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Germanwings Crash in French Alps Kills 150; Cockpit Voice Recorder Is Found

DIGNE-LES-BAINS, France — A German jetliner en route from Barcelona, Spain, to Düsseldorf, Germany, plunged from the sky on Tuesday and slammed into the French Alps, killing all 150 people on board.

Helicopters and rescue personnel swarmed into the remote, rugged area in southeastern France after the crash but found no signs of life. Prime Minister Manuel Valls said none of the 144 passengers and six crew members survived.

The authorities and executives of the airline, the budget carrier Germanwings, a subsidiary of Lufthansa, had no immediate explanation for the cause of the crash, which occurred just before 11 a.m. At a news conference Tuesday evening, Heike Birlenbach, the vice president of Lufthansa, said, “At this stage, we consider this to be an accident,” adding that everything else was speculation.

As night fell in the area, officials said they had recovered one of the jet’s so-called black boxes: the cockpit voice recorder, which captures up to two hours of the pilots’ conversations as well as other cockpit noises, including any alarms that would have sounded as the plane descended. A few hours later, they called off the search for the evening.

The plane, an Airbus A320 that carried young people, vacationers and others, crashed after an eight-minute descent from 38,000 feet, the managing director of Germanwings, Thomas Winkelmann, said at a news conference.

When French air traffic controllers lost contact with the plane at 10:53 a.m., it was flying at just 6,000 feet, Mr. Winkelmann said, and it crashed shortly afterward. The terrain in that area rises to an elevation of more than 6,000 feet.

Security personnel in Digne-les-Bains, a town close to the crash site, described a scene of almost unimaginable wreckage, with even the plane’s metal structures smashed into countless pieces.

“The airplane had completely disintegrated,” Capt. Benoit Zeisser, head of the center of operations and information for the local police in Digne-les-Bains, said late Tuesday. “There is nothing left; the area of the crash is huge.”

As emergency crews combed France’s Alpes-de-Haute-Provence department, Mr. Valls announced a judicial investigation into the crash. Many questions remained, including whether the pilots were in control of the aircraft during the descent and what would have caused a plane with an experienced pilot and solid safety record to crash in largely clear and cloudless weather.

The passengers included Germans, Spaniards, Turks and Australians, and among them was a class of 16 German high school students and two teachers who were returning from a study program near Barcelona. Some of their parents gathered at the airport in Düsseldorf, frantically waiting for news.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/25/world ... crash.html

Germanwings Pilot Was Locked Out of Cockpit Before Crash in France

PARIS — As officials struggled Wednesday to explain why a jet with 150 people on board crashed in relatively clear skies, an investigator said evidence from a cockpit voice recorder indicated one pilot left the cockpit before the plane’s descent and was unable to get back in.

A senior military official involved in the investigation described “very smooth, very cool” conversation between the pilots during the early part of the flight from Barcelona to Düsseldorf. Then the audio indicated that one of the pilots left the cockpit and could not re-enter.

“The guy outside is knocking lightly on the door and there is no answer,” the investigator said. “And then he hits the door stronger and no answer. There is never an answer.”

He said, “You can hear he is trying to smash the door down.”

While the audio seemed to give some insight into the circumstances leading up to the Germanwings crash, it also left many questions unanswered.

"We don’t know yet the reason why one of the guys went out,” said the official, who requested anonymity because the investigation is continuing. "But what is sure is that at the very end of the flight, the other pilot is alone and does not open the door."

The data from the voice recorder seems only to deepen the mystery surrounding the crash and provides no indication of the condition or activity of the pilot who remained in the cockpit. The descent from 38,000 feet over about 10 minutes was alarming but still gradual enough to indicate that the twin-engine Airbus A320 had not been damaged catastrophically . At no point during the descent was there any communication from the cockpit to air traffic controllers or any other signal of an emergency.

When the plane plowed into craggy mountains northeast of Nice, it was traveling with enough speed that it was all but pulverized, killing the 144 passengers and crew of six and leaving behind almost no apparent clues about what caused the crash.

The French aviation authorities have made public very little, officially, about the nature of the information that has been recovered from the audio recording, and it was not clear whether it was partial or complete. France’s Bureau of Investigations and Analyses confirmed only that human voices and other cockpit sounds had been detected and would be subjected to detailed analysis.

Asked about the new evidence revealed in the cockpit recordings, Martine del Bono, a bureau spokeswoman, declined to comment.

Or the pilot on deck suffered a massive MCI, statistically more likely by a very large magnitude

bigskygal wrote:This is where you post about blind squirrels and nuts, I believe.

Today, as a direct result of 9/11, cockpit doors are required to be armoured and locked throughout the flight, with video cameras scanning the area outside them for the pilots to be able to judge risk. Today, no physical threats to passengers or cabin crew will cause the pilots to accede to any demands from would-be hijackers, or to emerge from the flightdeck or allow anyone into it. They just fly the aircraft to the nearest diversion and land. Whatever ills befall those in the cabin, the primary job of the pilots becomes one of ensuring that the aircraft cannot be commandeered for any purpose determined by the hijackers. That armoured door and the changed cabin drills are the most significant product of 9/11.

Today, as a direct result of 9/11, cockpit doors are required to be armoured and locked throughout the flight, with video cameras scanning the area outside them for the pilots to be able to judge risk.

Germanwings Co-Pilot Deliberately Crashed Airbus Jet, French Prosecutor Says

PARIS — The chief Marseille prosecutor handling the investigation into the crash of a Germanwings jetliner said on Thursday that evidence from the cockpit voice recorder indicated that the co-pilot had deliberately locked the captain out of the cockpit and steered the plane into its fatal descent.

“At this moment, in light of investigation, the interpretation we can give at this time is that the co-pilot through voluntary abstention refused to open the door of the cockpit to the commander, and activated the button that commands the loss of altitude,” the prosecutor, Brice Robin, said.

He said it appeared that the co-pilot’s intention had been “to destroy the aircraft.” He said that the voice recorder showed that the co-pilot had been breathing until before the moment of impact, suggesting that he was conscious and deliberate in his actions.[I watched the press conference, and not only did he say that he was breathing, but that right up until the impact he was "breathing normally'] He said that his inquiry had shown that the crash was intentional.

The revelation that one of the pilots of the jetliner was locked out of the cockpit before it crashed raised new and troubling questions on Thursday, as search teams continued to scour the rugged terrain of the French Alps for clues that could shed light on what happened.

The flight, an Airbus A320 operated by the budget carrier Germanwings, was traveling to Düsseldorf, Germany, from Barcelona, Spain, on Tuesday morning when it descended and slammed into the French Alps, killing the 144 passengers and six crew members on board.

The prosecutor said that the authorities had a full transcript of the final 30 minutes of the voice recorder.

“During the first 20 minutes, the pilots talk normally,” he said, saying they spoke in a “cheerful” and “courteous” way. “There is nothing abnormal happening,” he said.

The prosecutor said the transcript showed that the captain was preparing a briefing for landing in Düsseldorf. The co-pilot’s answer, the prosecutor said, was “laconic.”

The commanding pilot then asked the co-pilot to take over, and the noise of a seat backing up and a door closing could be heard.

“At this stage, the co-pilot is in control, alone,” the prosecutor said. “It is when he is alone that the co-pilot manipulates the flight monitoring system to activate the decent of the plane.” The prosecutor said that this action could only have been “voluntary.”

“You can hear the commanding pilot ask for access to the cockpit several times,” the prosecutor said. “He identifies himself, but the co-pilot does not provide any answer.”

“You can hear human breathing in the cockpit up until the moment of impact,” the prosecutor said. “The pilot was therefore alive.”

Stefan Schaffrath, an Airbus spokesman, said on Thursday that in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the United States, Airbus had upgraded the reinforcements of cockpit doors on its planes in compliance with international regulations.

According to an Airbus video describing the operations of locking the cockpit door, it is locked by default when closed. But when a pilot wants to lock the cockpit door to bar access to someone outside, he or she can move the toggle to a position marked “locked,” which illuminates a red light on a numeric code pad outside. That disables the door, keypad and the door buzzer for five minutes.

While these functions are disabled, the video shows, the only way to make contact with the crew is via an intercom. The doors can then only be opened if someone inside overrides the lock command by moving and holding the toggle switch to the “unlock” position.

In someone outside the cockpit suspects the pilot is incapacitated, that person would normally first try to establish contact via the intercom or by activating a buzzer. If those efforts were unsuccessful, the video shows, a crew member outside the cockpit would need to enter an emergency code on the keypad.

The code activates a loud buzzer and flashing light on the cockpit control panel, and it sets off a timer that unlocks the door 30 seconds later. The person outside has five seconds to enter before the door locks again.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/27/world ... crash.html

This is where you post about blind squirrels and nuts, I believe.

"He who chirps last chirps best"- Johnathan Swift

If someone outside the cockpit suspects the pilot is incapacitated, that person would normally first try to establish contact via the intercom or by activating a buzzer. If those efforts were unsuccessful, the video shows, a crew member outside the cockpit would need to enter an emergency code on the keypad.

The code activates a loud buzzer and flashing light on the cockpit control panel, and it sets off a timer that unlocks the door 30 seconds later. The person outside has five seconds to enter before the door locks again.