Hi airtren,
Originally Posted by airtren
You've mentioned "documentation". But "documentation" in French is feminine, therefore it is replaced by the pronoun "elle", not "il", so it's not that.
Don't be so short sighted. I mentioned that it may be a "part of the documentation" (generic class), because maybe you didn't noticed, but there is no mention of any procedure applied by the pilots and we know that there was no ECAM procedure until later. This could also explain why the captain was called back when the PNF was looking for "it".
The gender of the word (for "it") is certainly not ruling out such hypothesis; in fact, there is plenty of words that could fit: "classeur", "manuel".... he could meant also "ce putain de truc/machin/bordel..."