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That’s Odd — Why Now?
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That’s Odd

by Bryan

The BBC is reporting on the Germanwings Alps crash and some interesting information has been revealed today.

The voice recorder has been located. Although it is battered, the investigators say they can retrieve the data. An unidentified investigator said that it sounds like one of the two pilots was locked out of the cockpit and trying to get in.

The aircraft had climbed to its cruise altitude of 38,000 feet, but began descending rapidly without reporting anything to air traffic control. Radar lost the aircraft at 6,800 feet at about 10 minutes into the descent.

There is also a report that the aircraft flew into the mountain, rather than falling. If there had been an airborne explosion it would have fallen.

They haven’t located the second box, the flight data recorder.

Update: The BBC is reporting that the French prosecutor is now saying that the co-pilot ‘wanted to destroy plane’. This opinion is based on information from the voice recorder and the necessary control changes required to descend and fly into the ground.

2 comments

1 Steve Bates { 03.26.15 at 10:13 am }

It is difficult to imagine that sequence of events resulting from anything other than deliberate acts by one or both of the pilots… and today it’s looking more like the copilot. Unless he left a note back home, we will probably never know why.

Please refresh my memory: Wasn’t there another pilot suicide-by-aircraft a couple of years ago?

2 Bryan { 03.26.15 at 10:50 am }

Because the tracking indicates a controlled descent and no alarms heard on the voice recorder, it would have taken multiple control changes to do that. The actions were too specific to have occurred without intentional actions by the pilot. The aircraft should have been on autopilot as it was at its assigned altitude and course. The data recorder can detect the changes if they locate it. If the pilot had been incapacitated, the autopilot would have continued to maintain course and altitude, not descend.

The last verified case was in 2013, in a flight over Africa, but there have been a few other cases where pilot suicide is one of the suspected possibilities.