A French prosecutor has issued a statement that the co-pilot of Germanwings 9525, Andreas Lubitz, 28, locked out the pilot of the plane and then intentionally crashed the plane in the French Alps. The conclusion adds a new horrific detail to an already horrific crash. It was not an accident according to a review of the record from the black box found at the crash site.
The cockpit voice recorder revealed the pilot politely knocking to be allowed back into the cockpit and then frantically banging on the door as Lubitz directed the plane into the ground. Marseille prosecutor Brice Robin said that Lubitz “wanted to destroy this plane.” He killed 150 passengers and crew, who can be heard in the background screaming in terror. New reports indicate that there may have been issues in the past with regard to depression.
Germanwings, a low-budget carrier operated by Lufthansa, will likely face litigation over the crash and this adds a new issue. Companies will often offer a “rogue employee” defense of an employee acting outside the scope of their employment or clearly against the rules and wishes of the employer. This would clearly appear to fit since this is a senseless criminal act. However, there will remain the question of whether the airline had any indication or should have uncovered the type of mental imbalance that would lead to such an suicidal and murderous act.
Source: WSJ
Ken
In Annie’s defense, she is relentlessly ganged upon by those regulars. It is rare that she comments on anything without someone responding with a direct or veiled attack on her.
Although you are right, they are the minority, but they are also the “tough” kids in the hallway, tripping and abusing those who seem like victims to them. Annie is responding to the abuse she gets.
However, there is value in restraint, as I try to remind myself off very often.
Looking forward to having a discussion without any name calling, sweeping generalizations or falsities assigned to others.
randy
Have you read this? It has a decent graphic of the descent.
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/03/24/world/europe/germanwings-plane-crash-map.html
Wade that says nothing at all about the plane or the pilot. Once again for those who have not read my previous posts or have a problem with comprehension, the Airbus is ALL fly by wire. The plane will only let the pilot do what the plane thinks is appropriate. The pilot makes a command with the side stick controller and the plane decides if it will comply. The plane has the final authority in normal law, NOT the pilot and there have been instances where the pilots had no control at all. That is the main reason I did not try and get on with an airline that flew this plane.
Yet there are reports that the altimeter was set to 96 feet – leading to the fatal dive. How do they know that if they have not found the data from the FDR?
Does the altimeter have an audio annunciator so that resetting the device would be apparent from the audio recording that was found?
And is it possible that an equipment failure would look or sound like a person manually resetting the equipment?
bigfatmike wrote: “Yet there are reports that the altimeter was set to 96 feet – leading to the fatal dive. How do they know that if they have not found the data from the FDR?”
From what I understand, that information comes from the transponder. They have not found the FDR yet.
david I suggest you stick to something you know about. The only info that the transponder emits is the altitude of the plane at the time. It does not tell the controller what the altimeter is set at, it does not tell what altitude the autopilot has selected or any other information. The FDR needs to be found and read to understand the whole story.
randyjet wrote: “david I suggest you stick to something you know about. The only info that the transponder emits is the altitude of the plane at the time.”
LOL. Well, I do understand basic math, so when I read reports that the transponder gave them the information about the plane descending immediately when the pilot left the cockpit, I assume that a series of altitude messages from a transponder enable them to determine the azimuth setting. Of course the transponder is not going to tell them who set that azimuth, the copilot or the computer, but there are experts familiar with the Airbus A320 who say that it had to be done deliberately by the copilot. You claim otherwise. Hopefully we will see which experts are correct when the FDR is recovered.
randyjet wrote: “Once again for those who have not read my previous posts or have a problem with comprehension, the Airbus is ALL fly by wire.”
You talk like you are the sole authority on this subject. Bugs Forsythe, who has logged thousands of hours on the Airbus A320, says he knows exactly how he crashed the plane and demonstrates how it was done in a flight simulator.
http://www.ktvz.com/news/in-the-cockpit-easy-to-keep-door-locked/32041598
davidm Once again you miss the rather obvious points. I do not claim to be an expert on the Airbus since I have never flown one or even been in the sim. All that video proved is the rather obvious point that the copilot could fly it into the ground. DUH!
A more relevant question would be how is the code set for the door prior to flight? Is it one standard code for all planes, or does the captain have to program it as part of the pre-flight? The captain may have forgotten to set his code in before flight if they were rushed and so he would not have the proper code. Or if it is standard among all planes he may have forgotten it because he never used it. In my career I have had supposedly impossible things happen to the airplane. I have lost three generators at once, all displays go black so I only had one backup instrument, among some of the other things. I have had the FMS fail to set because the data base was out of date, and had to manually set the FMS. to override it. In my time as a radar repair tech in the USAF, I tracked UFOs that were non-existent, and found out that is was cars on a road outside the base that were the culprits, The list is so long that I don’t have time to list them all where technology does things it supposedly cannot do. Even if we do get the FDR, it may not answer all the questions since some of the inputs may have been at fault, and thus would have had the plane act in accordance with bad data. It is way too early to posit a suicidal F/O.
randyjet wrote: “davidm Once again you miss the rather obvious points. I do not claim to be an expert on the Airbus since I have never flown one or even been in the sim. All that video proved is the rather obvious point that the copilot could fly it into the ground. DUH!”
It is difficult to know what is obvious to you. Previously you seemed to think that one could not determine the azimuth of a plane from transponder information because it only conveys altitude information at a given point in time. Then later you wrote:
“… the Airbus is ALL fly by wire. The plane will only let the pilot do what the plane thinks is appropriate. The pilot makes a command with the side stick controller and the plane decides if it will comply. The plane has the final authority in normal law, NOT the pilot and there have been instances where the pilots had no control at all.”
Now after I share a video from someone who has flown the Airbus and demonstrates how to crash it in a simulator, you say it is an obvious point that the copilot could fly it into the ground.
I certainly value your experience as a pilot. Your experience in this area makes you much more qualified than me. However, just as my not being a lawyer does not prevent me from engaging in matters of law, I don’t think it is inappropriate for me to engage others about this tragic flight. I fly a lot, and so this subject interests me for personal reasons. In fact, I am scheduled to fly on Lufthansa later this year.
randyjet – if the Airbus is fly by wire, why would it allow you to go to 100 feet in mountains?
randyjet
So the co-pilot is wrestling to control the suddenly rogue plane. That took off the auto pilot. That reset for a steady descent. Mind you the plane was not bouncing around. Passengers are not alarmed until the very end.
So for 8 minutes…
there is calm STEADY breathing
there is not one swear word
no… damn?
no…what the hell is happening?
no…Jesus?
no…sh*t!
no…Help!
no…damn. This pain in my chest really hurts.
Just silence. while he heroically , but silently, stoically struggles to save 150 lives.
Just silence with the pilot begging to get in.
Just silence with towers and trackers radioing in begging for some word. – warning him of the danger.
Just silence. And steady breathing.
Just a steady decline of the plane who has become something out of a Stephen King horror story.
@PS: I will go where I please, thank you very much.
You could try Storm Front yourself: that would be right up your alley.
William Berry – I rather like it here. I have friends to chat with every day.
@Ingannie
“William Berry, not only is this place inundated with racists, misogynists, homophobics, Islamaphobics, ageists, it’s infested with nuts who invade other’s privacy, who try to silence others with intimidation. Vile creepy disgusting people like PaulS and others.”
Well, I see you went ahead and took my suggestion back out of consideration:
seven name-callings and only one description of behavior.
Here’s what I just finished writing in response to your earlier post in which you said you’d take into consideration my suggestion that you not emulate the commenters here who call people names instead of addressing their thoughts:
“Well, in addition to being more persuasive to others, we go further in our own intellectual and emotional development if we address people’s specific behaviors, specifically, the expression of their thoughts, rather than calling them undefined names, categorizing them, and writing them off as people.
“Otherwise, the logical end-point of name-calling animosity is the advocacy of war and the extermination of huge numbers of people, as P HaW has done.”
Isn’t it a somewhat emotional exaggeration to say that this place is “inundated” with people who manifest some twisted thinking? I’ve seen consistently authoritarian thought processes from only six or eight people out of forty or fifty commenters.
It behooves us all to think more and emote less.
By the way, it is Flowers for Socrates…all the intellect, none of the “really reprehensible, hate-inflected crap that inundates these threads” 🙂
po – I have scanned the site, that is why I can it Flowers for Algernon. It is the sundown of his life.
Paul C Schulte
Again – you would be referring to Flowers to Algernon as there is definitely a regression setting in
Paul, still waiting for your source regarding the CAIR office at the White House.
@Ingannie:
I hear you.
Ultimately, this has to be laid at JT’s door. His vaunted “civility policy” will stop you saying the naughty words, but when it comes to the really reprehensible, hate-inflected crap that inundates these threads, the good professor is conspicuously MIA.
William Berry – if you are not a happy camper here you can certainly go to Flowers for Algernon where you will be welcomed.
happy,The only thing W Bush is guilty of in 9/11 is gross dereliction of duty when he got the PBR which said Bin Laden will attack the US at some point. He was derelict because he simply blew that report off, and did nothing. He also disregarded the warning Clinton gave him about Bin Laden being a major problem. If you read Clark’s book Against All Enemies, you will notice that Bush refused to even discuss terrorism until the day before 9/11. If Bush had simply issued an order to all agencies concerned to review and rethink their plans against terrorism, I would not have any problem since that is the extent of what he could do. All the FAA needed was to recognize the threat, and issue a bulletin to the airlines to change their anti-hijacking procedures to not allow any hijackers into the cockpit. That would have stopped 9/11 even with the cockpit doors we had at the time.
randyjet
This is what my common sense that seems to be not so common today has always told me. Apparently we are supposed to believe our enemy and go around hating America like the Enemy does.l You see, I am in my 60s and I was alive then and that is what I remember also so it is nice to have someone repeat back to me what I remember so I am not called crazy, out of my mind a fool and a Islamophobe for believing what is true and real.
I could care less what religion a Terrorist is. My Cousin Married one from Tunisia that was self admitted and that was enough for all of us. Whatever has happened to this country to make right wrong. “war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength”
George Orwell
Inga – just to clarify, some of the people on the right already use their real names and do not have to worry about being doxxed. They don’t invent a life.
randyjet
happy, I think you are referring to the flight I took into LGA when I was one of the first flights allowed in there. We flew up the Hudson River approach to LGA and got a first hand look from nearly overhead of the still burning WTC. All during the flight from IND to LGA I was trying to get my F/O to join the USAF as a pilot. As we flew past the WTC ruins, he got his camera out and was taking pictures of it. I told him to get some good shots so that when he went overseas to bomb the hell out of those folks, he would have no hesitation or regrets killing them. My only regret was that I was too old to rejoin the USAF since I would have done it in a minute.
YES Randy that’s what I was referring to, but I put the other parts in there because of the Truthers on here that keep insisting that Bush is the one who blew up the Buildings or that the Jewish People did it. It is so Absurd.
You see, when one is in a delicate position of being an individual who doesn’t support a complete agenda of a “party” it is difficult to stand up and show what is true. I want people on this blog that are new to see that you flew and saw what happened and that it was not an “Inside Job”
@Bugsy: “Paul, pogo and davidm2575 [Nick amd squeeky’s feelings must be hurt!] are the thoughtful and intelligent commentators here.”
That is the most hilarious thimg I have ever read here. Thnx for a really good laugh, Bugsy.
The vile bigotry and racism on these threads is so pervasive that they have become increasingly depressing to read; one just doesn’t want to believe that so many of one’s fellow citizens are so steeped in hatred.
But occasionally there is genuine comic relief.
This was exactly my point all along:
Is the prosecutor arguing that the Germanwings co-pilot isn’t a terrorist because he is German? The investigation into the causes of the Germanwings crash in the French Alps resumed Thursday, with the prosecutor alleging that the co-pilot had deliberately crashed the plane. According to prosecutor Brice Robin, the co-pilot took advantage of the pilot stepping out of the cockpit to start the descent of the aircraft. He also stated “there is no reason to suspect a terrorist attack.” Mainstream media are currently repeating this claim, yet may not have if the pilot had been of another nationality or religion. He also refused to label the event a suicide, saying, “When you are responsible for 150 people, I don’t call that a suicide.” Robin is calling the event a “voluntary homicide.” It is unclear why the event is not being labelled a suicide attack, as other attacks involving suicide and murder, such as in Afghanistan are called that. Robin also said the co-pilot, a 28-year-old German, had “no terrorist profile” and when asked about his religion, said, “I don’t think we should concentrate on [that] at this time.” He also stated that it was definitely not an accident and the “intention was to destroy this plane.”
This content was originally published by teleSUR at the following address:
http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/Prosecutor-Pilot-Crashed-Deliberately-but-Not-a-Terrorist–20150326-0008.html. If you intend to use it, please cite the source and provide a link to the original article. http://www.teleSURtv.net/english
More and more info that this guy was depressed. But, you have to be more than just depressed to kill hundreds of people. “LOOK @ ME” is the mantra of his generation. Borderline personality disorder, just like some w/ that affliction drive this blog into the ground daily.
Hmm!
I have lost a few posts here. Were they censured? If so would someone please let me know why?
Meanwhile:
Bugsy says:
Po
Once again, you state things based upon vague assumptions. Par for the course. I never mentioned whether I was male or female. You assumed that I was male. Could be correct. Could be incorrect.
As I said earlier, based on your vehemence and irrationality, all hallmark of manhood, at least on this blog, I assumed, yes, wrongly, that Bugsy was a man! My bad!
You would have never made it through law school. You assume too many things not in evidence.
Quite fallacious, esquire.Short of seeing you and knowing you, what can I do but assume? And based on your tone, apparent knowledge of me, and your ability to read my mind and familiarity with my thought process, either you’ve been doing much assuming or Nick has been trailing me, again!
Let’s see you publish a transcript of one of your imam’s speeches on love, tolerance and acceptance on non–Muslims. Not interested in his views on the treatment of other Muslims, just interested in him denouncing terror against infidels and the condemnation of the murder of innocents.
<What's in it for me? Just to make a point? And then what's in it for me?
If that is what you want, spend 10 minutes online and I can bet you one of my world class 10 course meals that you'll find at least 10 different islamic leaders doing just that. And to follow your logic, prove to me that you are not a bigot. Go ahead, I am patiently waiting.
Your imam will not permit you to speak before the worshipers? Interesting. I suppose that even he sees you as deluded and irrational as the rest of us. That, indeed, says a lot.
Indeed, says a lot about your refusal to see a joke for what it is, a joke. There is a reason he is the imam, that’s his job. It is akin to Pogo stepping up to his pastor during service and snatching the mike out of his hands. Though he may have much good to say, as the kids say, that’s just not his place
randyjet – is it possible the auto pilot was reset to 100 feet as some sort of instrument failure? I hope very much that you are right, that this was not deliberate.
I think it is a mistake to release information in bits and pieces. They should investigate thoroughly before making any conclusions. The co-pilot’s family is going to really suffer if he did do this deliberately, so they had better be completely sure before they make such an assertion. It’s a really scary thought, that the flight crew could deliberately harm passengers.
Karen, the more I think about this, it is more than likely it was some kind of a system failure since setting the vertical speed to 3000’/min down on autopilot will give a pretty noticeable pitch change and feel. If one wanted to do such a thing, deliberately it would make more sense to do it gradually so that there would be little indication that the plane was descending that fast. So I am more of the opinion that the plane itself commanded that downward motion, such as would happen if it thought the plane was close to a stall.
As for allowing passengers into the cockpit prior to 9/11, that was not officially allowed, but it had been known to happen, especially when there are pretty young women on board. If it were on Al Itallia, that is guaranteed it will happen, even now I think.
randyjet – very true that passengers had access to cockpits prior to 9/11. 2001 was when my sister and I vacationed in Italy. During the flight home, an airline attendant told us we had an invitation to view the cockpit. My sister enjoyed the tour, but I was so nervous. There were buttons and switches literally everywhere, and we were sitting on these little jump seats. I kept thinking, please don’t let there be a black box recording that the flight was going well until some passenger accidentally brushed against the single switch that would send everyone to their doom. So I literally sat on my hands.
randyjet – if I’m thinking of the same crash, it was the worst I could have ever imagined. Is that the one where it plunged down, went back up, and then plunged down until it was inverted and crashed? I was absolutely ill reading about that. I cannot imagine how hard it must be for investigators to sift through the audio in those last recordings for hours on end.
I understand the downside you point out to video recordings. But isn’t it possible it could put to rest the intent portion of this particular crash? I’ve been wondering how in the world one could rule out a medical condition. Is it possible to slump over and change that auto pilot to 100 feet? Keep the pilot locked out for any reason except a deliberate one? Was he wrestling with the controls and a catastrophic malfunction, or become a murderer? Wouldn’t video answer that question definitively? Perhaps it could be activated in the event the plane gets below a certain altitude threshold. We’ve seen it save cops’ reputations on body cameras. Couldn’t it help pilots, too, or do you think the bad outweighs the benefit?
Karen From all the reports I have read about the co-pilot, he was not suicidal or homicidal, so I have to discount the idea he did this purposely. Instead, I think that after the captain left, the door was locked as per SOP. The airplane experienced and ADC failure and the plane went into a dive per programing. The F/O was very young inexperienced, and tried to control the plane manually, but the Airbus does not allow that in such a situation. He is panic stricken, tries to get the QRH and see what it calls for or does some other thing which diverts his attention to the exclusion of letting the captain in. He simply gets tunnel vision and fails to do his duty, which would explain the situation absent malicious intent. That is why the FDR is so important. That should help prove or disprove my thesis.
Paul
Think back to Sep 11, 2001. Several force their way into the cockpit. I have an idea. Let’s strengthen the door so you cannot break in. What a great idea.
Yes, I already have visited that theory and was wondering when the box cutters would appear – Never fear – they will appear later than sooner 😉
I have news for those who think the 9/11 terrorists forced their way into the cockpit. They were INVITED in and had to use NO FORCE at all. That was the rule before 9/11. Now of course we do not let them in under any circumstances. The armored doors make little sense too since the rest of the cockpit bulkhead has no such protection. I used to tell my F/Os that in case bullets come in, the F/O takes the front of the control pedestal while I will straddle the rear since that the is the only bulletproof part of the cockpit, the door.
randyjet
I remember the last time you were here and what you were saying about that day. Would you please recount it for those of us who don’t have the understanding that you do. I certainly would appreciate it. I might have this wrong because I frequently don’t understand or am told I don’t understand but you said their was bombs falling straight down? Something about straight down and you saw it? Please set me straight I do know what you said freaked me out and the other poster was a guest poster.
happy, I think you are referring to the flight I took into LGA when I was one of the first flights allowed in there. We flew up the Hudson River approach to LGA and got a first hand look from nearly overhead of the still burning WTC. All during the flight from IND to LGA I was trying to get my F/O to join the USAF as a pilot. As we flew past the WTC ruins, he got his camera out and was taking pictures of it. I told him to get some good shots so that when he went overseas to bomb the hell out of those folks, he would have no hesitation or regrets killing them. My only regret was that I was too old to rejoin the USAF since I would have done it in a minute.
Piot exits to pee. Door locks. Co-pilot IMMEDIATELY takes plane off auto-pilot and sets descent rate.
Does that strike you as a medical emergency?
And of course the pilots are unhappy. Professionals hate it when one of their own is at fault. Everybody wants to blame the ‘other’ trade. Cops blame the perp. Carpenters blame the drywallers. Congresspeople blame the President. The Left blames the Right.