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 ...
Here’s another one..”passengers experienced injuries consistent with rapid deceleration”.
They’ll be lucky to get a viable data recorder out of that debris field.
Parts of PanAm 103 were found 60 miles away.
If the flight path featured on this news page is accurate, then the plane was not yet off course - it was about to take a northward path to Germany.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/germanwings-a320-plane-crashes-in-southern-france-1427195298
But I am not sure of any of the information which we are being given.
I am also highly suspicious of the disappearance of one Malaysian airliner, the unexplained shooting down of another (Putin’s rebels? No proof, no full story?), and the sudden crash of a third over Indonesia.
Do you think the inputs from the aircraft’s computer to the crew show a normal ascent when the plane was really descending?
Could the crew see they were actually descending, or could clouds have obscured the view, and thus, no reference points?
Could the crew have been distracted and did not notice the autopilot was malfunctioning?
“They’ll be lucky to get a viable data recorder out of that debris field.”
There are several tests that make up the crash-survival sequence:
•Crash impact - Researchers shoot the CSMU down an air cannon to create an impact of 3,400 Gs (1 G is the force of Earth’s gravity, which determines how much something weighs). At 3,400 Gs, the CSMU hits an aluminum honeycomb target at a force equal to 3,400 times its weight. This impact force is equal to or in excess of what a recorder might experience in an actual crash.
•Pin drop - To test the unit’s penetration resistance, researchers drop a 500-pound (227-kilogram) weight with a 0.25-inch (0.64-centimeter) steel pin protruding from the bottom onto the CSMU from a height of 10 feet (3 meters). This pin, with 500 pounds behind it, impacts the CSMU cylinder’s most vulnerable axis.
•Static crush - For five minutes, researchers apply 5,000 pounds per square-inch (psi) of crush force to each of the unit’s six major axis points.
•Fire test - Researchers place the unit into a propane-source fireball, cooking it using three burners. The unit sits inside the fire at 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit (1,100 Celsius) for one hour. The FAA requires that all solid-state recorders be able to survive at least one hour at this temperature.
•Deep-sea submersion - The CSMU is placed into a pressurized tank of salt water for 24 hours.
•Salt-water submersion - The CSMU must survive in a salt water tank for 30 days.
•Fluid immersion - Various CSMU components are placed into a variety of aviation fluids, including jet fuel, lubricants and fire-extinguisher chemicals.
http://science.howstuffworks.com/transport/flight/modern/black-box5.htm
RIP all souls lost today.
Did they do the “ 100% grade granite rockface at 435 knts” test. I know that FDRs are rugged and the storage media is well protected, but that sudden stop could of well exceeded 3400g.
“Did they do the “ 100% grade granite rockface at 435 knts” test. I know that FDRs are rugged and the storage media is well protected, but that sudden stop could of well exceeded 3400g.”
1. In a crash, there is some ‘cushion’ to the impact as the FDR is slowed as the plane hits the granite so the FDR does not impact the granite at the speed just before impact.
2. The CSMU is encased in an aluminum shell inside the SS box thus giving another level of energy dissipation before the CSMU ‘impacts’.
So, the ‘sudden stop against granite’ that you mention does not apply the the CMSU, the only component of the black box that is required to survive the crash.
There are backup instruments in case of failures. There is very little chance the crew thought they were climbing.
Yes, that makes sense - but then one wonders why there was no SOS call.
An airframe failure that killed the crew would be quick.
Wed. morning’s first presser:
After steep descent (3,500 ft/min), it appears pilot leveled off at 6,500 feet for last 41 sec before impact
The Hypoxia theory is getting stronger.
Indeed, Rest In Peace ...
That makes it less likely. Hypoxia does not explain the descent. All pilot hypoxia events in the last generation have resulted in fuel starvation at altitude.
Go back to you emergency descent flow. See the first step listed sets 10,000 feet? That is standard Airbus procedure. How did it descend to 6,500?
Fire and smoke would be far likelier because it could have disabled the automation and the crew.
Catastrophic failure of the aircraft bulkhead/deck plates from the cockpit into the nose wheel compartment could ruin your whole day. Ripping out control wires, disconnecting the pilots from being in control to just being passengers....................
The flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder are very tough, engineered to withstand crash conditions. Even if the outsides are totally smashed, the disks are usually safe and can be removed, put in a working unit and analyzed..............
The pre-crash sure sounds weird!
Looks like I was right about the autopilot descent.
Looks like we BOTH wrong about why....
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