Airbus A320 crash in Southern France

a reply to: earthling42

So can the Boeing door IIRC, yet crews on both have been locked out of the cockpit until they were on the ground.

a reply to: earthling42

Interesting video. So the remaining pilot would have to be awake to keep engaging the lock door toggle. Otherwise the Captain would have been able to reenter using the emergency procedure.

ETA. I will not accept that the door malfunctions at the same time the co-pilot has a heart attack.

P

originally posted by: earthling42
a reply to: Zaphod58

The door can be opened through an emergency procedure, unless the door is locked deliberately.

Dang. That wouldn't seem to bode well.

But, as has been proven in other accidents - it can be a series of small missteps or ignoring simple rules that can have huge consequences and lead to catastrophe.

However...that coupled with lack of info or comment regarding the co-pilot seems more than curious.

a reply to: kosmicjack

They call it an accident chain. Break any link and it never happens.

When the pilot felt the nose go down he may have panicked and forgot the procedure to open it.

a reply to: Zaphod58

Aviate, navigate, communicate...THEN get up and let the other pilot in the cockpit.

If *IF* the pilot in control was struggling with a critical problem, stepping away from the controls to open the door would likely be pretty far down the "holy crap" list of things to do.

a reply to: Leonidas

Exactly.

If a window broke in the cockpit and there was a pressure variation between the cabin and cockpit wouldn't this make it very difficult to get the door open?

Also on the point of flight recorders, in this day and age of communications technology would it not be possible for the flight data to be transmitted in real time to a remote blackbox/server?

a reply to: kosmicjack

They have tried to establish contact with the aircraft when it started to descend, without success, there was no response.
A minute after the last contact the aircraft started to descent, it has all the signs of a pilot suicide but i agree with Zaphod that we should wait until it is proven wrong or confirmed by the investigation team itself.
He is right that it won't be the first time that a pilot is locked out of the cockpit, but it would be quite a coincidence that not only the remaining pilot is somehow incapacitated while also the aircraft starts to descent for no reason with more than 3000 feet per minute.

a reply to: oddnutz

That would be heard and mentioned, bear in mind that the window consists of layers of glass, it does not suddenly break, a crack in one layer maybe, but that is not an acute problem.

originally posted by: earthling42
it has all the signs of a pilot suicide

or it could that the pilot left the cockpit to use the facilities and the co-pilot had a heart attack or some other event that that incapacitated him.

I read a story earlier in the year about a guy in his 50s that was driving down the street , head a heart attack and because of that crashed into a crowd of people and killed multiple people. Does that have all the signs of driver suicide?

Their simply isn't enough info yet to say it has all the signs of anything.

Hopefully it will be stated whether or not the aircraft had the door and electronic controls depicted in the posted video.

If so, then whether anything about the emergency unlocking sequence can be heard on the recording. (tones and multiple attempts)

Reports suggest it wasn't a decompression scenario. That it happened as a pilot had been locked out adds to the speculation.

www.theguardian.com...

Aviation experts have been puzzled as to why the plane failed to respond to calls from air traffic control and why the pilots did not send out a distress signal as the plane dropped steadily for more than eight minutes before ploughing into a mountain ravine.

Jouty said it was too early to give details of the cockpit recording. However, he said the information investigators had put together suggested the plane had not exploded and did not suffer a “classic decompression situation”.

Investigators refused to say more about what the cockpit recording contained.

“We have had this for a few minutes and we cannot say who is speaking. It takes time to understand these things. It’s too soon to draw conclusions about what happened,” Jouty said.

Investigators say the last recorded message from the plane came at 10.30am local time, when air traffic control at Aix-en-Provence responded to the crew’s request for permission to continue its route.

“A little while afterwards, the aircraft started a descent that it continued right up to impact just under 10 minutes later,” Jouty said.

“We lost a radar signal from the aircraft extremely close to the site of impact. At which point the aircraft was at 6000ft. The radar followed the plane to just before impact.”

He added investigators needed to explain why the plane continued to descend and did not respond to calls from air traffic control.

“We had some difficult to read it, but to our relief we have succeeded in extracting an information file, an audio file, that we can use. Now we have to work on the audio file to understand the sounds and voices that can be heard.”

Asked about the aircraft’s apparently controlled descent before it crashed, he added: “The path is compatible with the plane being controlled by pilots, except it’s hard to imagine that a pilot would send an aircraft into a mountain, and it’s compatible with an autopilot.”

An unnamed investigator told the respected US newspaper: ‘The guy outside is knocking lightly on the door and there is no answer.

‘And then he hits the door stronger and no answer. There is never an answer. You can hear he is trying to smash the door down.’

The claim will inevitably lead to speculation that the crash was deliberate – either caused by a suicidal pilot or as a result of terrorist activity.

However, the lack of a response by the crew member at the controls might also indicate he had passed out or had become incapacitated in some way.

The recording so far provides no indication of the condition or activity of the pilot who remained in the cockpit.

Intriguingly, neither pilot on board the Airbus A320 flight has been named, nor any details of their age or nationality released by Germanwings.

The airline’s chief executive, Thomas Winkelmann, has said one of the pilots had more than ten years’ experience, including more than 6,000 hours on A320s.

The evidence is understood to come from a cockpit voice recorder which is currently being analysed by accident investigators in Le Bourget, near Paris.

Read more: www.dailymail.co.uk...

The report said controllers tried three times on an assigned radio frequency to contact the pilots before switching to international emergency channels.

Solving the puzzle: A spokesman for the BEA, France's accident investigation office, confirmed yesterday that voices could be heard on the damaged voice recorder, which covered the flight 'from departure to crash'

No one answered and a French Mirage fighter jet was scrambled.

Remi Jouty, the technical director of the French air accident bureau, said the final message from the plane was ‘routine’, confirming its trajectory. One minute later, that trajectory began descending.

A spokesman for the BEA would not comment on the Times's revelations tonight.

Read more: www.dailymail.co.uk...

originally posted by: earthling42
it has all the signs of a pilot suicide

Just feel the need to say that it should not be called suicide, it's not, it's murder.
I have little problem with people ending their own lives (however sad), but when you take people with you it's murder and should be called so. If this copilot deliberately crashed this plane, they are not a victim of suicide, they are a mass murderer.

It's still early though, everything I have seen so far is leading me to think they failed to follow procedure and the copilot was alone in a locked cockpit, and likely had a medical a issue.

Perhaps an electronic /mechanical cause of the cabin door being locked unless deliberately jammed.

theflyingengineer.com...

DOORS
If there is any conflicting information, your FCOM shall be the overriding reference.

Please read the footnote at the end of this page.

Q1. On ECAM DOOR / OXY page, what does the SLIDE label indicate?

A1. The SLIDE label appears in white, when the slide is armed.

Q2. How will you know if a slide is disarmed on any cabin door?

A2. Each passenger door has :

‐-> One warning light to show whether the escape slide is ARMED or DISARMED

–> ECAM DOOR / OXY page, the SLIDE label appears in white.

Q3. How will you know if a door is open? How is it indicated on the DOOR / OXY page?

A3. On ECAM DOOR / OXY page, the DOOR symbol appears :-

–> Green : The door is closed and locked

–> Amber : The door is not locked.

Correspondingly, the DOOR indication appears in amber, when the door is not locked.

Q4. How many single-lane slide-rafts on each IndiGo aircraft?

A4. Nos. 4.

Q5. How many Dual-Lane Slide-rafts on each IndiGo aircraft?

A5. Nos. 2.

Q6. Can cargo doors be still operated if Yellow Hydraulic electric pump has failed? How?

A6. Yes. If the yellow system’s electric pump fails, crewmen can use a hand pump to pressurize the system. This hand pump is on the hydraulic maintenance panel.

Q7. If a cabin door is closed & armed, can it be opened from outside? In that case, will slide deploy?

A7. Yes, they can be operated from inside or outside the aircraft. Opening the door from the outside disarms the door and the escape slide.

Q8. When will CABIN PRESSURE warning light on passenger door, get illuminated?

A8. The CABIN PRESSURE warning light on the passenger door illuminates when :-

–> Both engines stopped and the Slides are disarmed and the Cabin Differential Pressure is above 2.5 Hpa.

Q9. When will SLIDE ARMED warning light on passenger door, get illuminated?

A9. The SLIDE ARMED warning light illuminates White if Control Handle is operated while the Slide is armed.

The timeline is changing:

www.independent.co.uk...
Evidence emerged today that the unexplained, gradual dive to destruction of Germanwings Flight 9525 took at least 18 minutes, not eight. ....For the next 17 minutes, it shed around 1,000 feet of height a minute – a gradual glide downwards rather than a dive.

This makes the failure of the crew to communicate even more mysterious.

a reply to: theabsolutetruth

That's a passenger door, not the cockpit door.

All these plane crashes has me wondering about straining relationships between the EU and surrounding areas. I think that these plans between the EU and the world are falling apart, and this is the punishment for that. I'm a strong believer in sept 23rd conspiracy, and I think this shows the negotiations that the powers that be are having are starting to have to rush and the EU is having second thoughts and might want to be independent, and this is the others response showing that they have no choice and must comply

I don't buy the decompression theory - even if a Window had blown out in the cockpit or whatever, you don't lose conciousness straight away and have quite a long time to don your mask and be alright.

According to Airbus - link here - even at 38,000 feet, you can have almost a minute before passing out. There have even been cases of windows blowing out before (one almost sucked a pilot out at 18,000 ft) - and the plane has landed perfectly safely.

EDIT: Also, if the cockpit had decompressed, the Autopilot should still have flown the plane normally. Take the Helios Flight 522 - everyone bar a flight attendant incapacitated yet it carried on and even entered a holding pattern for it's destination until it ran out of fuel.

a reply to: costco

"All these plane crashes"? Which ones? This is the first major one in Europe for years on an aircraft with an almost perfect safety record.

It's a plane crash, not everything is some Machiavellian conspiracy.

a reply to: Rocker2013

I wonder if someone could calculate the chances that just at THE MOMENT the pilot gets up to go to the bathroom, the co-pilot somehow locks the door from inside so that it is not unable to be opened from the outside (as discussed tonight on all the news channels by seasoned pilots) and THEN the copilot conveniently has a heart attack.

Really?

I mean, I guess strange things happen all of the time--but usually the most simple explanation is the right explanation and there is nothing simple about the scenario you present here.