Posted on 03/25/2015 5:24:23 AM PDT by maggief
NEW evidence has emerged that the Germanwings Airbus A320 that crashed in southern France yesterday dived for 18 minutes, and not eight as previously thought.
France’s Transport Minister Segolene Royal said this morning that the crew had stopped responding to radio messages at 10.30am, with the plane flying over the Mediterranean sea.
The aircraft crashed into the side of a mountain in the French Alps at 10.48am, suggesting that the plane had descended from 28,000ft to 2,000ft without signalling an emergency.
Ms Royal added that events in the cockpit in the 60 seconds between 10.30am and 10.31am were ‘crucial’ and could shed light on what caused the disaster.
(Excerpt) Read more at scotsman.com ...
This makes sense to me. 18 minutes is a long time. Someone was not paying attention to what the aircraft was doing. Airbus has a record of control issues where the computer wants to do its own thing and of pilots not knowing how to overcome the computer's control of the aircraft.
This sounds like the flight was at the "set it and forget it" phase of the flight. Routine trip, daylight,waypoints already in the system, relax.
Someone was not minding the altimeter, or the altimeter was wrong.
If the crew were overcome by hypoxia, I would think the plane would just continue at 38,000 ft., as there is no other input to tell it otherwise.
Somehow this plane had a downward trajectory, and no one realized it until too late.
I wonder if ground control noticed and tried to hail the aircraft.
The Airbus is going to be called HAL9000 soon.
It tells me that they figured out a way to incapacitate the pilots - poison?
I for one, never saw a plane turned into chaff.
If everything is working, the A320 has visual and aural alarms 60 seconds before hitting terrain. There is no way to miss it. Airbus pilots are trained to respond immediately without verification.
The A320 is capable of climbing at more than 15,000 feet per minute if the crew responds to a terrain warning when traveling at 380 knots. It will water your eyes to see a passenger jet do something like that.
If this aircraft was in one piece when it hit (I am not convinced of that) there is no way the crew was conscious when it hit. This will not be a matter for pilot inattention etc.
Yes.
If they hit going straight down, or have a high energy explosion above they do.
This happened to a United flight I was on in 1987. Chicago to Spokane. We were cruising at 35m’ over ND. We felt a pop in our ears. The captain put the jet in a nose drive for 15 minutes. We leveled out at 10m’. The O2 masks worked in the cockpit, but did not deploy in the main cabin. We made an unscheduled landing in Billings, MT. Myself and 4 others got flights out that same day through Denver and Salt Lake to end up Spokane. The remainder of the passengers spent the night in Billings. They grounded the aircraft, a Boeing 737.
When we came to a halt in front of the terminal in Billings, the pilot came out of the cockpit and we gave him a standing ovation. It made the national news.
At 10:30 the plane was flying normally over the Mediterranean and at 10:48 it crashed into a mountain side? Wait, we are dealing with the French here.
“there is no way the crew was conscious when it hit. This “
Sure there is: They intended to hit.
THe black box will tell the story. If they were conversing calmly they may have not noticed the slow descent. It was night time also right?
Independent:
Jean Louis Bietrix:
“Bits. Just bits. It is horrible to think
that something as large as an aircraft can be reduced to pieces no bigger than
a car door.”
15 minutes ago
Jean Louis Bietrix , a local mountain guide among the first on the scene, has told The Independent of his horror.
“It is incredible. There is not one bit of
that aircraft that has not be exposed to the open air. The terrain is perilous
- very rocky and very steep, a gradient of up to 80 per cent in places. It is
very difficult to describe what must have happened to those on board. They have
ended up in a very wild and lonely place.”
It was daytime, but clouds could have obscured their vision and disoriented the pilots as to what was happening.
But they had to be either misinformed by the system of the readings or doing something else, so that they were not cognizant of the descent.
My question, are Airbus unsafe? While the percentage is obviously low, they do seem to have similar recurring problems and deadly crashes.
I was wondering that. So the pilots took no action. Either because they were incapacitated or it was deliberate. If deliberate seems like they would have flown the plane into the ground. Which leads to another question.
In the event of a cabin depressurization don't oxygen masks drop down immediately. Wouldn't the pilots have time to put them on? If not who put the plane into the decent mode?
Who were the other 25 if there were 150 passangers on board like the Drudge article says?....150 is such a nicely rounded number.
They must copy from each other. One interesting tidbit was that there was a chase aircraft that may have had visual contact.
Both articles get the cruising altitude wrong, but if the plane crashed at 0948, it must have leveled off at a lower altitude after a rapid controlled descent.
The first thing I said to my wife when the crash was reported was that if this is terrorism, authorities will do everything possible to hide the fact.
This morning we learn that the black box is “damaged”. Hmmmm.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYFYJzHzjzY&feature=youtu.be
Aerial footage of Germanwings 4U2595 crash site in French Alps
There is a lot of that going on now.
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