Airbus A320 Crashes in Alps

neocon said:
Why was the plane descending?
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The whole point of the "We flew down the wrong Valley" hypothesis is that, for whatever reason, the Pilot (Might have) thought he was somewhere else.

The problem here (or at least one of them) is that people are going collective nuts trying to work out what might have happened when we simply do not yet have enough data to work out what did happen.

Air crashes are rare, yet they are always spectacular and almost always involve prompt loss of life for non-insignificant numbers of people.

(There is also the Public transit "Gestalt" effect to consider)
 
Surely the flight computer won't normally allow the plane to descend that much without prompt. The pilot must have actively decided to do that. He would have gotten ground proximity warnings too. Mistakingly setting up the computer to land the plane or purposely.
 
A worrying article has just appeared on NYTimes stating that 'one of the pilots was locked out of the cabin' before the aircraft crashed.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/26/world/europe/germanwings-airbus-crash.html

From the article:

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.
 
b0redj0rd said:
A worrying article has just appeared on NYTimes stating that 'one of the pilots was locked out of the cabin' before the aircraft crashed.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/26/world/europe/germanwings-airbus-crash.html

From the article:

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.
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If true - Not good.
 
AFAIK an incapacitated pilot would not result in a descent and and incapacitated pilot would not be able to keep the door locked - it had to have been done deliberately.

Here is how an Airbus secure cabin door works (5 minutes long) -

 
philip2009 said:
AFAIK an incapacitated pilot would not result in a descent and and incapacitated pilot would not be able to keep the door locked - it had to have been done deliberately.

Here is how an Airbus secure cabin door works (5 minutes long)
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If that is how this Airbus was, then surely there would have to be an active person in the cockpit over-riding the open request by flicking the switch to lock?
 
If this is true it must have been really desperate on that aircraft. Time to rethink the locked door policy perhaps.
 
The whole door locked isn't too much of a surprise as I can imagine the protocol on when the cockpit door must be locked is extremely strict since 9-11.

However as others have said the whole decent is strange, my first thought was did the pilot have a heart attack? But how would that then cause the descent plus also don't large planes like this have a flight engineer in the cockpit? If so where was he and if inside the cockpit that pretty much destroys my heart-attack guess!??
 
No way that was an accident. Get to cruising altitude, one of the two pilots goes to the loo, other one locks him out and proceeds to fly it into the ground.

The only question is whether it was terrorism, or a particularly selfish suicide.
 
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