied, "But I've been at maximum nose-up for a while!" When Captain Dubois heard this, he realized Bonin was causing the stall, and shouted, "No no no, don't climb! No No No!"


title: Air France Flight 447

text: When Robert heard this, he told Bonin to give him control of the airplane. In response to this, Bonin temporarily gave the controls to Robert. Robert pushed his side-stick forward to try to regain lift for the airplane to exit the stall. However, the aircraft was too low to recover from the stall. Shortly thereafter, the ground proximity warning system sounded an alarm, warning the crew about the aircraft's imminent crash with the ocean. In response, Bonin (without informing his colleagues) pulled his side-stick all the way back again, and said, "We're going to crash! This can't be true. But what's happening?" The last recording on the CVR was Dubois saying, "(ten) degrees pitch attitude."


title: Air France Flight 447

text: Both flight recorders stopped recording at 02:14:28 UTC, 3 hours and 45 minutes after takeoff. At that point, the aircraft's ground speed was recorded as , and that the aircraft was descending at ( of vertical speed). Its pitch was 16.2° nose-up, with a roll angle of 5.3° to the left. During its descent, the aircraft had turned more than 180° to the right to a compass heading of 270°. The aircraft remained stalled during its entire 3-minute-30-second descent from . The aircraft struck the ocean belly-first at a speed of , comprising vertical and horizontal components of and , respectively. All 228 passengers and crew on board died on impact from extreme trauma and the aircraft was destroyed.


title: Air France Flight 447

text: Air France's A330s are equipped with a communications system, Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System (ACARS), which enables them to transmit data messages via VHF or satellite. ACARS can be used by the aircraft's on-board computers to send messages automatically, and F-GZCP transmitted a position report about every 10 minutes. Its final position report at 02:10:34 gave the aircraft's coordinates as .


title: Air France Flight 447

text: In addition to the routine position reports, F-GZCP's centralized maintenance system sent a series of messages via ACARS in the minutes immediately prior to its disappearance. These messages, sent to prepare maintenance workers on the ground prior to arrival, were transmitted between 02:10 UTC and 02:15 UTC, and consisted of five failure reports and 19 warnings.


title: Air France Flight 447

text: Among the ACARS transmissions at 02:10 is one message that indicates a fault in the pitot-static system. Bruno Sinatti, president of Alter, Air France's third-biggest pilots' union, stated, "Piloting becomes very difficult, near impossible, without reliable speed data." The 12 warning messages with the same time code indicate that the autopilot and autothrust system had disengaged, that the traffic collision avoidance system was in fault mode, and flight mode went from "normal law" to "alternate law (ALT)".


title: Air France Flight 447

text: The remainder of the messages occurred from 02:11 UTC to 02:14 UTC, containing a fault message for an air data inertial reference unit and ISIS. At 02:12 UTC, a warning message "NAV ADR DISAGREE" indicated that a disagreement existed between the three independent air data systems. At 02:13 UTC, a fault message for the flight management guidance and envelope computer was sent. One of the two final messages transmitted at 02:14 UTC was a warning referring to the air data reference system, the other "ADVISORY" was a "cabin vertical speed warning", indicating that the aircraft was descending at a high rate.


title: Air France Flight 447

text: Weather conditions in the mid-Atlantic were normal for the time of year, and included a broad band of thunderstorms along the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ). A meteorological analysis of the area surrounding the flight path showed a mesoscale convective system extending to an altitude of around above the Atlantic Ocean before Flight 447 disappeared. During its final hour, Flight 447 encountered areas of light turbulence.


title: Air France Flight 447

text: Commercial air transport crews routinely encounter this type of storm in this area. With the aircraft under the control of its automated systems, one of the main tasks occupying the cockpit crew was that of monitoring the progress of the flight through the ITCZ, using the on-board weather radar to avoid areas of significant turbulence. Twelve other flights had recently shared more or less the same route that Flight 447 was using at the time of the accident.


title: Air France Flight 447

text: Flight 447 was due to pass from Brazilian airspace into Senegalese airspace around 02:20 (UTC) on 1 June, and then into Cape Verdean airspace at roughly 03:45. Shortly after 04:00, when the flight had failed to contact air traffic control in either Senegal or Cape Verde, the controller in Senegal attempted to contact the aircraft. When he received no response, he asked the crew of another Air France flight (AF459) to try to contact AF447; this also met with no success.


title: Air France Flight 447

text: After further attempts to contact Flight 447 were unsuccessful, an aerial search for the missing Airbus commenced from both sides of the Atlantic. Brazilian Air Force aircraft from the archipelago of Fernando de Noronha and French reconnaissance aircraft based in Dakar, Senegal, led the search. They were assisted by a Casa 235 maritime patrol aircraft from Spain and a United States Navy Lockheed Martin P-3 Orion anti-submarine warfare and maritime patrol aircraft.


title: Air France Flight 447

text: By early afternoon on 1 June, officials with Air France and the French government had already presumed the aircraft had been lost with no survivors. An Air France spokesperson told "L'Express" that "no hope for survivors" remained, and French President Nicolas Sarkozy announced almost no chance existed for anyone to have survived. On 2 June at 15:20 (UTC), a Brazilian Air Force Embraer R-99A spotted wreckage and signs of oil, possibly jet fuel, strewn along a band north-east of Fernando de Noronha Island, near the Saint Peter and Saint Paul Archipelago. The sighted wreckage included an aircraft seat, an orange buoy, a barrel, and "white pieces and electrical conductors". Later that day, after meeting with relatives of the Brazilians on the aircraft, Brazilian Defence Minister Nelson Jobim announced that the Air Force believed the wreckage was from Flight 447. Brazilian vice-president José Alencar (acting as president since Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was out of the country) declared three days of official mourning.


title: Air France Flight 447

text: Also on 2 June, two French Navy vessels, the frigate "Ventôse" and helicopter-carrier "Mistral", were "en route" to the suspected crash site. Other ships sent to the site included the French research vessel "Pourquoi Pas?", equipped with two minisubmarines able to descend to , since the area of the Atlantic in which the aircraft went down was thought to be as deep as .


title: Air France Flight 447

text: On 3 June, the first Brazilian Navy (the "Marinha do Brasil" or MB) ship, the patrol boat , reached the area in which the first debris was spotted. The Brazilian Navy sent a total of five ships to the debris site; the frigate "Constituição" and the corvette "Caboclo" were scheduled to reach the area on 4 June, the frigate "Bosísio" on 6 June and the replenishment oiler "Almirante Gastão Motta" on 7 June.


title: Air France Flight 447

text: Early on 6 June 2009, five days after Flight 447 disappeared, two male bodies, the first to be recovered from the crashed aircraft, were brought on board the "Caboclo" along with a seat, a nylon backpack containing a computer and vaccination card, and a leather briefcase containing a boarding pass for the Air France flight. Initially, media (including "The Boston Globe", the "Los Angeles Times", and the "Chicago Tribune") cited unnamed investigators in their reporting that the recovered bodies were naked, which implied the plane had broken up at high altitude. However, the notion that the aircraft fragmented while airborne ultimately was refuted by investigators. At this point, on the evidence of the recovered bodies and materials, investigators confirmed the plane had crashed, killing everyone on board. The following day, 7 June, search crews recovered the Airbus's vertical stabilizer, the first major piece of wreckage to be discovered. Pictures of this part being lifted onto the "Constituição" became a poignant symbol of the loss of the Air France craft.


title: Air France Flight 447

text: The search and recovery effort reached its peak over the next week or so, as the number of personnel mobilized by the Brazilian military exceeded 1100. Fifteen aircraft (including two helicopters) were devoted to the search mission.


title: Air France Flight 447

text: The Brazilian Air Force Embraer R99 flew for more than 100 hours, and electronically scanned more than a million square kilometers of ocean. Other aircraft involved in the search scanned, visually, of ocean and were used to direct Navy vessels involved in the recovery effort.


title: Air France Flight 447

text: By 16 June 2009, 50 bodies had been recovered from a wide area of the ocean. They were transported to shore, first by the frigates "Constituição" and "Bosísio" to the islands of Fernando de Noronha, and thereafter by air to Recife for identification. Pathologists identified all 50 bodies recovered from the crash site, including that of the captain, by using dental records and fingerprints. The search teams logged the time and location of every find in a database which, by the time the search ended on 26 June, catalogued 640 items of debris from the aircraft.


title: Air France Flight 447

text: On 5 June 2009, the French nuclear submarine "Émeraude" was dispatched to the crash zone, arriving in the area on the 10th. Its mission was to assist in the search for the missing flight recorders or "black boxes" that might be located at great depth. The submarine would use its sonar to listen for the ultrasonic signal emitted by the black boxes' "pingers", covering per day. The "Émeraude" was to work with the mini-sub "Nautile", which can descend to the ocean floor. The French submarines would be aided by two U.S. underwater audio devices capable of picking up signals at a depth of .


title: Air France Flight 447

text: Following the end of the search for bodies, the search continued for the Airbus's "black boxes"—the Cockpit Voice Recorder (CVR) and the Flight Data Recorder (FDR). French Bureau of Enquiry and Analysis for Civil Aviation Safety (BEA) chief Paul-Louis Arslanian said that he was not optimistic about finding them since they might have been under as much as of water, and the terrain under this portion of the ocean was very rugged. Investigators were hoping to find the aircraft's lower aft section, for that was where the recorders were located. Although France had never recovered a flight recorder from such depths, there was precedent for such an operation: in 1988, an independent contractor recovered the CVR of South African Airways Flight 295 from a depth of in a search area of between . The Air France flight recorders were fitted with water-activated acoustic underwater locator beacons or "pingers", which should have remained active for at least 30 days, giving searchers that much time to locate the origin of the signals.


title: Air France Flight 447

text: France requested two "towed pinger locator hydrophones" from the United States Navy to help find the aircraft. The French nuclear submarine and two French-contracted ships (the "Fairmount Expedition" and the "Fairmount Glacier", towing the U.S. Navy listening devices) trawled a search area with a radius of , centred on the aircraft's last known position. By mid-July, recovery of the black boxes still had not been announced. The finite beacon battery life meant that, as the time since the crash elapsed, the likelihood of location diminished. In late July, the search for the black boxes entered its second phase, with a French research vessel resuming the search using a towed sonar array. The second phase of the search ended on 20 August without finding wreckage within a radius of the last position, as reported at 02:10.


title: Air France Flight 447

text: The third phase of the search for the recorders lasted from 2 April until 24 May 2010, and was conducted by two ships, the "Anne Candies" and the "Seabed Worker". The "Anne Candies" towed a U.S. Navy sonar array, while the "Seabed Worker" operated three robot submarines AUV ABYSS (a REMUS AUV type). Air France and Airbus jointly funded the third phase of the search. The search covered an area of , mostly to the north and north-west of the aircraft's last known position. The search area had been drawn up by oceanographers from France, Russia, Great Britain and the United States combining data on the location of floating bodies and wreckage, and currents in the mid-Atlantic in the days immediately after the crash. A smaller area to the south-west was also searched, based on a re-analysis of sonar recordings made by "Émeraude" the previous year. The third phase of the search ended on 24 May 2010 without any success, though the BEA says that the search 'nearly' covered the whole area drawn up by investigators.


title: Air France Flight 447

text: In July 2010, the U.S.-based search consultancy Metron, Inc., had been engaged to draw up a probability map of where to focus the search, based on prior probabilities from flight data and local condition reports, combined with the results from the previous searches. The Metron team used what it described as "classic" Bayesian search methods, an approach that had previously been successful in the search for the submarine and . Phase 4 of the search operation started close to the aircraft's last known position, which was identified by the Metron study as being the most likely resting place of flight 447.


title: Air France Flight 447

text: Within a week of resuming of the search operation, on 3 April 2011, a team led by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution operating full ocean depth autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) owned by the Waitt Institute discovered, by means of sidescan sonar, a large portion of the debris field from flight AF447. Further debris and bodies, still trapped in the partly intact remains of the aircraft's fuselage, were at a depth of . The debris was found lying in a relatively flat and silty area of the ocean floor (as opposed to the extremely mountainous topography originally believed to be AF447's final resting place). Other items found were engines, wing parts and the landing gear.


title: Air France Flight 447

text: The debris field was described as "quite compact", measuring and a short distance north of where pieces of wreckage had been recovered previously, suggesting the aircraft hit the water largely intact. The French Ecology and Transportation Minister Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet stated the bodies and wreckage would be brought to the surface and taken to France for examination and identification. The French government chartered the "Île de Sein" to recover the flight recorders from the wreckage. An American Remora 6000 remotely operated vehicle (ROV) and operations crew from Phoenix International experienced in the recovery of aircraft for the United States Navy were on board the "Île de Sein".


title: Air France Flight 447

text: "Île de Sein" arrived at the crash site on 26 April, and during its first dive, the Remora 6000 found the flight data recorder chassis, although without the crash-survivable memory unit. On 1 May the memory unit was found and lifted on board the "Île de Sein" by the ROV. The aircraft's cockpit voice recorder was found on 2 May 2011, and was raised and brought on board the "Île de Sein" the following day.


title: Air France Flight 447

text: On 7 May, the flight recorders, under judicial seal, were taken aboard the French Navy patrol boat "La Capricieuse" for transfer to the port of Cayenne. From there they were transported by air to the BEA's office in Le Bourget near Paris for data download and analysis. One engine and the avionics bay, containing onboard computers, had also been raised.


title: Air France Flight 447

text: By 15 May, all the data from both the flight data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder had been downloaded. The data was analysed over the following weeks, and the findings published in the third interim report at the end of July. The entire download was filmed and recorded.


title: Air France Flight 447

text: Between 5 May and 3 June 2011, 104 bodies were recovered from the wreckage, bringing the total number of bodies found to 154. Fifty bodies had been previously recovered from the sea. The search ended with the remaining 74 bodies still not recovered.


title: Air France Flight 447

text: On 5 June 2009, the BEA cautioned against premature speculation as to the cause of the crash. At that time, the investigation had established only two facts - the weather near the aircraft's planned route included significant convective cells typical of the equatorial regions, and the speeds measured by the three pitot tubes differed from each other during the last few minutes of the flight.


title: Air France Flight 447

text: On 2 July 2009, the BEA released an intermediate report, which described all known facts, and a summary of the visual examination of the rudder and the other parts of the aircraft that had been recovered at that time. According to the BEA, this examination showed:


title: Air France Flight 447

text: On 16 May 2011, "Le Figaro" reported that the BEA investigators had ruled out an aircraft malfunction as the cause of the crash, according to preliminary information extracted from the FDR. The following day, the BEA issued a press release explicitly describing the "Le Figaro" report as a "sensationalist publication of non-validated information". The BEA stated that no conclusions had been made, investigations were continuing, and no interim report was expected before the summer. On 18 May, the head of the investigation further stated no major malfunction of the aircraft had been found so far in the data from the flight data recorder, but that minor malfunctions had not been ruled out.


title: Air France Flight 447

text: In the minutes before its disappearance, the aircraft's onboard systems sent a number of messages, via the ACARS, indicating disagreement in the indicated airspeed readings. A spokesperson for the BEA claimed, "the airspeed of the aircraft was unclear" to the pilots and, on 4 June 2009, Airbus issued an Accident Information Telex to operators of all its aircraft reminding pilots of the recommended abnormal and emergency procedures to be taken in the case of unreliable airspeed indication. French Transport Minister Dominique Bussereau said, "Obviously, the pilots [of Flight 447] did not have the [correct] speed showing, which can lead to two bad consequences for the life of the aircraft: under-speed, which can lead to a stall, and over-speed, which can lead to the aircraft breaking up because it is approaching the speed of sound and the structure of the plane is not made for enduring such speeds".


title: Air France Flight 447

text: Between May 2008 and March 2009, nine incidents involving the temporary loss of airspeed indication appeared in the air safety reports (ASRs) for Air France's A330/A340 fleet. All occurred in cruise between flight levels FL310 and FL380. Further, after the Flight 447 accident, Air France identified six additional incidents that had not been reported on ASRs. These were intended for maintenance aircraft technical logs drawn up by the pilots to describe these incidents only partially, to indicate the characteristic symptoms of the incidents associated with unreliable airspeed readings. The problems primarily occurred in 2007 on the A320, but awaiting a recommendation from Airbus, Air France delayed installing new pitot tubes on A330/A340 and increased inspection frequencies in these aircraft.


title: Air France Flight 447

text: When it was introduced in 1994, the Airbus A330 was equipped with pitot tubes, part number 0851GR, manufactured by Goodrich Sensors and Integrated Systems. A 2001 Airworthiness Directive (AD) required these to be replaced with either a later Goodrich design, part number 0851HL, or with pitot tubes made by Thales, part number C16195AA. Air France chose to equip its fleet with the Thales pitot tubes. In September 2007, Airbus recommended that Thales C16195AA pitot tubes should be replaced by Thales model C16195BA to address the problem of water ingress that had been observed. Since it was not an AD, the guidelines allowed the operator to apply the recommendations at its discretion. Air France implemented the change on its A320 fleet, on which the incidents of water ingress were observed, and decided to do so in its A330/340 fleet only when failures started to occur in May 2008.


title: Air France Flight 447

text: After discussing these issues with the manufacturer, Air France sought a means of reducing these incidents, and Airbus indicated that the new pitot probe designed for the A320 was not designed to prevent cruise-level ice-over. In 2009, tests suggested that the new probe could improve its reliability, prompting Air France to accelerate the replacement program, which started on 29 May. F-GZCP was scheduled to have its pitot tubes replaced as soon as it returned to Paris. By 17 June 2009, Air France had replaced all pitot probes on its A330 type aircraft.


title: Air France Flight 447

text: In July 2009, Airbus issued new advice to A330 and A340 operators to exchange Thales pitot tubes for tubes from Goodrich.


title: Air France Flight 447

text: On 12 August 2009, Airbus issued three mandatory service bulletins, requiring that all A330 and A340 aircraft be fitted with two Goodrich 0851HL pitot tubes and one Thales model C16195BA pitot (or, alternatively, three of the Goodrich pitot tubes); Thales model C16195AA pitot tubes were no longer to be used. This requirement was incorporated into ADs issued by the European Aviation Safety Agency on 31 August and by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) on 3 September. The replacement was to be completed by 7 January 2010. According to the FAA, in its "Federal Register" publication, use of the Thales model has resulted in "reports of airspeed indication discrepancies while flying at high altitudes in inclement weather conditions" that "could result in reduced control of the airplane." The FAA further stated that the Thales model probe "has not yet demonstrated the same level of robustness to withstand high-altitude ice crystals as Goodrich pitot probes P/N 0851HL."


title: Air France Flight 447

text: On 20 December 2010, Airbus issued a warning to roughly 100 operators of A330, A340-200, and A340-300 aircraft regarding pitot tubes, advising pilots not to re-engage the autopilot following failure of the airspeed indicators. Safety recommendations issued by BEA for pitot probes design, recommended, "they must be fitted with a heating system designed to prevent any malfunctioning due to icing. Appropriate means must be provided (visual warning directly visible to the crew) to inform the crew of any nonfunctioning of the heating system".


title: Air France Flight 447

text: On 27 May 2011, the BEA released an update on its investigation describing the history of the flight as recorded by the FDR. This confirmed what had previously been concluded from "post mortem "examination of the bodies and debris recovered from the ocean surface; the aircraft had not broken up at altitude, but had fallen into the ocean intact. The FDRs also revealed that the aircraft's descent into the sea was not due to mechanical failure or the aircraft being overwhelmed by the weather, but because the flight crew had raised the aircraft's nose, reducing its speed until it entered an aerodynamic stall.


title: Air France Flight 447

text: While the inconsistent airspeed data caused the disengagement of the autopilot, the reason the pilots lost control of the aircraft had remained a mystery, in particular because pilots would normally try to lower the nose in the event of a stall. Multiple sensors provide the pitch (attitude) information and no indication was given that any of them were malfunctioning. One factor may be that since the A330 does not normally accept control inputs that would cause a stall, the pilots were unaware that a stall could happen when the aircraft switched to an alternative mode because of failure of the airspeed indication.


title: Air France Flight 447

text: In October 2011, a transcript of the CVR was leaked and published in the book "Erreurs de Pilotage" ("Pilot Errors") by Jean Pierre Otelli. The BEA and Air France both condemned the release of this information, with Air France calling it "sensationalized and unverifiable information" that "impairs the memory of the crew and passengers who lost their lives." The BEA subsequently released its final report on the accident, and Appendix 1 contained an official CVR transcript that did not include groups of words deemed to have no bearing on flight.


title: Air France Flight 447

text: On 29 July 2011, the BEA released a third interim report on safety issues it found in the wake of the crash. It was accompanied by two shorter documents summarizing the interim report and addressing safety recommendations.


title: Air France Flight 447

text: The BEA assembled a human factors working group to analyze the crew's actions and reactions during the final stages of the flight.


title: Air France Flight 447

text: A brief bulletin by Air France indicated, "the misleading stopping and starting of the stall-warning alarm, contradicting the actual state of the aircraft, greatly contributed to the crew's difficulty in analyzing the situation."


title: Air France Flight 447

text: On 5 July 2012, the BEA released its final report on the accident. This confirmed the findings of the preliminary reports and provided additional details and recommendations to improve safety. According to the final report, the accident resulted from this succession of major events:


title: Air France Flight 447

text: Before and after the publication of the final report by the BEA in July 2012, many independent analyses and expert opinions were published in the media about the cause of the accident.


title: Air France Flight 447

text: In May 2011, Wil S. Hylton of "The New York Times" commented that the crash "was easy to bend into myth" because "no other passenger jet in modern history had disappeared so completely—without a Mayday call or a witness or even a trace on radar." Hylton explained that the A330 "was considered to be among the safest" of the passenger aircraft. Hylton added that when "Flight 447 seemed to disappear from the sky, it was tempting to deliver a tidy narrative about the hubris of building a self-flying aircraft, Icarus falling from the sky. Or maybe Flight 447 was the "Titanic", an uncrashable ship at the bottom of the sea." Dr. Guy Gratton, an aviation expert from the Flight Safety Laboratory at Brunel University, said, "This is an air accident the likes of which we haven't seen before. Half the accident investigators in the Western world – and in Russia too – are waiting for these results. This has been the biggest investigation since Lockerbie. Put bluntly, big passenger planes do not just fall out of the sky."


title: Air France Flight 447

text: In a July 2011 article in "Aviation Week", Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger was quoted as saying the crash was a "seminal accident" and suggested that pilots would be able to better handle upsets of this type if they had an indication of the wing's angle of attack (AoA). By contrast, aviation author Captain Bill Palmer has expressed doubts that an AoA indicator would have saved AF447, writing: "as the PF [pilot flying] seemed to be ignoring the more fundamental indicators of pitch and attitude, along with numerous stall warnings, one could question what difference a rarely used AoA gauge would have made".


title: Air France Flight 447

text: Following its investigation, the BEA recommended that the European Aviation Safety Agency and the FAA should consider making an AoA indicator on the instrument panel mandatory. In 2014, the FAA streamlined requirements for AoA indicators for general aviation without affecting requirements for commercial aviation.


title: Air France Flight 447

text: On 6 December 2011, "Popular Mechanics" published an English translation of the analysis of the transcript of the CVR controversially leaked in the book "Erreurs de Pilotage". It highlighted the role of the co-pilot in stalling the aircraft, while the flight computer was under alternate law at high altitude. This "simple but persistent" human error was given as the most direct cause of this accident. In the commentary accompanying the article, they also noted that the failure to follow principles of crew resource management was a contributory factor.


title: Air France Flight 447

text: The final BEA report points to the human-computer interface (HCI) of the Airbus as a possible factor contributing to the crash. It provides an explanation for most of the pitch-up inputs by the pilot flying, left unexplained in the "Popular Mechanics" piece: namely that the flight director display was misleading. The pitch-up input at the beginning of the fatal sequence of events appears to be the consequence of an altimeter error. The investigators also pointed to the lack of a clear display of the airspeed inconsistencies, though the computers had identified them. Some systems generated failure messages only about the consequences, but never mentioned the origin of the problem. The investigators recommended a blocked pitot tube should be clearly indicated as such to the crew on the flight displays. "The Daily Telegraph" pointed out the absence of AoA information, which is so important in identifying and preventing a stall. The paper stated, "though angle of attack readings are sent to onboard computers, there are no displays in modern jets to convey this critical information to the crews." "Der Spiegel" indicated the difficulty the pilots faced in diagnosing the problem: "One alarm after another lit up the cockpit monitors. One after another, the autopilot, the automatic engine control system, and the flight computers shut themselves off." Against this backdrop of confusing information, difficulty with aural cognition (due to heavy buffeting from the storm, as well as the stall) and zero external visibility, the pilots had less than three minutes to identify the problem and take corrective action. The "Der Spiegel" report asserts that such a crash "could happen again".


title: Air France Flight 447

text: In an article in "Vanity Fair", William Langewiesche noted that once the AoA was so extreme, the system rejected the data as invalid, and temporarily stopped the stall warnings, but "this led to a perverse reversal that lasted nearly to the impact; each time Bonin happened to lower the nose, rendering the angle of attack marginally less severe, the stall warning sounded again—a negative reinforcement that may have locked him into his pattern of pitching up", which increased the angle of attack and thus aggravated the stall.


title: Air France Flight 447

text: In April 2012 in "The Daily Telegraph", British journalist Nick Ross published a comparison of Airbus and Boeing flight controls; unlike the control yoke used on Boeing flight decks, the Airbus side-stick controls give little visual feedback and no sensory or tactile feedback to the second pilot. The cockpit synthetic voice, however, does give an aural message 'Dual Input' whenever opposite inputs are initiated by the pilots. Ross reasoned that this might in part explain why the PF's [pilot flying] fatal nose-up inputs were not countermanded by his two colleagues. In fact BEA's final report July 2012 page 177 said, "during this forty-six second period between the autopilot disconnection and the STALL 2 warning, the C-chord warning [an altitude related alarm] sounded for a total duration of thirty-four seconds, thirty-one seconds of which as a continuous alert, and the STALL warning sounded for two seconds. The C-chord alert therefore saturated the aural environment within the cockpit. It was not cancelled by the crew. This aural environment certainly played a role in altering the crew's response to the situation."


title: Air France Flight 447

text: In a July 2012 CBS report, Sullenberger suggested the design of the Airbus cockpit might have been a factor in the accident. The flight controls are not mechanically linked between the two pilot seats, and Robert, the left-seat pilot who believed he had taken over control of the aircraft, was not aware that Bonin continued to hold the stick back, which overrode Robert's own control. BEA's final report July 2012 page 179 said, "In fact the situation, with a high workload and multiple visual prompts, corresponds to a threshold in terms of being able to take into account an unusual aural warning. In an aural environment that was already saturated by the C-chord warning, the possibility that the crew did not identify the stall warning cannot be ruled out."


title: Air France Flight 447

text: Getting enough sleep is a constant challenge for pilots of long-haul flights. Although the BEA could find no "objective" indications that the pilots of Flight 447 were suffering from fatigue, some exchanges recorded on the CVR, including a remark made by Captain Dubois that he had only slept an hour, could indicate the crew were not well rested before the flight. The co-pilots had spent three nights in Rio de Janeiro, but the BEA was unable to retrieve data regarding their rest and could not determine their activities during the stopover.


title: Air France Flight 447

text: Shortly after the crash, Air France changed the number of the regular Rio de Janeiro-Paris flight from AF447 to AF445.


title: Air France Flight 447

text: Six months later, on 30 November 2009, Air France Flight 445 operated by another Airbus A330-203 (registered F-GZCK) made a mayday call because of severe turbulence around the same area and at a similar time to when Flight 447 was lost. Because the pilots could not obtain immediate permission from air traffic controllers (ATCs) to descend to a less turbulent altitude, the mayday was to alert other aircraft in the vicinity that the flight had deviated from its allocated flight level. This is standard contingency procedure when changing altitude without direct ATC authorization. After 30 minutes of moderate-to-severe turbulence, the flight continued normally. The flight landed safely in Paris 6 hours and 40 minutes after the mayday call.


title: Air France Flight 447

text: Several cases have occurred in which inaccurate airspeed information led to flight incidents on the A330 and A340. Two of those incidents involved pitot probes. In the first incident, an Air France A340-300 (F-GLZL) "en route" from Tokyo to Paris experienced an event at , in which the airspeed was incorrectly reported and the autopilot automatically disengaged. Bad weather and obstructed drainage holes in all three pitot probes were subsequently found to be the cause. In the second incident, an Air France A340-300 (F-GLZN) "en route" from Paris to New York encountered turbulence followed by the autoflight systems going offline, warnings over the accuracy of the reported airspeed, and 2 minutes of stall alerts.


title: Air France Flight 447

text: Another incident on TAM Flight 8091, from Miami to Rio de Janeiro on 21 May 2009, involving an A330-200, showed a sudden drop of outside air temperature, then loss of air data, the ADIRS, autopilot and autothrust. The aircraft descended before being manually recovered using backup instruments. The NTSB also examined a similar 23 June 2009 incident on a Northwest Airlines flight from Hong Kong to Tokyo, concluding in both cases that the aircraft operating manual was sufficient to prevent a dangerous situation from occurring.


title: Air France Flight 447

text: Following the crash of Air France 447, other Airbus A330 operators studied their internal flight records to seek patterns. Delta Air Lines analyzed the data of Northwest Airlines flights that occurred before the two companies merged and found a dozen incidents in which at least one of an A330's pitot tubes had briefly stopped working when the aircraft was flying through the ITCZ, the same location where Air France 447 crashed.


title: Air France Flight 447

text: Air France and Airbus have been investigated for manslaughter since 2011, but in 2019, prosecutors recommended dropping the case against Airbus and charging Air France with manslaughter and negligence, concluding, "the airline was aware of technical problems with a key airspeed monitoring instrument on its planes but failed to train pilots to resolve them". The case against Airbus was dropped on 22 July the same year. The case against Air France was dropped in September 2019 when magistrates said, "there were not enough grounds to prosecute". However, in 2021, a public prosecutor in Paris requested to have Airbus and Air France tried in a court of law. In April, it was announced that both companies would be prosecuted over the crash. Lawyers for Airbus stated they would lodge an immediate appeal against the decision. The trial opened on 10 October 2022, with Airbus and Air France both being charged with involuntary manslaughter. Both companies pleaded not guilty to the charges. On 7 December, prosecutors announced that they would not not seek convictions for either company of manslaughter as they were unable to prove them guilty, and recommended acquitting both companies. Families and friends of the victims were outraged by the decision.


title: Air France Flight 447

text: A one-hour documentary entitled "Lost: The Mystery of Flight 447" detailing an early independent hypothesis about the crash was produced by Darlow Smithson in 2010 for "Nova" and the BBC. Using the then-sparse publicly available evidence and information, and without data from the black boxes, a critical chain of events was postulated, employing the expertise of an expert pilot, an expert accident investigator, an aviation meteorologist, and an aircraft structural engineer.


title: Air France Flight 447

text: On 16 September 2012, Channel 4 in the UK presented "Fatal Flight 447: Chaos in the Cockpit", which showed data from the black boxes including an in-depth re-enactment. It was produced by Minnow Films. Similar presentation was made by 60 Minutes Australia in 2014.


title: Air France Flight 447

text: The aviation-disaster documentary television series "Mayday" (also known as "Air Crash Investigation" and "Air Emergency") produced a 45-minute episode titled "Air France 447: Vanished", which aired on 15 April 2013 in Great Britain and 17 May 2013 in the U.S.


title: Air France Flight 447

text: An article about the crash by American author and pilot William Langewiesche, entitled "Should Airplanes Be Flying Themselves?", was published by "Vanity Fair" in October 2014.


title: Air France Flight 447

text: A "99% Invisible" podcast episode about the flight, entitled "Children of the Magenta (Automation Paradox, pt. 1)", was released on 23 June 2015 as the first of a two-part story about automation.


title: Air France Flight 447

text: In November 2015, Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor David Mindell discussed the Air France Flight 447 tragedy in the opening segment of an "EconTalk" podcast dedicated to the ideas in Mindell's 2015 book "Our Robots, Ourselves: Robotics and the Myths of Autonomy". Mindell said the crash illustrated a "failed handoff", with insufficient warning, from the aircraft's autopilot to the human pilots.


title: Air France Flight 447

text: The Rooster Teeth–produced podcast "Black Box Down" covered the flight in an episode titled "Stalling 38,000 Feet Over The Atlantic" on 30 July 2020.


title: Air France Flight 447

text: On 9 September 2021, the Science Channel Documentary "Deadly Engineering" covered the crash on Season 3 Episode 1 : "Catastrophes in the Sky".


title: Air France Flight 447

text: On December 11, 2022, a one-hour documentary that discusses the technical details of the crash was aired on the Mentour Pilot channel. The documentary refers to the flight as a "Titanic of the Skies".


title: Teutonic Order

text: The Order of Brothers of the German House of Saint Mary in Jerusalem, commonly known as the Teutonic Order, is a Catholic religious institution founded as a military society in Acre, Kingdom of Jerusalem. It was formed to aid Christians on their pilgrimages to the Holy Land and to establish hospitals. Its members have commonly been known as the Teutonic Knights, having a small voluntary and mercenary military membership, serving as a crusading military order for the protection of Christians in the Holy Land and the Baltics during the Middle Ages.


title: Teutonic Order

text: Purely religious since 1810, the Teutonic Order still confers limited honorary knighthoods. The Bailiwick of Utrecht of the Teutonic Order, a Protestant chivalric order, is descended from the same medieval military order and also continues to award knighthoods and perform charitable work.


title: Teutonic Order

text: The name of the Order of Brothers of the German House of Saint Mary in Jerusalem is in and in Latin "Ordo domus Sanctae Mariae Theutonicorum Hierosolymitanorum." Thus the term "Teutonic" echoes the German origins of the order ("Theutonicorum") in its Latin name. German-speakers commonly refer to the "Deutscher Orden" (official short name, literally "German Order"), historically also as "Deutscher Ritterorden" ("German Order of Knights"), "Deutschherrenorden" ("Order of the German Lords"), "Deutschritterorden" ("Order of the German Knights"), "Marienritter" ("Knights of Mary"), "Die Herren im weißen Mantel" ("The lords in white capes"), "etc.".


title: Teutonic Order

text: The Teutonic Knights have been known as "Zakon Krzyżacki" in Polish ("Order of the Cross") and as "Kryžiuočių Ordinas" in Lithuanian, "Vācu Ordenis" in Latvian, "Saksa Ordu" or, simply, "Ordu" ("The Order") in Estonian, as well as various names in other languages.


title: Teutonic Order

text: A manuscript by Karl Marx once characterised the forces of the Order as "Reitershunde" – meaning something like a "pack of knights". Russian readers of Marx translated the phrase over-literally as "dog-knights" (Псы-рыцари), which became a widespread, pejorative label for the Order in the Russian language – especially after the 1938 release of Sergei Eisenstein's film "Aleksandr Nevskij", which fictionalised the Knights' defeat in the Battle on the Ice of 1242.


title: Teutonic Order

text: The fraternity which preceded the formation of the Order was formed in the year 1191 in Acre by the German merchants from Bremen and Lübeck. After the capture of Acre they took over a hospital in the city to take care of the sick and began to describe themselves as the Hospital of St. Mary of the German House in Jerusalem. Soon Pope Clement III approved it and the Order started to play an important role in the Outremer (the general name for the Crusader states), controlling the port tolls of Acre. After Christian forces were defeated in the Middle East, the order moved to Transylvania in 1211 to help defend the south-eastern borders of the Kingdom of Hungary against the Cumans. The Knights were expelled by force of arms by King Andrew II of Hungary in 1225, after attempting to build their own state within Transylvania and Pope Honorius III's papal bull claiming the Order's territory in Transylvania.


title: Teutonic Order

text: In 1230, following the Golden Bull of Rimini, Grand Master Hermann von Salza and Duke Konrad I of Masovia launched the Prussian Crusade, a joint invasion of Prussia intended to Christianize the Baltic Old Prussians. The Knights had quickly taken steps against their Polish hosts and with the Holy Roman Emperor's support, had changed the status of Chełmno Land (also Ziemia Chełmińska or Kulmerland), where they were invited by the Polish Duke, into their own property. Starting from there, the Order created the independent Monastic State of the Teutonic Knights, adding continuously the conquered Prussians' territory, and subsequently conquered Livonia. Over time, the kings of Poland denounced the Order for expropriating their lands, specifically Chełmno Land and later the Polish lands of Pomerelia (also Pomorze Gdańskie or Pomerania), Kuyavia, and Dobrzyń Land.


title: Teutonic Order

text: The order theoretically lost its main purpose in Europe with the Christianization of Lithuania. However, it initiated numerous campaigns against its Christian neighbours, the Kingdom of Poland, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and the Novgorod Republic (after assimilating the Livonian Order). The Teutonic Knights had a strong economic base which enabled them to hire mercenaries from throughout Europe to augment their feudal levies, and they also became a naval power in the Baltic Sea. In 1410, a Polish-Lithuanian army decisively defeated the Order and broke its military power at the Battle of Grunwald. However, the capital of the Teutonic Knights was successfully defended in the following Siege of Marienburg (Malbork) and the Order was saved from collapse.


title: Teutonic Order

text: In 1515, Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I made a marriage alliance with Sigismund I of Poland-Lithuania. Thereafter, the empire did not support the Order against Poland. In 1525, Grand Master Albert of Brandenburg resigned and converted to Lutheranism, becoming Duke of Prussia as a vassal of Poland. Soon after, the Order lost Livonia and its holdings in the Protestant areas of Germany. The Order did keep its considerable holdings in Catholic areas of Germany until 1809, when Napoleon Bonaparte ordered its dissolution and the Order lost its last secular holdings.


title: Teutonic Order

text: However, the Order continued to exist as a charitable and ceremonial body. It was outlawed by Nazi Germany in 1938, but re-established in 1945. Today it operates primarily with charitable aims in Central Europe.


title: Teutonic Order

text: The Knights wore white surcoats with a black cross. A cross pattée was sometimes used as their coat of arms; this image was later used for military decoration and insignia by the Kingdom of Prussia and Germany as the Iron Cross and Pour le Mérite. The motto of the Order was: "Helfen, Wehren, Heilen" ("Help, Defend, Heal").


title: Teutonic Order

text: In 1143 Pope Celestine II ordered the Knights Hospitaller to take over management of a German hospital in Jerusalem, which, according to the chronicler Jean d'Ypres, accommodated the countless German pilgrims and crusaders who could neither speak the local language nor Latin ("patriæ linguam ignorantibus atque Latinam"). Although formally an institution of the Hospitallers, the pope commanded that the prior and the brothers of the "domus Theutonicorum" (house of the Germans) should always be Germans themselves, so a tradition of a German-led religious institution could develop during the 12th century in the Kingdom of Jerusalem.


title: Teutonic Order

text: After the loss of Jerusalem in 1187, some merchants from Lübeck and Bremen took up the idea and founded a field hospital for the duration of the Siege of Acre in 1190, which became the nucleus of the order; Celestine III recognized it in 1192 by granting the monks Augustinian Rule. However, based on the model of the Knights Templar, it was transformed into a military order in 1198 and the head of the order became known as the Grand Master ("magister hospitalis"). It received papal orders for crusades to take and hold Jerusalem for Christianity and defend the Holy Land against the Muslim Saracens. During the rule of Grand Master Hermann von Salza (1209–1239) the Order changed from being a hospice brotherhood for pilgrims to primarily a military order.


title: Teutonic Order

text: The Order was founded in Acre, and the Knights purchased Montfort (Starkenberg), northeast of Acre, in 1220. This castle, which defended the route between Jerusalem and the Mediterranean Sea, was made the seat of the Grand Masters in 1229, although they returned to Acre after losing Montfort to Muslim control in 1271. The Order received donations of land in the Holy Roman Empire (especially in present-day Germany and Italy), Frankish Greece, and the Kingdom of Jerusalem.


title: Teutonic Order

text: Emperor Frederick II elevated his close friend Hermann von Salza to the status of "Reichsfürst", or "Prince of the Empire", enabling the Grand Master to negotiate with other senior princes as an equal. During Frederick's coronation as King of Jerusalem in 1225, Teutonic Knights served as his escort in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre; von Salza read the emperor's proclamation in both French and German. However, the Teutonic Knights were never as influential in Outremer as the older Templars and Hospitallers.


title: Teutonic Order

text: In 1211, Andrew II of Hungary accepted the services of the Teutonic Knights and granted them the district of Burzenland in Transylvania, where they would be immune to fees and duties and could enforce their own justice. Andrew had been involved in negotiations for the marriage of his daughter with the son of Hermann, Landgrave of Thuringia, whose vassals included the family of Hermann von Salza. Led by a brother called Theoderich or Dietrich, the Order defended the south-eastern borders of the Kingdom of Hungary against the neighbouring Cumans. Many forts of wood and mud were built for defence. They settled new German peasants among the existing Transylvanian Saxon inhabitants. The Cumans had no fixed settlements for resistance, and soon the Teutons were expanding into their territory. By 1220, the Teutonics Knights had built five castles, some of them made of stone. Their rapid expansion made the Hungarian nobility and clergy, who were previously uninterested in those regions, jealous and suspicious. Some nobles claimed these lands, but the Order refused to share them, ignoring the demands of the local bishop. After the Fifth Crusade, King Andrew returned to Hungary and found his kingdom full of grudge because of the expenses and losses of the failed military campaign. When the nobles demanded that he cancel the concessions made to the Knights, he concluded that they had exceeded their task and that the agreement should be revised, but did not revert the concessions. However, Prince Béla, heir to the throne, was allied with the nobility. In 1224, the Teutonic Knights, seeing that they would have problems when the Prince inherited the Kingdom, petitioned Pope Honorius III to be placed directly under the authority of the Papal See, rather than that of the King of Hungary. This was a grave mistake, as King Andrew, angered and alarmed at their growing power, responded by expelling the Teutonic Knights in 1225, although he allowed the ethnically German commoners and peasants settled here by the Order and who became part of the larger group of the Transylvanian Saxons, to remain. Lacking the military organization and experience of the Teutonic Knights, the Hungarians did not replace them with adequate defenders which had prevented the attacking Cumans. Soon, the steppe warriors would be a threat again.


title: Teutonic Order

text: In 1226, Konrad I, Duke of Masovia in north-eastern Poland, appealed to the Knights to defend his borders and subdue the pagan Baltic Old Prussians, allowing the Teutonic Knights use of Chełmno Land as a base for their campaign. This being a time of widespread crusading fervor throughout Western Europe, Hermann von Salza considered Prussia a good training ground for his knights for the wars against the Muslims in Outremer. With the Golden Bull of Rimini, Emperor Frederick II bestowed on the Order a special imperial privilege for the conquest and possession of Prussia, including Chełmno Land, with nominal papal sovereignty. In 1235 the Teutonic Knights assimilated the smaller Order of Dobrzyń, which had been established earlier by Christian, the first Bishop of Prussia.


title: Teutonic Order

text: The conquest of Prussia was accomplished with much bloodshed over more than fifty years, during which native Prussians who remained unbaptised were subjugated, killed, or exiled. Fighting between the Knights and the Prussians was ferocious; chronicles of the Order state the Prussians would "roast captured brethren alive in their armour, like chestnuts, before the shrine of a local god".


title: Teutonic Order

text: The native nobility who submitted to the crusaders had many of their privileges affirmed in the Treaty of Christburg. After the Prussian uprisings of 1260–83, however, much of the Prussian nobility emigrated or were resettled, and many free Prussians lost their rights. The Prussian nobles who remained were more closely allied with the German landowners and gradually assimilated. Peasants in frontier regions, such as Samland, had more privileges than those in more populated lands, such as Pomesania. The crusading knights often accepted baptism as a form of submission by the natives. Christianity along western lines slowly spread through Prussian culture. Bishops were reluctant to have Prussian religious practices integrated into the new faith, while the ruling knights found it easier to govern the natives when they were semi-pagan and lawless. After fifty years of warfare and brutal conquest, the end result meant that most of the Prussian natives were either killed or deported.


title: Teutonic Order

text: The Order ruled Prussia under charters issued by the Pope and the Holy Roman Emperor as a sovereign monastic state, comparable to the arrangement of the Knights Hospitallers in Rhodes and later in Malta.


title: Teutonic Order

text: To make up for losses from the plague and to replace the partially exterminated native population, the Order encouraged immigration from the Holy Roman Empire (mostly Germans, Flemish, and Dutch) and from Masovia (Poles), the later Masurians. These included nobles, burghers, and peasants, and the surviving Old Prussians were gradually assimilated through Germanization. The settlers founded numerous towns and cities on former Prussian settlements. The Order itself built a number of castles ("Ordensburgen") from which it could defeat uprisings of Old Prussians, as well as continue its attacks on the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the Kingdom of Poland, with which the Order was often at war during the 14th and 15th centuries. Major towns founded by the Order included Allenstein (Olsztyn), Elbing (Elbląg), Klaipėda (Memel), and Königsberg, founded in 1255 in honor of King Otakar II of Bohemia on the site of a destroyed Prussian settlement.


title: Teutonic Order

text: The Livonian Brothers of the Sword were absorbed by the Teutonic Knights in 1237 after the former had suffered a devastating defeat in the Battle of Saule. The Livonian branch subsequently became known as the Livonian Order. Attempts to expand into Rus' failed when the knights suffered a major defeat in 1242 in the Battle of the Ice at the hands of Prince Alexander Nevsky of Novgorod. Over the next decades the Order focused on the subjugation of the Curonians and Semigallians. In 1260 it suffered a disastrous defeat in the Battle of Durbe against Samogitians, which inspired rebellions throughout Prussia and Livonia. After the Teutonic Knights won a crucial victory in the Siege of Königsberg from 1262 to 1265, the war had reached a turning point. The Curonians were finally subjugated in 1267 and the Semigallians in 1290. The Order suppressed a major Estonian rebellion in 1343–1345, and in 1346 purchased the Duchy of Estonia from Denmark.


title: Teutonic Order

text: The Teutonic Knights began to direct their campaigns against pagan Lithuania (see Lithuanian mythology), due to the long existing conflicts in the region (including constant incursions into the Holy Roman Empire's territory by pagan raiding parties) and the lack of a proper area of operation for the Knights, after the fall of the Kingdom of Jerusalem at Acre in 1291 and their later expulsion from Hungary. At first the knights moved their headquarters to Venice, from which they planned the recovery of Outremer, this plan was, however, shortly abandoned, and the Order later moved its headquarters to Marienburg, so it could better focus its efforts on the region of Prussia. Because "Lithuania Propria" remained non-Christian until the end of the 14th century, much later than the rest of eastern Europe, the conflicts stretched out for a longer time, and many Knights from western European countries, such as England and France, journeyed to Prussia to participate in the seasonal campaigns ("reyse") against the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. In 1348, the Order won a great victory over the Lithuanians in the Battle of Strėva, severely weakening them. The Teutonic Knights won a decisive victory over Lithuania in the Battle of Rudau in 1370.


title: Teutonic Order

text: Warfare between the Order and the Lithuanians was especially brutal. It was common practice for Lithuanians to torture captured enemies and civilians, it is recorded by a Teutonic chronicler that they had the habit of tying captured Knights to their horses and having both of them burned alive, while sometimes a stake would be driven into their bodies or the Knight would be flayed. Lithuanian pagan customs included ritualistic human sacrifice, the hanging of widows, and the burying of a warrior's horses and servants with him after his death. The Knights would also, on occasion, take captives from defeated Lithuanians, whose condition (as that of other war captives in the Middle Ages) was extensively researched by Jacques Heers. The conflict had much influence in the political situation of the region, and was the source of many rivalries between Lithuanians or Poles and Germans, the degree to which it impacted the mentalities of the time can be seen in the lyrical works of men such as the contemporary Austrian poet Peter Suchenwirt.


title: Teutonic Order

text: The conflict in its entirety lasted over 200 years (although with varying degrees of aggression during that time), with its front line along both banks of the Neman River, with as many as twenty forts and castles between Seredžius and Jurbarkas alone.


title: Teutonic Order

text: A dispute over the succession to the Duchy of Pomerelia embroiled the Order in further conflict at the beginning of the 14th century. The Margraves of Brandenburg had claims to the duchy that they acted upon after the death of King Wenceslaus of Poland in 1306. Duke Władysław I the Elbow-high of Poland also claimed the duchy, based on inheritance from Przemysław II, but he was opposed by some Pomeranians nobles. They requested help from Brandenburg, which subsequently occupied all of Pomerelia except for the citadel of Gdańsk in 1308. Because Władysław was unable to come to the defense of Gdańsk, the Teutonic Knights, then led by Grand Master Siegfried von Feuchtwangen, were called to expel the Brandenburgers.


title: Teutonic Order

text: The Order, under a Prussian Landmeister Heinrich von Plötzke, evicted the Brandenburgers from Gdańsk in September 1308 but then refused to yield the town to the Poles, and according to some sources massacred the town's inhabitants; although the exact extent of the violence is unknown, and widely recognized by historians to be an unsolvable mystery. The estimates range from 60 rebellious leaders, reported by dignitaries of the region and Knight chroniclers, to 10,000 civilians, a number cited in a papal bull (of dubious provenance) that was used in a legal process installed to punish the Order for the event; the legal dispute went on for a time, but the Order was eventually absolved of the charges. In the Treaty of Soldin, the Teutonic Order purchased Brandenburg's supposed claim to the castles of Gdańsk, Świecie, and Tczew and their hinterlands from the margraves for 10,000 marks on 13 September 1309.


title: Teutonic Order

text: Control of Pomerelia allowed the Order to connect their monastic state with the borders of the Holy Roman Empire. Crusading reinforcements and supplies could travel from the Imperial territory of Hither Pomerania through Pomerelia to Prussia, while Poland's access to the Baltic Sea was blocked. While Poland had mostly been an ally of the knights against the pagan Prussians and Lithuanians, the capture of Pomerelia turned the kingdom into a determined enemy of the Order.


title: Teutonic Order

text: The capture of Gdańsk marked a new phase in the history of the Teutonic Knights. The persecution and abolition of the powerful Knights Templar, which began in 1307, worried the Teutonic Knights, but control of Pomerelia allowed them to move their headquarters in 1309 from Venice to Marienburg (Malbork) on the Nogat River, outside the reach of secular powers. The position of Prussian Landmeister was merged with that of the Grand Master. The Pope began investigating misconduct by the knights, but no charges were found to have substance. Along with the campaigns against the Lithuanians, the knights faced a vengeful Poland and legal threats from the Papacy.


title: Teutonic Order

text: The Treaty of Kalisz of 1343 ended the open war between the Teutonic Knights and Poland. The Knights relinquished Kuyavia and Dobrzyń Land to Poland, but retained Chełmno Land and Pomerelia with Gdańsk (Germanized as "Danzig").


title: Teutonic Order

text: In 1236, the Knights of Saint Thomas, an English order, adopted the rules of the Teutonic Order. A contingent of Teutonic Knights of indeterminate number is traditionally believed to have participated at the Battle of Legnica in 1241 during the first Mongol invasion of Poland. The combined Polish-German army was crushed by the Mongol army and their superior tactics, with few survivors.


title: Teutonic Order

text: In 1337, Emperor Louis IV allegedly granted the Order the imperial privilege to conquer all Lithuania and Russia. During the reign of Grand Master Winrich von Kniprode (1351–1382), the Order reached the peak of its international prestige and hosted numerous European crusaders and nobility.


title: Teutonic Order

text: King Albert of Sweden ceded Gotland to the Order as a pledge (similar to a fiefdom), with the understanding that they would eliminate the pirating Victual Brothers from this strategic island base in the Baltic Sea. An invasion force under Grand Master Konrad von Jungingen conquered the island in 1398 and drove the Victual Brothers out of Gotland and the Baltic Sea.


title: Teutonic Order

text: In 1386, Grand Duke Jogaila of Lithuania was baptised into Christianity and married Queen Jadwiga of Poland, taking the name Władysław II Jagiełło and becoming King of Poland. This created a personal union between the two countries and a potentially formidable opponent for the Teutonic Knights. The Order initially managed to play Władysław II Jagiełło and his cousin Vytautas against each other, but this strategy failed when Vytautas began to suspect that the Order was planning to annex parts of his territory.


title: Teutonic Order

text: The baptism of Jogaila began the official conversion of Lithuania to Christianity. Although the crusading rationale for the Order's state ended when Prussia and Lithuania had become officially Christian, the Order's feuds and wars with Lithuania and Poland continued. The Lizard Union was created in 1397 by Prussian nobles in Chełmno Land to oppose the Order's policy.


title: Teutonic Order

text: In 1407, the Teutonic Order reached its greatest territorial extent and included the lands of Prussia, Pomerelia, Samogitia, Courland, Livonia, Estonia, Gotland, Dagö, Ösel, and the Neumark, pawned by Brandenburg in 1402.


title: Teutonic Order

text: In 1410, at the Battle of Grunwald a combined Polish–Lithuanian army, led by Władysław II Jagiełło and Vytautas, decisively defeated the Order in the Polish–Lithuanian–Teutonic War. Grand Master Ulrich von Jungingen and most of the Order's higher dignitaries fell on the battlefield (50 out of 60). The Polish–Lithuanian army then began the Siege of Marienburg (Malbork), the capital of the Order, but was unable to take Marienburg owing to the resistance of Heinrich von Plauen. When the First Peace of Thorn was signed in 1411, the Order managed to retain essentially all of its territories, although the Knights' reputation as invincible warriors was irreparably damaged.


title: Teutonic Order

text: While Poland and Lithuania were growing in power, that of the Teutonic Knights dwindled through infighting. They were forced to impose high taxes to pay a substantial indemnity but did not give the cities sufficient requested representation in the administration of their state. The authoritarian and reforming Grand Master Heinrich von Plauen was forced from power and replaced by Michael Küchmeister von Sternberg, but the new Grand Master was unable to revive the Order's fortunes. After the Gollub War the Knights lost some small border regions and renounced all claims to Samogitia in the 1422 Treaty of Melno. Austrian and Bavarian knights feuded with those from the Rhineland, who likewise bickered with Low German-speaking Saxons, from whose ranks the Grand Master was usually chosen. The western Prussian lands of the Vistula River Valley and the Brandenburg Neumark were ravaged by the Hussites during the Hussite Wars. Some Teutonic Knights were sent to battle the invaders but were defeated by the Bohemian infantry. The Knights also sustained a defeat in the Polish-Teutonic War (1431–1435).


title: Teutonic Order

text: In 1440, the Prussian Confederation was founded by gentry and burghers of the State of the Teutonic Order. In 1454, it rose up against the Order and asked Polish King Casimir IV Jagiellon to incorporate the region into the Kingdom of Poland, to which the King agreed and signed an act of incorporation in Kraków. Mayors, burghers and representatives from the region pledged allegiance to the Polish King during the incorporation in March 1454 in Kraków. This marked the beginning of the Thirteen Years' War between the Teutonic Order and Poland. The main cities of the incorporated territory were authorized by Casimir IV to mint Polish coins. Much of Prussia was devastated in the war, during the course of which the Order returned Neumark to Brandenburg in 1455 to raise funds for war. Because Marienburg Castle was handed over to mercenaries in lieu of their pay, and eventually passed to Poland, the Order moved its base to Königsberg in Sambia. In the Second Peace of Thorn (1466), the defeated Order renounced any claims to the territories of Gdańsk/Eastern Pomerania and Chełmno Land, which were reintegrated with Poland, and the region of Elbląg and Malbork, and the Prince-Bishopric of Warmia, which were also recognized as part of Poland, while retaining the eastern territories in historic Prussia, but as a fief and protectorate of Poland, also considered an integral part of "one and indivisible" Kingdom of Poland. From now on, every Grand Master of the Teutonic Order was obliged to swear an oath of allegiance to the reigning Polish king within six months of taking office. The Grand Master became a prince and counselor of the Polish king and the Kingdom of Poland.


title: Teutonic Order

text: After the Polish–Teutonic War (1519–1521), the Order was completely ousted from Prussia when Grand Master Albert of Brandenburg converted to Lutheranism in 1525. He secularized the Order's remaining Prussian territories and assumed from his uncle Sigismund I the Old, King of Poland, the hereditary rights to the Duchy of Prussia as a personal vassal of the Polish Crown, the Prussian Homage. Ducal Prussia retained its currency, laws and faith. The aristocracy was not present in the Sejm.


title: Teutonic Order

text: Although it had lost control of all of its Prussian lands, the Teutonic Order retained its territories within the Holy Roman Empire and Livonia, although the Livonian branch retained considerable autonomy. Many of the Imperial possessions were ruined in the German Peasants' War from 1524 to 1525 and subsequently confiscated by Protestant territorial princes. The Livonian territory was then partitioned by neighboring powers during the Livonian War; in 1561 the Livonian Master Gotthard Kettler secularized the southern Livonian possessions of the Order to create the Duchy of Courland, also a vassal of Poland.


title: Teutonic Order

text: After the loss of Prussia in 1525, the Teutonic Knights concentrated on their possessions in the Holy Roman Empire. Since they held no contiguous territory, they developed a three-tiered administrative system: holdings were combined into commanderies that were administered by a commander ("Komtur"). Several commanderies were combined to form a bailiwick headed by a "Landkomtur". All of the Teutonic Knights' possessions were subordinate to the Grand Master, whose seat was in Bad Mergentheim.


title: Teutonic Order

text: The Order gradually lost control of these holdings until, by 1809, only the seat of the Grand Master at Mergentheim remained.


title: Teutonic Order

text: Following the abdication of Albert of Brandenburg, Walter von Cronberg became "Deutschmeister" in 1527, and later Administrator of Prussia and Grand Master in 1530. Emperor Charles V combined the two positions in 1531, creating the title "Hoch- und Deutschmeister", which also had the rank of Prince of the Empire. A new Grand Magistery was established in Mergentheim in Württemberg, which was attacked during the German Peasants' War. The Order also helped Charles V against the Schmalkaldic League. After the Peace of Augsburg in 1555, membership in the Order was open to Protestants, although the majority of brothers remained Catholic. The Teutonic Knights became tri-denominational, with Catholic, Lutheran and Reformed bailiwicks.


title: Teutonic Order

text: The Grand Masters, often members of the great German families (and, after 1761, members of the House of Habsburg-Lorraine), continued to preside over the Order's considerable holdings in Germany. Teutonic Knights from Germany, Austria, and Bohemia were used as battlefield commanders leading mercenaries for the Habsburg monarchy during the Ottoman wars in Europe.


title: Teutonic Order

text: The military history of the Teutonic Knights was to be ended in 1805 by the Article XII of the Peace of Pressburg, which ordered the German territories of the Knights converted into a hereditary domain and gave the Austrian Emperor responsibility for placing a Habsburg prince on its throne. These terms had not been fulfilled by the time of the Treaty of Schönbrunn in 1809, and therefore Napoleon Bonaparte ordered the Knights' remaining territory to be disbursed to his German allies, which was completed in 1810.


title: Teutonic Order

text: The "Generalkapitel" (general chapter) was the collection of all the priests, knights and half-brothers (German: "Halbbrüder"). Because of the logistical problems in assembling the members, who were spread over large distances, only deputations of the bailiwicks and commandries gathered to form the General chapter. The General chapter was designed to meet annually, but the conventions were usually limited to the election of a new Grandmaster. The decisions of the "Generalkapitel" had a binding effect on the "Großgebietigers" of the order.


title: Teutonic Order

text: The "Hochmeister" (Grand Master) was the highest officer of the order. Until 1525, he was elected by the "Generalkapitel". He had the rank of the ruler of an ecclesiastic imperial state and was sovereign prince of Prussia until 1466. Despite this high formal position, in practice, he was only a kind of first among equals.


title: Teutonic Order

text: The "Großgebietige" were high officers with competence on the whole order, appointed by the "Hochmeister". There were five offices.


title: Teutonic Order

text: The order was divided into three national chapters, Prussia, Livland and the territory of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. The highest officer of each chapter was the "Landmeister" (country master). They were elected by the regional chapters. In the beginning, they were only substitutes of the Grandmaster but were able to create a power of their own so that, within their territory, the Grandmaster could not decide against their will. At the end of their rule over Prussia, the Grandmaster was only "Landmeister" of Prussia.


title: Teutonic Order

text: Because the properties of the order within the rule of the "Deutschmeister" did not form a contiguous territory, but were spread over the whole empire and parts of Europe, there was an additional regional structure, the bailiwick. "Kammerballeien" ("Chamber Bailiwicks") were governed by the Grandmaster himself. Some of these bailiwicks had the rank of imperial states


title: Teutonic Order

text: The smallest administrative unit of the order was the Kommende. It was ruled by a Komtur, who had all administrative rights and controlled the "Vogteien" (district of a reeve) and "Zehnthöfe" (tithe collectors) within his rule. In the commandry, all kinds of brothers lived together in a monastic way. Noblemen served as Knight-brothers or Priest-brothers. Other people could serve as Sariantbrothers, who were armed soldiers, and as Half-brothers, who were working in the economy and healthcare.


title: Teutonic Order

text: The Roman Catholic order continued to exist in the various territories ruled by the Austrian Empire, out of Napoleon's reach. From 1804 the Order was headed by members of the Habsburg dynasty.


title: Teutonic Order

text: The collapse of the Habsburg monarchy and the Empire it governed in Austria, the Italian Tyrol, Bohemia and the Balkans brought a shattering crisis to the Order. While in the new Austrian Republic, the Order seemed to have some hope of survival, in the other former parts of the Habsburg territories, the tendency was to regard the Order as an honorary chivalric Order of the House of Habsburg. The consequence of this risked being the confiscation of the Order's property as belongings of the House of Habsburg. So as to make the distinction clearer, in 1923 the then High Master, Field Marshal Eugen of Austria-Teschen, Archduke of Austria, a member of the House of Habsburg and an active army commander before and during the First World War, had one of the Order's priests, Norbert Klein, at the time Bishop of Brno (Brünn) elected his Coadjutor and then abdicated, leaving the Bishop as High Master of the Order.


title: Teutonic Order

text: As a result of this move, by 1928 the now-independent former Habsburg territories all recognized the Order as a Catholic religious order. The Order itself introduced a new Rule, approved by Pope Pius XI in 1929, according to which the government of the Order would in the future be in the hands of a priest of the Order, as would its constituent provinces, while the women religious of the Order would have women superiors. In 1936 the situation of the women religious was further clarified and the Congregation of the Sisters of the Order was given as their supreme moderator the High Master of the Order, the Sisters also having representation at the Order's general chapter.


title: Teutonic Order

text: This completed the transformation of what remained in the Catholic Church of the Teutonic knights into a Catholic religious order now renamed simply the "Deutscher Orden" ("German Order"). However, further difficulties were in store.


title: Teutonic Order

text: The promising beginnings of this reorganization and spiritual transformation suffered a severe blow through the expansion of German might under the National Socialist regime. After Austria's annexation by Germany in 1938, and similarly the Czech lands in 1939 the Teutonic Order was suppressed throughout the "Großdeutsches Reich" until Germany's defeat. This did not prevent the National Socialists from using imagery of the medieval Teutonic knights for propagandistic purposes.


title: Teutonic Order

text: The Fascist rule in Italy, which since the end of the First World War had absorbed the Southern Tyrol, was not a propitious setting, but following the end of hostilities, a now democratic Italy provided normalized conditions, In 1947 Austria legally abolished the measures taken against the Order and restored confiscated property. Despite being hampered by the Communist regimes in Yugoslavia and in Czechoslovakia, the Order was now broadly in a position to take up activities in accordance with elements of its tradition, including care for the sick, for the elderly, for children, including work in education, in parishes and in its own internal houses of study. In 1957 a residence was established in Rome for the Order's Procurator General to the Holy See, to serve also as a pilgrim hostel. Conditions in Czechoslovakia gradually improved and in the meanwhile, the forced exile of some members of the Order led to the Order's re-establishing itself with some modest, but historically significant, foundations in Germany. The Sisters, in particular, gained several footholds, including specialist schools and care of the poor and in 1953 the former house of Augustinian Canons, St. Nikola, in Passau became the Sisters' Motherhouse. Although the reconstruction represented by the reformed Rule of 1929 had set aside categories such as the knights, over time the spontaneous involvement of laypeople in the Order's apostolates has led to their revival in a modernized form, a development formalized by Pope Paul VI in 1965.


title: Teutonic Order

text: With the official title of "Brethren of the German House of St Mary in Jerusalem", the Order today is unambiguously a Catholic religious order, though sui generis. Various features of its life and activities recall those of monastic and mendicant orders. At its core are priests who make a solemn religious profession, along with lay brothers who make a perpetual simple profession. Also part of the Order are the Sisters, with internal self-government within their own structures but with representation in the Order's General Chapter. Their ultimate superior is the High Master of the Order. The approximately 100 Catholic priests and 200 nuns of the Order are divided into five provinces, namely, Austria, Southern Tyrol-Italy, Slovenia, Germany, Czech Republic and Slovakia. While the priests predominantly provide spiritual guidance, the nuns primarily care for the ill and the aged. Many of the priests care for German-speaking communities outside of Germany and Austria, especially in Italy and Slovenia; in this sense, the Teutonic Order has returned to its 12th-century roots: the spiritual and physical care of Germans in foreign lands.


title: Teutonic Order

text: There is an Institute of "Familiares", most of whom are laypeople, and who are attached by spiritual bonds to the Order but do not take vows. The "Familiares" are grouped especially into the bailiwicks of Germany, Austria, Southern Tyrol, Ad Tiberim (Rome), and the bailiwick of the Czech Republic and Slovakia, as also in the independent commandry of Alden Biesen in Belgium, though others are dispersed throughout the world. Overall, there are in recent years some 700.


title: Teutonic Order

text: By the end of the 20th century, then, this religious Order had developed into a charitable organization and established numerous clinics, as well as sponsoring excavation and tourism projects in Israel. In 2000, the German chapter of the Teutonic Order declared bankruptcy, and its upper management was dismissed; an investigation by a special committee of the Bavarian parliament in 2002 and 2003 to determine the cause was inconclusive.


title: Teutonic Order

text: The current Abbot General of the Order, who also holds the title of High Master, is Father Frank Bayard. The current seat of the High Master is the "Church of the German Order" ("Deutschordenskirche") in Vienna. Near the St Stephen's Cathedral ("Stephansdom") in the Austrian capital is the Treasury of the Teutonic Order, which is open to the public, and the Order's central archive. Since 1996, there has also been a museum dedicated to the Teutonic Knights at their former castle in Bad Mergentheim in Germany, which was the seat of the High Master from 1525 to 1809.


title: Teutonic Order

text: A portion of the Order retains more of the character of the knights during the height of its power and prestige. Der "Balije van Utrecht" ("Bailiwick of Utrecht") of the "Ridderlijke Duitsche Orde" ("Chivalric German [i.e., 'Teutonic'] Order") became Protestant at the Reformation, and it remained an aristocratic society. The relationship of the Bailiwick of Utrecht to the Roman Catholic "Deutscher Orden" resembles that of the Protestant Bailiwick of Brandenburg to the Roman Catholic Order of Malta: each is an authentic part of its original order, though differing from and smaller than the Roman Catholic branch.


title: Teutonic Order

text: The Knights wore white surcoats with a black cross, granted by Innocent III in 1205. A cross pattée was sometimes used.


title: Teutonic Order

text: The coat of arms representing the grandmaster ("Hochmeisterwappen") is shown with a golden cross fleury or cross potent superimposed on the black cross, with the imperial eagle as a central inescutcheon. The golden cross fleury overlaid on the black cross became widely used in the 15th century. A legendary account attributes its introduction to Louis IX of France, who is said to have granted the master of the order this cross as a variation of the Jerusalem cross, with the fleur-de-lis symbol attached to each arm, in 1250. While this legendary account cannot be traced back further than the early modern period (Christoph Hartknoch, 1684), there is some evidence that the design does indeed date to the mid 13th century.


title: Teutonic Order

text: The black cross pattée was later used for military decoration and insignia by the Kingdom of Prussia and Germany as the Iron Cross.


title: Teutonic Order

text: Emperor Wilhelm II of Germany posed for a photo in 1902 in the garb of a monk from the Teutonic Order, climbing the stairs in the reconstructed Marienburg Castle as a symbol of Imperial German policy.


title: Teutonic Order

text: The German historian Heinrich von Treitschke used imagery of the Teutonic Knights to promote pro-German and anti-Polish rhetoric. Many middle-class German nationalists adopted this imagery and its symbols. During the Weimar Republic, associations and organisations of this nature contributed to laying the groundwork for the formation of Nazi Germany.


title: Teutonic Order

text: Before and during World War II, Nazi propaganda and ideology made frequent use of the Teutonic Knights' imagery, as the Nazis sought to depict the Knights' actions as a forerunner of the Nazi conquests for Lebensraum. Heinrich Himmler tried to idealise the SS as a 20th-century reincarnation of the medieval Order. Yet, despite these references to the Teutonic Order's history in Nazi propaganda, the Order itself was abolished in 1938 and its members were persecuted by the German authorities. This occurred mostly due to Hitler's and Himmler's belief that, throughout history, Roman Catholic military-religious orders had been tools of the Holy See and as such constituted a threat to the Nazi regime.


title: Teutonic Order

text: Hitler based his German Order on the Teutonic Order, especially the Hochmeister's ceremonial regalia itself even though they abolished the said order.


title: Teutonic Order

text: The converse was true for Polish nationalism (see: Sienkiewicz "The Knights of the Cross"), which used the Teutonic Knights as symbolic shorthand for Germans in general, conflating the two into an easily recognisable image of the hostile. Similar associations were used by Soviet propagandists, such as the Teutonic knight villains in the 1938 Sergei Eisenstein film "Aleksandr Nevskii".


title: Chris O'Donnell

text: Christopher Eugene O'Donnell (born June 26, 1970) is an American actor and former model. He played Charlie Sims in "Scent of a Woman", Chris Reece in "School Ties", D'Artagnan in "The Three Musketeers", Jack Foley in the drama film "Circle of Friends", Dick Grayson/Robin in "Batman Forever" and "Batman & Robin", Jason Brown in Robert Altman's "Cookie's Fortune", Peter Garrett in "Vertical Limit", and Wardell Pomeroy in "Kinsey". O'Donnell stars as special Agent G. Callen on the CBS crime drama television series "", a spin-off of "NCIS".


title: Chris O'Donnell

text: O'Donnell was born in the Chicago suburb of Winnetka, Illinois, the son of William Charles O'Donnell Sr., a general manager of WBBM-AM, and Julie Ann Rohs von Brecht. He is the youngest of seven children, with four sisters and two brothers, and is of German and Irish descent. O'Donnell was raised in a Catholic family and attended Catholic schools. He graduated from Loyola Academy in Wilmette, Illinois in 1988. O'Donnell then attended Boston College and graduated with a Bachelor of Science in marketing in 1992.


title: Chris O'Donnell

text: O'Donnell started his career by appearing in numerous commercials as a teenager, including commercials for Cap'n Crunch cereal and Fruit Roll-Ups snacks, as well as a McDonald's fast food commercial in which he served NBA great Michael Jordan. An early television series role was an appearance on the TV series "Jack and Mike" in 1986. In the early 1990s, he appeared in several films including "Men Don't Leave" (1990), starring Jessica Lange; "Fried Green Tomatoes" (1991), reuniting him with Kathy Bates with whom he appeared with in "Men Don't Leave"; "School Ties" (1992); and "Scent of a Woman" (1992) with Al Pacino; O'Donnell would receive two nominations: one for a Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actor-Motion Picture (which was won by Gene Hackman for "Unforgiven"), and one for a Chicago Film Critics Association Award for Most Promising Actor (which he won). He was also named one of the 12 Promising New Actors of 1992 in John Willis's "Screen World", Vol. 44.


title: Chris O'Donnell

text: After appearing in the film "Blue Sky" (1994), reuniting him with Jessica Lange from "Men Don't Leave", he starred in "Circle of Friends" (1995) with Minnie Driver and "Mad Love" (1995) with Drew Barrymore. O'Donnell then went on to play the character of Dick Grayson/Robin in "Batman Forever", in which Barrymore also made an appearance. He reportedly was part of a field of candidates for the role of Robin that included Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon, Jude Law, Ewan McGregor, Corey Haim, Corey Feldman, Toby Stephens, and Scott Speedman. Casting directors narrowed their choices to O'Donnell and DiCaprio with O'Donnell eventually winning the role. O'Donnell was said to be one of the considerations of 20th Century Fox studios to play the lead role of Jack Dawson in "Titanic" (1997), but that role was ultimately won by DiCaprio.


title: Chris O'Donnell

text: O'Donnell followed with a starring role in 1996's "The Chamber", based on the John Grisham novel. He subsequently reprised his role as Robin in 1997's "Batman & Robin". Although it was a box-office success, the movie was critically panned and O'Donnell attested he believed it didn't turn out well.


title: Chris O'Donnell

text: O'Donnell did not appear in another movie for two years. He was one of the producers choice for the role of James Darrell Edwards III/Agent J in "Men in Black" (1997), but after turning it down because he thought the character would be too similar to his role in "Batman Forever", the role went to Will Smith. The subsuquent films "Cookie's Fortune" (1999) and "The Bachelor" (1999) were moderately successful, while "Vertical Limit" (2000) was a box office hit.


title: Chris O'Donnell

text: Following a four-year hiatus, O'Donnell returned in 2004 with the widely praised "Kinsey". He also appeared in the 2004 episode of "Two and a Half Men" entitled "An Old Flame With A New Wick."


title: Chris O'Donnell

text: O'Donnell took a lead role in the Fox Network television series "Head Cases" in 2005. The show was the first of the fall 2005 season to be canceled, and only two episodes were aired. He was subsequently cast as veterinarian Finn Dandridge on the ABC medical drama "Grey's Anatomy".


title: Chris O'Donnell

text: O'Donnell featured prominently in the TNT miniseries "The Company" as CIA case officer Jack McAuliffe, a character who progressed from spoonfed Yale elitist to jaded, post-Cold War cynic. In 2008 he appeared in "" as the titular character's father Jack Kittredge, and in "Max Payne" as Jason Colvin.


title: Chris O'Donnell

text: Since 2009, O'Donnell has starred in "", a spinoff of "NCIS", as G. Callen, an NCIS Special Agent in charge of the Office of Special Projects Team stationed in Los Angeles. CBS describes Callen as "a chameleon who transforms himself into whomever he needs to be to infiltrate the criminal underworld."


title: Chris O'Donnell

text: O'Donnell married Caroline Fentress in April 1997 at St. Matthew's Cathedral in Washington, D.C. They have five children.


title: Greg Kinnear

text: Gregory Buck Kinnear (born June 17, 1963) is an American actor. He was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his role in "As Good as It Gets" (1997).


title: Greg Kinnear

text: Kinnear has appeared in many popular films, including "Sabrina" (1995), "You've Got Mail" (1998), "Nurse Betty" (2000), "Someone like You" (2001), "We Were Soldiers", "Auto Focus" (both 2002), "Stuck on You" (2003), "Robots" (2005), "Little Miss Sunshine," "Invincible" (both 2006), "Green Zone", "The Last Song" (both 2010), "Heaven Is for Real" (2014), "Misbehaviour" (2020) and television roles, such as "Friends", "Talk Soup", "Modern Family", "House of Cards", "Rake", and the miniseries "The Stand" (2020). Kinnear has portrayed John F. Kennedy in "The Kennedys" (2011), and Joe Biden in "Confirmation" (2016).