Posted on 03/26/2015 5:21:36 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
The co-pilot of Germanwings Flight 9525 appears to have deliberately crashed the plane after he was left alone in the cockpit, according to a French prosecutor.
The captain was intentionally locked outside minutes before the A320 crashed into an alpine mountain ridge, French Prosecutor Brice Robin said Thursday. Co-pilot Andreas Lubitz, a 28-year-old German national, was silent throughout the plane’s descent and was alive at the point of impact, according to the prosecutor.
Mr. Robin’s conclusions are drawn from the plane’s cockpit voice recorder, recovered at the crash site in the French Alps late Tuesday and analyzed by French accident investigators on Wednesday.
The recording contains screams believed to be from passengers, once they recognized the plane was crashing.
Investigators are now exploring why Flight 9525 went into its unauthorized descent from its 38,000-foot cruising altitude with one crew member absent. The descent led to the crash about 10 minutes later.
French air accident investigators said on Wednesday they extracted information from the jet’s cockpit voice recorder. The recording contained voices and other sounds, said Rémi Jouty, director of France’s aviation accident investigation office, which is leading the probe. He added that there was no explanation yet for why the plane went down.
Germanwings, the low-fare unit of Deutsche Lufthansa AG, hasn’t disclosed the identity of the pilots....
(Excerpt) Read more at wsj.com ...
Or his religion?
If so, you can be certain the enemedia will do their utmost to hide the fact.
OK, this is a stretch - Imagine the co-pilot frozen in a position with his hand weighted against the toggle, unable to lift his arm, perhaps only being able to use some upper body motion (limited by seat belt) - or - completely incapacited because he was stroking out.
Perhaps the airlines will consider modifying the safety devise to accept a sequence of codes to over-ride that toggle for this kind of emergency, where two or more crew members have separate codes that must be entered in a rank sequence to break the security lock triggered by the cockpit's toggle.
My impression is the authorities are already aware of his faith leanings but refuse to release that information at this point.
If there is any truth to the alleged potential attack as the blog poster stated, the end could have been horrendous (but not discounting the horror of 149 innocents plummeting to their deaths). Flight path appears to have flown right over the string of plants, and might have significance considering the flight veered off normal flight path and into the mountains.
I searched the web about threats to French nuclear plants, found nothing.
I also think that the authorities have most of the picture they need and are just clarifying things. The French and German governments definitely got a lesson from Malaysia’s poor handling of their last incidents.
“If the co-pilot suffered a stroke”
The co-pilot had to be awake to keep re-securing the door to prevent the code from working.
Correct.
The only way (pre-tape of the door banging) this could have been an accident in the first place would have been if they mis-entered the destination into the autopilot and somehow didn’t hear the ground avoidance alerts (”PULL UP!” Buzzz!) until it was too late.
That theory is obviously now bogus given the input into the system and the locked door/banging/etc.
It has three positions: Normal, Unlock, and Lock.
To unlock the door, a pilot moves the switch to Unlock. In an emergency, the cabin crew can enter a secret code (easily extracted by any competent jihadi), which causes the door to unlock. However, if the pilots suspect trouble, they can move the switch to Lock. That disables the unlock code for the next five minutes to twenty minutes (programmable). The unlock code sounds an alarm first, reminding the pilots to renew their veto on entry. Of course, if they are incapacitated, that won't happen, and the door will unlock.
A training video is the top Google search result.
is it even possible that after the pilot opened the door to exit the cockpit, one of the passengers forced himself in and locked the door to take down that plane? Maybe the breathing wasn’t from the co-pilot, but from that someone else?
The criminal part of the investigation should give us more information.
Yeah, I agree that he may very well be gay. I just don’t think that there’s a big epidemic of gay people going out as mass murders!
There would have been sounds on the recording indicating a struggle or something incapacitating the co-pilot then.
Thanks, I’m aware of the functions thanks to other posters.
What I meant was, where is it located, how is it set, etc. Concierge engineering and the like, or not.
This all plays into how easy it is - or is not - to use, especially while seated in either seat.
It is a frequent subject in accident investigation - where are XXXX and could the person get it, or make a mistake hitting it, etc.
Lubitz was identified as a German citizen and Mr Robin said he was not known to terrorism links or extremist links, but the prosecutor said he was expecting more information from the German authorities. Mr Robin added his religion was "unknown". Telegraph
More:
The 27-year-old's parents’ neighbours in the affluent suburb on the edge of Montabaur all spoke of a polite, if not particularly gregarious, man. Johannes Rossbach, 23, who lives two doors away from Lubitz, said he would regularly see the pilot jogging through the neighbourhood's quiet streets.Mr Rossbach said: "He was very polite. He would always say hello and goodbye. There certainly seemed nothing out of the ordinary about him."
He added: "I didn't realise he was a pilot until I heard it yesterday. And today's news is absolutely shocking. I can't believe someone like that would kill 149 other people. It's something that absolutely needs investigating and proving before we can believe it."
Certainly NOT 18 minutes.
Daily Mail reporting something found on his computer but it is not a suicide note.
bump
"Daily Mail reporting something found on his computer but it is not a suicide note. - Daisy12
Thank you.
"Police investigating the Germanwings crash said tonight they had made a 'significant discovery' at the home of pilot Andreas Lubitz, who deliberately ploughed the Airbus A320 into the French Alps.Officers refused to reveal details of the potential breakthrough but said it was not a suicide note.
Speaking outside the flat on the outskirts of Dusseldorf, police said they had 'found something' that would now be taken for tests, adding it may be a 'clue' as to what happened to the doomed jet.
German detectives were also pictured carrying evidence from a £400,000 home in Montabaur, a town 40 miles from Bonn, that Lubitz is believed to have shared with his parents.
The 28-year-old is understood to have split his time between the two addresses.
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