Weird.

30 hours after this tragic plane crash in Europé and no one discuss it.
A passenger plane Airbus 320 crashed in the southern French Alps yesterday. The plane, which is reported to have had 150 people on board, was en route from Barcelona to Düsseldorf.

They hit the ground at 400 knots in to the mountain at about 2000 meters.
Altitude & speed chart of 4U 9525.
The aircraft entered a steep but constant descent for about 8 minutes.
https://twitter.com/AirlineFlyer/status/580326398620934144/photo/1

Early wild guesses:

Cabin depressurized and deliberate rapid descent to get below 10000ft but the Alps got in the way;

Fuel icing causing both engines to fail and that is the glide angle for 400knts, but why no intervention to slow and extend the glide?...;

Mis-programmed autopilot descent to make a landing;

Cockpit windows failure making piloting near impossible...



All just guesses until we hear from news for the flight recorders...

Best wishes / condolences to anyone involved,
Martin

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Why didn't the pilots announced that they changed the height? And why did they not set the autopilot correct?
Now investigators are looking for answers to two mysteries that surround the eight minute long descent.
"The crew may have suffered from lack of oxygen," said aviation safety analyst Hans Kjäll.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/26/world/europe/germanwings-airbus-crash.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=photo-spot-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0

Hmm is it already 2015/03/26 in New York? :)

Many Planes falling Out of The Sky last few years and NO COMM At All from Cockpit. BULLSHAT.

'Experts' Always Saying: Too Busy to COMM. BULLSHAT BULLSHAT BULLSHAT.

All Crews 'Incapacitated' in Some Way? BULLSHAT BULLSHAT BULLSHAT.

The Only Way, ALL OF THESE Incidents can have NO COMM and Incapacitated Crew is:

TERRORISM

And The World's Gubments are Silent, as All Corporate, and 'News'.

'Cause if The 'T' Word 'is' Used, WORLD's Economies would TANK.

Keep 'em Flyin' and Dyin'

For The World's Sake.

Yep.

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May we All have a METAMORPHOSIS. REASON. GOoD JUDGEMENT and LOVE and ORDER!!!!!

Yes, long time for no one to comment on the boards.

Everything now is a guess. Fire, depress, flight deck taken over, engine fail, bad fuel, flight computer fail, and the list goes on. All else I'll note is that AFIK no passenger sent an impending doom message.

Until the FDR and CVR are read out, very little will be known. All that can be said now is it appears to be controlled flight into the ground. That doesn't happen without something else going wrong!

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I'll note is that AFIK no passenger sent an impending doom message

Maybe there is.
Anyway. It's truly a mystery what happened.

At a press conference in Le Bourget, outside Paris a representative of the French aviation safety authority announces, BEA, the investigators were able to obtain information from one of the black boxes.
- We have been able to extract an audio file from the box, we know it is about the ill-fated flight. We will now conduct a detailed analysis of the sounds and the comments we get from the recording.
Probably it will take a few days before investigators can present a first result and a few weeks in order to provide more detailed information.
BEA can not confirm that the second black box is found. It is derived from the French aviation safety authority's press conference. According to the Authority there are yet no explanation whatsoever as to why the accident occurred.

Vernet today. "There was nothing to do. Nothing" said Jean-Louis Bietrix to swedish DN. He is one of the mountain guides who were first on the scene of the disaster in the Alps yesterday.
Jean-Louis Bietrix lower his eyes and becomes silent when he describes what he saw.
- You really need to know that it was an accident scene to understand that it was just that. It looked more like ... a rubbish dump. There was no bit of the plane that was larger than this, he says, holding his hands with a half-meter distance.
- It was obvious that there was no rescue, he says.
The rock wall where the plane crashed according to him is steep, around 70 degrees!

There is no good side to this but at least they found what is needed to determine the cause of the crash and the passengers.

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Bob DeWoody

My motto: Never do today what you can put off until tomorrow as it may not be required. This no longer applies in light of current events.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/26/world/europe/germanwings-airbus-crash.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=first-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news

Germanwings Pilot Was Locked Out of Cockpit Before Crash in France

By NICOLA CLARK and DAN BILEFSKYMARCH 25, 2015

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.

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Investigators eventually determined that the primary cause of that crash was a series of human errors, including deficient maintenance checks on the ground and a failure by the pilots to heed emergency warning signals.

Deficient maintenance checks on the ground are likely.
Pilots work situation with unreasonable working hours are more likely.

If latest reports are correct then they may have had a bird strike on one of the cockpit windows and knock the pilots out or worse caused one to be sucked out the window as with the British Airways accident when the pilot was sucked out the window and the co-pilot had to hang onto his legs till they got the plane down .?

Or was it a pilot gone terrorist and lock one of them out and flew the plane into the mountain ?

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Investigators eventually determined that the primary cause of that crash was a series of human errors, including deficient maintenance checks on the ground and a failure by the pilots to heed emergency warning signals.

Deficient maintenance checks on the ground are likely.
Pilots work situation with unreasonable working hours are more likely.

You speak of Helios Airways Flight 522 not Germanwings.

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Investigators eventually determined that the primary cause of that crash was a series of human errors, including deficient maintenance checks on the ground and a failure by the pilots to heed emergency warning signals.

Deficient maintenance checks on the ground are likely.
Pilots work situation with unreasonable working hours are more likely.

You speak of Helios Airways Flight 522 not Germanwings.

Nope. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helios_Airways_Flight_522
That plane crashed into a mountain on 14 August 2005!
In that case the crew suffered from lack of oxygen.

I'm speaking about 4U 9525, the Germanwings Airbus 320 that crashed in the French Alpes yesterday in to a moutain at 2000 meters with the speed of 400 knots!
In this case we have to wait for the results from the investigators.
That will take months!

I hope it was a medical emergency on the part of the pilot left in the cockpit and not a deliberate crash. Its hard on the families either way, but to think that they were all murdered is just too much.

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If latest reports are correct then they may have had a bird strike on one of the cockpit windows and knock the pilots out or worse caused one to be sucked out the window as with the British Airways accident when the pilot was sucked out the window and the co-pilot had to hang onto his legs till they got the plane down .?

Or was it a pilot gone terrorist and lock one of them out and flew the plane into the mountain ?

If the window failed, the decompression would have opened the door. The plane crash was under the control of the copilot and now the question is why? I suspect until they look into the copilot's personal history we aren't going to know anything more.

Edit; bird strikes don't happen at 38,000 feet but a window failure while very unlikely is possible.

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bird strikes don't happen at 38,000 feet but a window failure while very unlikely is possible.

Bird strike at 38,000 feet:)

Window failure. Why not. It have happend before.
British Airways Flight 5390.
On 10 June 1990 an improperly-installed panel of the windscreen failed, blowing the plane's captain, Tim Lancaster, halfway out of the aircraft, with his body firmly pressed against the window frame.

A tough lesson, but perhaps future doors to pilots' cabin should have a
combination lock on them. Then, authorized personnel could gain entrance
in an emergency.

A tough lesson, but perhaps future doors to pilots' cabin should have a
combination lock on them. Then, authorized personnel could gain entrance
in an emergency.

On the news they said the US requires two people in the cockpit at all times. One of the flight attends is the second person when somebody needs a rest room break. The news said it wasn't clear what the rules are in other countries. Before 911 they had a key hid in the public area but anything that allows the door to be unlocked from the outside while in flight is a security risk.

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The logic favoring absolute security sounds right, Dena. However, from the
standpoint of a passenger (myself), a hijacking would be preferable to
a destroyed plane. Perhaps, the FAA, et. al., need to revisit this.

A tough lesson, but perhaps future doors to pilots' cabin should have a
combination lock on them. Then, authorized personnel could gain entrance
in an emergency.

On the news they said the US requires two people in the cockpit at all times. One of the flight attends is the second person when somebody needs a rest room break. The news said it wasn't clear what the rules are in other countries. Before 911 they had a key hid in the public area but anything that allows the door to be unlocked from the outside while in flight is a security risk.

Yes, and a gun to your head may get the combination or any other "secret" way to open the door. May have to go back to the old days when there was a flight engineer in addition to pilot and co-pilot on the flight deck. The USAF has had some thought on this in crewing ICBM sites.

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