Germanwings airliner crashes in French Alps

[Anthea]

BBC News

Germanwings airliner crashes in French Alps

An Airbus A320 airliner has crashed in the French Alps between Barcelonnette and Digne, French aviation officials and police have said.

The jet belongs to the German airline Germanwings, a subsidiary of Lufthansa.

The plane had reportedly been en route from Barcelona to Dusseldorf and was carrying 142 passengers and six crew.

French President Francois Hollande said: "The conditions of the accident, which have not yet been clarified, lead us to think there are no survivors."

Mr Hollande said the crash was a tragedy and called for solidarity with the victims, adding that the area of the crash was very difficult to access.

The plane had issued a distress call at 10:47 (09:47 GMT), according to sources quoted by AFP news agency.

French Prime Minister Manuel Valls said he had sent Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve to the scene and a ministerial crisis cell to co-ordinate the incident had been set up.

Both Airbus and Germanwings have said they are aware of the reports but cannot yet confirm them.

Information on link now updated:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-32030270

R I P

[Anthea]

The White House has said there is no evidence so far of a terror attack.

When America deny something it is always a bad sign

The plane did not send out a distress signal, officials said...The plane began descending one minute after it reached its cruising height and continued to lose altitude for eight minutes, Germanwings managing director Thomas Winkelmann told reporters.

If the plane descended for 8 minutes I wonder what happened up there to prevent them from sending out a distress signal

[Piling]

They have found the black box now.

[Anthea]

Reuters

Germanwings to cancel more flights as crew members refuse to fly

Germanwings will have to cancel more flights on Wednesday as some crew members refuse to fly, a day after an Airbus A320 (AIR.PA) operated by the budget arm of Lufthansa (LHAG.DE) crashed in the French Alps.

"There will be irregularities... There are crew members who do not want to fly in the current situation, which we understand," a spokeswoman for Germanwings said.

Germanwings flight 4U 9525 from Barcelona to Duesseldorf crashed into a mountainside on Tuesday, killing all 150 people on board including 16 school children.

http://uk.reuters.com/article/2015/03/2 ... GS20150325

[Anthea]

http://www.express.co.uk/news/world/566 ... leg-Bryjak

The BIG question everyone wants answers to is why - during the pane's 8 minute plummet to the mountain - did they not send out a Mayday call?

[Anthea]

Bloomberg

Crash-Jet Investigators Recover Cockpit Voices Key to Probe


A handout picture made available by the French Aviation Authority BEA on March 25, 2015 shows the cockpit voice recorder (CVP) from the Germanwings A320 airplane that crashed in the French Alps on March 24, 2015.

French air-accident investigators probing the loss of an Airbus A320 jet that crashed in the French Alps said voice recordings from the cockpit survived the impact, handing them vital clues in seeking to explain the tragedy.

While the so-called black box was damaged, the base unit containing its memory module remains intact and a usable data file has been extracted, Remi Jouty, director of the French BEA, which is leading the probe, said at a briefing in Paris.

“We have the entire flight recorded, but we haven’t analyzed all the sounds and speech on the file,” Jouty said Wednesday. “We hope to have the first rough ideas in a matter of days.” A full analysis will take months, he added.

Jouty said there’s currently no reason to think that a sudden depressurization -- advanced by some as a likely cause of the crash -- was to blame. The jet, operated by Deutsche Lufthansa AG’s Germanwings unit, seems to have remained intact until hitting the ground, since a mid-air explosion would have created a significantly wider debris field, he said.

French President Francois Hollande said earlier that the casing of the plane’s second flight recorder, which logs hundreds of data parameters, had been found, but not the contents. Jouty said he couldn’t confirm the device’s condition.

Crash experts will rely on the recorders, supplied by L-3 Communications Holdings Inc., to explain why it was lost on a routine daylight flight with no distress signals from the crew.

No Explanation

“We do not yet have any explanation about the reason this plane went down and why the two crew didn’t answer messages to them from the control tower,” he said at the BEA’s Le Bourget base, where the voice recorder arrived at 9:45 a.m. local time.

The backgrounds of the pilots, their professional history and training will be examined as matter of course, Jouty said. He declined to say whether the voices on the recordings were those of the cockpit crew.

Search teams continue scouring mountain slopes for the data recorder after retrieving the voice recorder yesterday. The fortified boxes, actually painted bright orange to facilitate retrieval in the field, should give investigators a fuller picture of the accident’s cause when used in concert.

The Germanwings tragedy, which claimed the lives of all 150 people on board, has perplexed experts because the aircraft had only just settled into cruising altitude at 38,000 feet when it began a steep, unauthorized descent lasting more than eight minutes, while still following its flight path.

Impact Force

There was no communication with the flightdeck despite several attempts from air traffic controllers on the ground, suggesting the pilots were either busy trying to salvage the plane or were incapacitated and unable to respond. The last contact with the plane was “routine,” he said.

Honeywell Inc., which also makes black boxes, said the jet seems to have crashed with a force equal to a Boeing 747 hitting the ground at 400 miles an hour and halting in 16 inches.

The A320, the backbone of many global fleets, was heading from Barcelona to Dusseldorf, having flown to the Spanish city earlier in the day. Germanwings is Lufthansa’s low-cost arm, and has never had an accident that killed all those on board.

“For us all at Lufthansa and Germanwings, let me say that it’s simply inexplicable how a technically flawless airplane with two experienced Lufthansa pilots, how such a flight can turn into such a tragedy,” Lufthansa Chief Executive Officer Carsten Spohr said today at Frankfurt airport.

To contact the reporters on this story: Gregory Viscusi in Paris at gviscusi@bloomberg.net; Andrea Rothman in Toulouse at aerothman@bloomberg.net - To contact the editors responsible for this story: Benedikt Kammel at bkammel@bloomberg.net Christopher Jasper

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/ ... l-to-probe

[Piling]

Now it seems to be a suicide planned by the co-pilot.

[Anthea]

Now it seems to be a suicide planned by the co-pilot.

Surely not

I remember that the same was said about the crew of the plane that went missing

[RomaMater]

Too many airplanes are crashing as of late. I've flown on planes and it's safe to fly on a jet.

[Piling]

Now it seems to be a suicide planned by the co-pilot.

Surely not

I remember that the same was said about the crew of the plane that went missing

Apparently the copilot suffered from severe depression, was hospitalized in psy center in 2009, etc.

If he was called Ahmed or Ali, everybody would have searched the Jidadist cause, but fortunately , 150 ppl died only because of a moody Andreas.

But police seized his computer and many personal papers, and stated that 'clues' were found. So let's wait…