German wings A320 down in French Alps

Not much known at the moment....148 on board...flight from Barcelona Spain to Düsseldorf germany.

Supposedly put out "7700" on transponder before slow decent into the mountains.

 

Hearing a lot of mixed reports here: everything from distress right after takeoff (and they flew another 80 minutes) to a sudden loss from radar. Weird one for sure, then again most commercial plane crashes are.

 

Germanwings airliner 4U 9525 crashes in French Alps - BBC News

 

Very sad - I fly them alot. I know a pilot there and we workout together at my gym. He was I think flying to LHR and BCN today. I hope that he is ok.

 

Official french source say most probably there is no survivor; the weather was fine today on the site.

Rgds

 

The route is puzzling, since a direct route from Barcelona to Dusseldorf would go nowhere near the Alps.

 

Looks like it was descending but not gaining speed while doing it.

Was it trying to pick up speed?

 

Jim, this was my first thought when I saw the news on TV earlier; Digne is far to the east of a flight path from Barcelona to Dusseldorf. My quick guess is that the early distress signal suggests an in-flight hijacking by suicide terrorists.

 

Seth,

As far as we know at the minute (it still can change) there were in fact no distress signals at all: it is the controller who decided to declare the flight as "having problems", but the flight itself did not emit any transmission at all, contrary to what was believed at first.
I know you can read french, so have a quick look yourself (see the link here enclosed); sorry for the others who can't read it, but basically it says that, at the minute, there is no explanation whatsoever...

Ce que l'on sait du crash de l'Airbus A320

Rgds

 

One of the flight recorder boxes ("black boxes") retrieved at the minute.

Rgds

 

RIP to everyone....especially hard as it seems like a lot of high school kids on board..

Saw a few pictures on the crash site...looks like it hit very very hard...total distruction, thousands of very small pieces over a larger area.

Another site had a radar track showed a high but consistent rate of descent, but with fluctuating ground speeds.. Lots of theories from hypoxia to hijacking... hope the boxes are recovered and readable...

 

Loss of pressurization or plane failed to pressurize. Thats the only thing I can think of.

RIP to all the families.

 

Officials are indicating the AC was serviced just yesterday...

CW

 

This will be looked at very very closely.....

From newsite DW.de - 19:15 - Thomas Winkelmann said the plane went into a steep eight-minute descent before hitting the ground. He told reporters that an initial count indicated there were 67 German citizens on board.
http://www.dw.de/live-germanwings-crash-in-alps/a-18336127

 

I agree - here's the flightradar tracking:

D-AIPX - Germanwings - Aircraft info and flight history - Flightradar24

Does seems a strange direction to take. Wish there was an option to compare this track against a published flight plan.

RIP to all those who were on board and hopefully a swift answer can be determined as to the cause of this crash.

>8^\
ER

 

Were there any "normal" communications? If not, it sounds like the crew had become incapacitated, which would explain the strange flight path and apparent controlled descent into terrain. It could be like the ValuJet crash in the Everglades, but the lack of any distress call is very puzzling.

 

This is the most puzzling to me, according to the graph I saw, the speed was relatively the same during the last half of the climb, leveling off and throughout most of the decent.

 

News tonight said it was still doing 500mph at the end of the descent.

I am sure that altitude incapacitation is to be suspected - but the question I have there is why the descent if they were on autopilot.

Maybe they initiated the descent to get down into breathable air, but it does not explain why the crew would not have been on oxygen and halted the descent before they flew into the ground (if indeed they realized pressurization was not working and started the descent).

 

Incident: Lufthansa A321 near Bilbao on Nov 5th 2014, loss of 4000 feet of altitude

Similar problem, but with the Alps in the way not enough time to recover?

http://ad.easa.europa.eu/blob/easa_ad_2014_0266_E.pdf/EAD_2014-0266-E_1

 

They have the black box already. If something like the above happened, that should be obvious from the data.

Of course, there remains the mystery of why there were no communications.

 

They have one of the two black boxes. They have not announced which one (CVR or FDR) yet.

EDIT: Just announced that it was the Flight Data Recorder that has been found so far.

 

Usually the recorders are pretty close together; it's a bit strange that one was found so quickly but the other is still missing. (I'll bet the conspiracy theorists will try to make something of that.)

If it was some fault or quirk in the software, the next question will obviously be: could this happen on a Boeing?

 

does anybody know if this was the first leg flown by this airplane after its maintenance check out - reported to be the day prior? Would Lufthansa have any of its planes checked out in a Barcelona maintenance shop?

 

I thought of that and I'm certain that it will be looked at. I have never seen a crash site that was so destructive and disbursed. I can't believe the wide area covered by so much totally destroyed debris. It looks like it has been ground up and sprayed over the area.

 

Amazing that the FDR box could survive it. It may take a while to get useful readings back.