There's a wheel! (lower middle)
Posted on 03/24/2015 9:51:17 AM PDT by Red Badger
FULL TITLE: Search aircraft find the remains of Germanwings Flight 4U 9525 scattered all over an alpine mountainside: Riddle over why pilots didn't send SOS despite taking eight minutes to fall 32,000 feet
The final moments of Germanwings Flight 4U 9525 were shrouded in mystery today after air traffic controllers claimed they received no SOS despite the jet nosediving 32,000ft in just eight minutes.
All 144 passengers and six crew were today presumed dead after the Airbus A320 crashed in a remote region of the French Alps en route from Spain to Germany.
Two babies were among 45 Spanish on board and 16 children from the same school on an exchange trip were among some 100 Germans also feared to have died.
Images from the first rescue helicopters to reach the crash site showed wreckage scattered across hundreds of metres of mountainside, with some debris the size of a car.
Earlier reports quoted aviation sources in France as saying the pilots issued a Mayday distress signal and requested an emergency descent minutes before it hit the ground.
However, civil aviation authorities later denied that air traffic controllers received any such call.
'The aircraft did not itself make a distress call, but it was the combination of the loss of radio contact and the aircraft's descent which led the controller to implement the distress phase,' a spokesman for the French civil aviation authority said.
Germanwings chief executive Thomas Winkelmann said the aircraft began descending at 10.45am, a minute after reaching cruising height of 38,000ft.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
Interesting. I’ve never heard of that, I don’t think.
“Controlled flight into terrain (CFIT) describes an accident in which an airworthy aircraft, under pilot control, is unintentionally flown into the ground, a mountain, water, or an obstacle.[2] The pilots are generally unaware of the danger until it is too late. The term was coined by engineers at Boeing in the late 1970s.[3] Accidents where an aircraft is already damaged and uncontrollable at the time of the collision (also known as uncontrolled flight into terrain) are not considered CFIT.
According to Boeing, CFIT is a leading cause of airplane accidents involving the loss of life, causing over 9,000 deaths since the beginning of the commercial jet age. CFIT was identified as a cause of 25% of USAF Class A Mishaps between 1993 and 2002.”
Source: Wikipedia
Hypoxia, as I have said, when it comes on gradually, is quite insidious.
Hypoxia effects the brain, and because of that, you might not even recognize it is happening. You have to RECOGNIZE the problem before you can deal with the problem, and therein lies the rub.
There's a wheel! (lower middle)
Here is the FAA-speak for a crash:
“Unscheduled landing resulting in collision with terrain.”
I’m a little surprised that this section of the Alps isn’t covered in snow... it is only mid-March.
It sounds so benign.
The OP article stated that they didn’t think it was terrorist related, because the debris field was very localized compared to the Lockerbie (sp?) incident.
But wouldn’t the spread of debris depend upon the altitude at which an explosion would take place along with the ground structures which would either promote a spreading debris field or inhibit spreading?
It looks like the photographer used a wide angle lense which does tend to distort the view. They said the dibris was spread hundreds of meters, but not being metric literate, the discription means nothing to me. However, I spend YEARS living in the Rocky Mountains and what I’m looking at in those photos looks more like MILES to me. And the Alps are much larger than the Rockies.
Please, just stop. You may not know who I am, but I can assure you that you do not know what you are talking about.
You are welcome to your theories, but stop insisting on something that any Airbus pilot (as a matter of fact, and Boeing pilot also) can tell you DOES NOT EXIST. There is no autopilot setting for emergency descent. None. You put up a graphic of a flow, not “an autopilot override for emergency descent.”
No. Because the autopilot software is not part of any network. It is embedded, and inaccessible except with special equipment. It isn’t like you can put a memory stick into it.
Based on what you have heard so far; what do you think happened?
I think that is a wheel. It appears to be a main gear tire. That would have been attached to the wing.
Perhaps that is scorching in that picture as well.
I don’t know if Airbus did equip the A350 with the Automated Descent system, but they were considering it, five years ago.
It is definitely in the Citation X/Sovereign
October 1, 2009
Airbus A350 could be equipped with automatic emergency descent system
By David Kaminski-Morrow @ Flightglobal.com
Airbus is considering equipping the A350 XWB with an automated system that would put the aircraft into an unaided emergency descent if it detected unsafe cabin pressure.
The system would only initiate the descent if the pilots failed to respond to a cautionary alert - potentially indicating that the crew was incapacitated through the effects of oxygen depletion.
Failure to recognise non-pressurisation of a Helios Airways Boeing 737-300 rendered the crew unconscious from hypoxia while en route to Athens four years ago. The jet continued to fly, unattended, at cruising altitude until it crashed through fuel exhaustion.
Airbus insists that it has not committed to installing the system: “It has not been decided yet to fit out the A350 XWB with the ‘auto emergency descent’ - it is a potential system which could be installed but, for the moment, it is under consideration,” it says.
But while the company says it is “too early” to provide details, it has outlined the envisaged mechanism to a delegation from the International Federation of Air Line Pilots’ Associations.
Should the aircraft’s monitoring system detect an unsafe cabin pressure, it would warn the crew via the primary flight display and begin a countdown. The length of time has not been specified.
If the crew did not act to cancel the warning or take positive control of the aircraft, the A350 would perform a side-step manoeuvre, taking it 2.75nm (5km) to the right of the designated airway to avoid conflict. This sidestep would automatically account for any existing lateral offset selected by the crew.
The aircraft would also be put into a rapid descent at maximum operating speed towards flight level 100 - the target altitude for depressurization incidents, at which oxygen masks are no longer necessary - although the twinjet would adjust for minimum altitude and terrain-clearance requirements.
Airbus could potentially provide the system for other types in its range as a retrofit option, although it has yet to confirm this possibility.
http://wrightsquawks.blogspot.com/2009/10/automated-descent-after-pressurisation.html
I am in Budapest today, flying to Paris and then into the states on Thursday. This doesn’t make me calm.
“I think a catastrophic event at 38,000 may have taken out the cockpit”
Someone over at airliners was speculating about a cockpit window failure. While possible, IMO, that’s even more unlikely than hypoxia.
ALTHOUGH, it is/was a 24 year-old aircraft, could that kind of fatigue go unnoticed, especially given the a-check the day before?
I know the A350XB. I have not flown it, although I have friends who have flown it in Toulouse. I am not aware of any airlines that have ordered such a system for their A350XB orders (only Qatar has taken delivery).
Regardless, this was an A320. No automatic emergency descent “setting” or system. None.
There were only high clouds.
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