It's crazy these days the way the planes are just falling out of the skies..
Bob, The plane has been checked for maintenance on Monday afternoon (= March 23rd) in Düsseldorf. It then flew from Düsseldorf to Barcelone, this on Tuesday morning, according to the news we had yesterday: so it crashed on its returning flight to Düsseldorf the same day. The place where the plane crashed is very remote, it is mountains without any access road, not even an access trail practicable for any vehicle. The nearest village is ten miles away. The impact occurred with the plane still “at high speed”, probably “about 400 knots”, according to the latest news (= 700 to 750 kms/h). The Gendarmerie, which is searching the debris, declares that, for the time being, there have found only one or two pieces of wreckage “about the size of a car”, all the others are “not much bigger than a cell phone”. The “Black box” that has already been found, is not the FDR, but the Cockpit Voice Recorder (= CVR) is said to be “damaged, but can still be exploited”. Rgds
Almost similar crash site to the Sukhoi superjet 100 jet demo flight that happened in Indonesia back in 2012. Mount Salak Sukhoi Superjet 100 crash - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HvaIGJO0EJE
Well.... With about 95,000 flights world wide a day, there have been 32 crashes with 1313 fatalities including military and civilian since the March 8 Malaysian air incident according to planecrashinfo.com. That's 34,675,000 flights approx since then. So that's about 0.0000009% of the flights have crashed And with 3 mill people a day makes 1,095,000,000 in the year since or 0.0000011%. Pretty stunning how low the numbers are.
Pics of the "Black Box" that has been recovered, released today by the BEA (Bureau Enquêtes Accidents). http://cdnmo.coveritlive.com/media/image/201503/1600_phpexpv4gphoto.cvr.2.jpg http://cdnmo.coveritlive.com/media/image/201503/1600_phput3z7v706960.jpg Rgds
During their official common speak François Hollande / Angela Merkel / Mariano Rajoy, Hollande just said at the minute that the second black box has been found, but damaged, so it is empty: they have only the external "enveloppe", there is nothing inside. Rgds
Press Conference of the Bureau DEnquêtes Accident (Bureau for Accident Enquiries) 17:19: it is much too early to draw any conclusion on the kind of information, and its extent, that we should find inside that file, and we will need some days before being able to state anything. 17:17 The data that we have access to from the CVR do indeed include the flight to the accident, so we should have some information regarding the accident to work on, but we do not have yet precise information regarding what sounds and words that can be heard on this file 17:16 the work on exploitation and reading of the CVR has begun; we have encountered some drawbacks but one readable file was extracted from the CVR
From the pic it appears to be an L-3 unit (US manufacture) L-3 Aviation Recorders edit: pic in post #31 is the CVR Most likely that the airplane would carry CVR and FDR from the same supplier
Looks like it was on its normal flight track. This is from a couple days before https://flightaware.com/live/flight/GWI9525/history/20150320/0835Z/LEBL/EDDL Very rare that an airliner goes direct point to point, lots of other things to consider in the flight plan/track, such as traffic, weather, airspace terrain... Lots of talking heads on the BBC news last night talking about the problems with the AOA sensors on the A320... There was an incident last year when one ( I believe Germanwings also) lost 4000 ft in uncontrolled dive, but the crew where able to recover....
Not what I meant. I am not predisposed to believe in conspiracy theories but the EU has very good reasons to obfuscate the reason for the crash if it is mechanical in nature.
Thanks for for finding that other flight. Removes the likelihood of a number of potential nefarious theories when you see it was at least following the path it normally would have. >8^\ ER
A clear technical reason that can be fixed would mean a lot less trouble than an unexplicable crash. I doubt that Airbus, the France government, "the EU" (who? The European parliament? the comission?) have any interest in obfuscating anything, much less at this stage.
Hopefully not, but as I recall there was a good deal of misdirection with the Air France crash over the Atlantic out of Brazil. This naturally causes mistrust to arise.
Only one pilot in the cockpit.... http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/26/world/europe/germanwings-airbus-crash.html?smid=tw-bna
CNN reporting that the CVR has one of the pilots beating on the cockpit door trying to get in, with no response from inside the cockpit. From nyt http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/03/26/world/europe/germanwings-airbus-crash.html?_r=0&referrer=
So when a pilot leaves the cockpit the door must be locked behind him right? And so a person has to open it from the other side to let him back in? Also, the plane would have been on auto pilot and would have to be taken off to enter the decent or have an incapacitated pilot fall on the yoke except the A320 has side sticks right? Should there be a "fail safe" way for pilots to open a locked door from the other side?
It really can't be opened from the outside. When one of us leaves, a flight attendant must come up (at least for all U.S. carriers), so there is always two people in the cockpit. The remaining pilot flies, while the flight attendent operates the door. On the A320 the door locks automatically when closed. If the remaing pilot became incompasitated, who initiated the descent? The autopilot will not automatically do that.
Whatever the cause, I still cannot believe the total destruction of the airplane into minute particles and seeing the wreckage distributed into so many ravines. It looks like it blew up before it hit but I'm not saying that is what happened.
