Posted on 03/26/2015 6:30:57 AM PDT by COUNTrecount
The German co-pilot who deliberately flew a Germanwings flight into the French Alps has been named as Andreas Lubitz, who was aged 28. Prosecutors said information suggested he was fully conscious as the plane went down.
"The co-pilot is alone at the controls," prosecutor Brice Robin said, drawing on information gathered from the black box recorder. "He voluntarily refused to open the door of the cockpit to the pilot and voluntarily began the descent of the plane."
Details of Lubitz's life are still emerging, with investigators confirming he did not have any known terrorist links. According to the website of the flight club where he was a member, the co-pilot was from Montabaur in Rhineland Palatinate.
German media reports he had 630 flight hours and joined budget airline Germanwings straight out of Lufthansa Flight Training School in Bremen in September 2013. Authorities have not confirmed if he had any experience as a professional pilot prior to that.
In 2013, the Federal Aviation Administration recognized Lubitz for "meeting and exceeding" the "high educational, licensing and medical standards" established by the body, which regulates civil aviation, reports the Aviation Business Gazette.
The FAA said that the certification standards have evolved to "reduce pilot errors that lead to fatal crashes."
"Andreas became a member of the club as a youth to fulfil his dream of flying," the LSC club said in a death notice on its website.
"He fulfilled his dream, the dream he now paid for so dearly with his life," the club said, reports the Wall Street Journal.
Montabaur city mayor Gabriele Wieland, speaking to the DPA press agency, said Lubitz lived with his parents in Montabaur and also had a residence in Dusseldorf, where the Germanwings flight was heading before it crashed.
French authorities said his family had left Marseille, where a press conference was held earlier on 26 March. His Facebook page lists his interests as aviation and music.
Information from the black box recorder of the flight, which crashed on 24 March and killed 150 people, indicated Lubitz was alone in the cockpit, and intentionally started a descent while the other co-pilot was locked out.
The Airbus 320 from Barcelona to Dusseldorf hit a mountain near Barcelonette in the French Alps, after an eight-minute descent.
That guy’s a white guy...that’s all the pic shows. Those three girls you referred to were muslims
That guy’s a white guy...that’s all the pic shows. Those three girls you referred to were muslims
I have previous accident reports involving the A320 to use as a guide. Very similar circumstances have lead to other A320 crashes. You may want to enlighten yourself of this information and the issues that exist with the flight control system in the A320. This information is readily available through the FAA’s accident investigation site.
Told the wife this morning that if he wasn’t a part of a sleeper cell then maybe he was gay and his lover just dumped him.
There are Caucasian Muslims, especially among eastern Europeans and there are plenty of Caucasian converts, especially in Europe. There are also still German terrorist cells that go back to the 60s-70s and they collaborated with Muslim terrorists at that time.
But...assuming that this prosecutor has heard the available tape and it does,*in fact*,indicate that one of the pilots was locked out of the cockpit and was *frantically* trying to get back in,isn't a deliberate act on the part of the pilot *in* the cockpit the most plausible explanation?
After all,as they say..."sometimes a cigar is just a cigar".
Those three girls you referred to were muslims
Exactly!
We had a local case of a guy who ran into a bridge. Come to find out he left behind a huge insurance policy going to his parents. They suspected suicide disguised as an accident.
If you are going to kill yourself and are not worried about what happens afterwards, you can justify almost anything. But people who disguise suicide usually do it for a reason.
Thanks. I agree on the advisability of waiting for an investigation.
Perhaps my question wasn’t sufficiently clear ... I was asking your thoughts on the accuracy of formal accident reports once they have been completed. Do you think they generally get it right?
I don’t doubt your information that there are problems with A320’s flight control system. The point is that if the audio recording for this particular flight reveals that the pilot was desperately trying to regain access to the cockpit, but was manually locked out by the copilot, who was awake and breathing normally while everyone else was screaming in terror, it seems exceedingly unlikely that this situation in the cockpit was unrelated to the crash and the actual cause was some mechanical problem that went unnoticed. Do you not see how monumentally illogical that is?
That would also pretty much be the beginning of "Thunderball."
Given that his total time is apparently less than 700 hours it's fair to say he was very new to the A320. As I explained previously, there have been other crashes of the A320 that were directly attributed to false readings of flight parameter sensors. In one case it was a pitot tube that froze up, giving the flight computer inaccurate data regarding the aircraft's airspeed. In this case the nose was lowered automatically by the flight computer in an attempt to gain airspeed. This incident happened in heavy, convective weather at night. The pilot's became disoriented because they were getting conflicting information from their instruments and the flight computer. The aircraft ultimately flew itself right into the ocean killing all on board. On another A320 crash the angle of attack indicator had been damaged by ice and reported false "nose high" information to the flight computer. This also caused the flight computer to put the aircraft into a rather steep descent, even though the aircraft was actually at cruising altitude, flying straight and level. The crew became disoriented and it flew into the ground. Perhaps the most notable and spectacular crash of an A320 came at the Habsheim Airshow in 1988 while performing for the crowd of thousands. The pilots were unable to override the flight computer when pulling out of a descent as they neared the ground in a fly-by and the aircraft crashed in a forested area near the airport, earning the A320 the nickname "The worlds most expensive chain saw".
The fact that the pilot was locked out of the cockpit doesn't mean this was a deliberate act. It is very easy to become overwhelmed if you are new to a very complex system. There are quite literally dozens of examples where pilots have ignored all sorts of warning alarms and buzzers and did exactly the opposite of what the alarm was telling them to do. If this low time pilot became disoriented because he could not override the flight computer it is entirely possible that he never heard the pilot beating on the door.
I’ve had that thought too
I see how you are jumping to conclusions and how you don’t understand how easily it is to become disoriented and distracted in the cockpit of a complex aircraft. See post 112
Carsten Spohr, the chief executive of Lufthansa, the parent company of Germanwings, said earlier that there was an interruption to Lubitz’s training. Responding to a question, He says he can’t shed any light on this and adds that it will be have to be investigated.
That's a WTF moment right there. Psychological breakdown? Trip to Afghanistan? Hospitalization?
No it wasn’t missing. You are getting your news from the wrong source. Black boxes aren’t built in a way that they ‘memory card’ can just be ‘missing’. They only recovered the voice recorder so far and they got the recording off of it of the pilot pounding on the door. That combined with their detailed understanding of how the door security works, and that you can’t ‘accidentally’ lock someone out, has led the officials to conclude it was a deliberate act. I was wrong about them having the flight control input data yet. Since the actual officials investigating this say it was a deliberate act then are you telling THOSE people to give it a rest? Because clearly you know more than them.
You really don't see anything. You decided on the cause of the crash based on some rather common information you have in your head about mechanical problems with this plane.
The co-pilot had to specifically and manually lock the pilot out of cockpit. He didn't become overwhelmed by your pet mechanical problem and suddenly go into a frenzy of randomly overriding the pilot's ability to disengage the cockpit lock.
You're becoming increasingly silly.
“how you don’t understand how easily it is to become disoriented and distracted in the cockpit of a complex aircraft.”
For 8 minutes??? I am starting to doubt your claims of knowing how to fly.
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