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 ...
But I am curious about one thing. It was reported the plane was 24 years old..had 58,000 flight hours, and 45,000 flights..that's about an average flight of 1 hr 15 minutes...it was basically used for shorts hops...that's 90,000 take-off and landings..I recall when the Aloha Airlines plane came apart in flight..it was the same scenario..it was a puddle jumper..lots of short inter-island hops...which put great stress on the airframe. Does the history/use of this Airbus 320 make some type of systems failure more likely.
18 minutes, not 10, So somebody forged the FlightRadar24 plots?
I don’t think so.
That recorder looks just fine - the cylindrical unit on the left appears undamaged - and that’s where the memory unit is.
Still too much to speculate, though 18 minutes is a loooong time to go without checking instruments, even on auto.
The one thing that makes me doubt terrorism is that they could easily have flown into a city...as opposed to the side of a mountain. If it’s terrorism...you want the maximum impact. They could easily have altered course and crashed into Nice, or Monaco..that would make news..
Thank God you are alive to tell your story!
My question, are Airbus unsafe? While the percentage is obviously low, they do seem to have similar recurring problems and deadly crashes.
...
Probably due to poor piloting skills than anything else.
How a about when 737’s were having rudder problems and falling out of the sky? A 777 crashed in London a few years ago due to ice in the fuel system. A 777 crashed in San Francisco not long ago, probably due to pilot error, but avionics may have played a role. Both Boeing and Airbus make good aircraft. The percentages are very low for something to go wrong.
That usually means broke up in air.
Aerial footage at post #59.
ATC called an “Emergency” for the flight when no response was received from crew and altitude was declining from filed flight plan.
“Or an explosion in the E&E bay under the cockpit floor (with 3 access doors on the outside of the aircraft) could take out a lot of things including the pilots, with the aircraft still flying (albeit not automatically).”
Here’s my scenario: improper maint on the nose gear doors resulted in a catastrophic failure of the doors at 38k, which knocked out the comms, autopilot and fly-by-wire, and put the plane in a nose-down trim. 18 minutes later they impacted the ground.
Or zombies.
It didn’t fall 7 miles in 8 minutes let alone 18 minutes. That’s about 75mph not 400mph.
The only way to do that would be fluttering pieces falling.
It’s not adding up.
And they corrected the 737 and really no problem since. Of course some are pilot error, such as the 777 in San Francisco, compounded by the fire department running over and killing survivors. I’m just saying the number of rather similar Airbus crashes is adding up... Besides, as a state-sponsored manufacturer, will they have transparency on allowing negative info out, of admitting a problem?
Affirmative Dave, I read you !
It didn’t go straight down. It was also going forward.
“The one thing that makes me doubt terrorism is that they could easily have flown into a city...as opposed to the side of a mountain. If it’s terrorism...you want the maximum impact.”
Not really. There was that flight over the water by Canada a few years ago. Pilot simply nosed in.
I think they’d be noticing when the mountains appeared to get closer and closer.
Inside the Black Box
How Flight Data Recorders can live through aircraft crashes.
http://www.autospeed.com/cms/article.html?&title=Inside-the-Black-Box&A=1227
About half way down is a cutaway view of a similar unit.
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