Posted on 03/25/2015 2:38:20 AM PDT by Reaganite Republican
The Airbus operated by Lufthansa's budget airline 'GermanWings' that crashed in the French Alps yesterday made no radio contact whatsoever for the entire 8 minutes was roaring straight into the mountains (from 32,000 ft)... add to that the fact that no apparent effort was made to override computer controls, the German pilots' experience, the airline's perfect safety record... you can see why the other pilots would now like an explanation before they drag another 150 people to a horrific death.
The pilots were likely either unconscious, bound, or dead- those are pretty much the only logical conclusions.
If it was the A320 fly-by-wire computer controls issue, they could have over-rode it with manual controls at some point in the crisis.
The plane made a controlled descent at full speed into a mountain while issuing no distress signal- does that sound like mechanical failure to you?
we hope
Pilot rules in distress situations
Aviate
Navigate
Communicate
Hypoxia(sp)?
It certainly looks like a terror attack. If they could have, the pilots would have had eight minutes to communicate their distress before the crash, but they didn’t.
Of course, yesterday our government immediately declared it was not a terror attack. This always looks suspicious, when there had been no investigation of the wreckage.
This tells me the crew tried to initiate an emergency descent, but lost consciousness before completing the emergency descent procedure. As such, the plane appear to have gone into a "normal" descent--a descent that resulted in a controlled flight into terrain (CFIT) crash.
As a very experienced Airbus captain, I can assure you that the Airbus is easy to override. Instantly. The automation in an A320 is at a lower level than a B787, and both Boeing and Airbus make manual overrides as simple as move a switch of pushing a button (which in the case of A320 is right by your thumb).
As for your link, every Airbus pilot knows that air show crash was not caused by a failure of the automation, but the foolishness of the man at the controls, depending on an automatic feature he had turned off. All he ever had to do to recover was move the thurst levers like any pilot would.
The first two steps in an emergency descent are, don oxygen at 100%, then set the autopilot to descend to 10,000 feet or higher for terrain.
The theory you mentioned would not explain how it descended to 6,500. Depressurization on an Airbus is not subtle, believe me.
Even passengers with their cell phones... no one sent a message?
Perhaps the food/drink that the crew was given was drugged. Once they all were unconscious the plane began to descend as the autopilot may not have been initiated yet.
It could happen.
This was the European equivalent of a Spirit Air flight from Miami to Minneapolis crashing in the Ozarks. There’s basically no flight less likely to have had any high value targets on the ground or aboard. It would fit into a terror plan only if they could repeat it often enough to stop all flying.
So you’re saying that since it was a controlled descent, that would indicate that the pilots had the wherewithal (oxygen in case of depressurization) to initiate such a descent. And if they had the wherewithal to initiate the descent, why didn’t the descent stop at 10,000 feet or whatever altitude was necessary to clear the mountains.
Flight 93 may have been destined for a major building in Washington, D.C, but the passengers rushed the cockpit or something - remember: ‘Let’s roll!’
Because they received cell calls from family informing them about the other 2 planes going into the WTC in New York, the (some) passengers made a brave decision that their plane was not going to crash into anything significant.
They really weren't far enough out of Barcelona to have taken the time to eat anything.
Thought I saw a headline fairly early on stating our White House had determined no apparent connection to terrorism so we’re okay in that regard.
They may have eaten or drank before getting on the plane.
Exactly. A controlled descent could be on autopilot or hand flown. If on autopilot, it would stop at 10,000. That means the automation was off if the crew was unconscious. That makes no sense.
I think there are only a few explanations:
1). Someone in control that wanted this to happen.
2). A fire and/or smoke at altitude, that incapacitated the crew AND the automation (electrical fire is a frightening scenario).
3). Structural failure at altitude, disabling the crew and automation (bomb or airframe breach in the nose).
I think #3 is the most likely now, but we may never know because of the more political way of accident investigation since TWA 800.
Are there eye witness reports? I admit I haven’t been following this story extremely closely and sometimes eyewitness reports are unreliable. Whether or not the jet flew intact into the mountain or whether it broke up prior to impact would reveal a lot.
All infidels are HVTs to a Muzzie.
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