Airbus A320 Crash

[Glacier]

This plane crash seemed suspicious right from the beginning, and now it appears that it was indeed brought down intentionally.

Workers amid debris at the plane crash site near Seyne-les-Alpes, France, Wednesday.
The co-pilot of a Germanwings flight that slammed into an Alpine mountainside "intentionally" sent the plane into its doomed descent, a French prosecutor said Thursday.

Marseille prosecutor Brice Robin said the commander left the cockpit, presumably to go to the lavatory, and then was unable to regain access. In the meantime, he said, co-pilot Andreas Lubitz manually and "intentionally" set the plane on the descent that drove it into the mountainside in the southern French Alps.

It was the co-pilot's "intention to destroy this plane," Robin said.

The information was pulled from the black box cockpit voice recorder, but Robin said the co-pilot did not say a word after the commanding pilot left the cockpit.

"It was absolute silence in the cockpit," he said.

During the final minutes of the flight's descent, pounding could be heard on the door as alarms sounded, he said.

In the German town of Montabaur, acquaintances said Lubitz was in his late twenties and showed no signs of depression when they saw him last fall as he renewed his glider pilot's license.

"He was happy he had the job with Germanwings and he was doing well," said a member of the glider club, Peter Ruecker, who watched him learn to fly. "He gave off a good feeling."

Lubitz had obtained his glider pilot's license as a teenager, and was accepted as a Lufthansa pilot trainee after finishing a tough German college preparatory school, Ruecker said. He described Lubitz as a "rather quiet" but friendly young man.

The Airbus A320, on a flight from Barcelona to Duesseldorf, began to descend from cruising altitude after losing radio contact with ground control and slammed into the remote mountain on Tuesday morning, killing all 150 people on board.

Lufthansa has not identified the pilots but said the co-pilot joined Germanwings in September 2013, directly after training, and had flown 630 hours.

The captain had more than 6,000 hours of flying time and been a Germanwings pilot since May 2014, having previously flown for Lufthansa and Condor, Lufthansa said.

[mexi cali]

Scary isn't even close to describing this tragedy. That a human being could be so callous and selfish regarding the lives of so many innocent people.

It has to be considered murder making this young pilot one of the worlds most heinous serial killers.

[OREZ]

Unbelievable! How terrible.

[Sige]

I couldn't believe it this morning when I read this article...I was absolutely stunned! I was certainly not expecting it to be on purpose. It will be interesting to see how this plays out. I feel so bad for the families of those killed :(

[GordonH]

This co-pilot wanted to commit suicide fine, do that on your own. The others on this plane should be able to live there lives.

This is incredibly selfish act, my heart goes out to all of Families & Friends innocent victims my condolences.

[Atomoa]

This always crosses my mind when air disasters happen. We'll never know why the pilot steered the plan into the ground.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_%28novel%29

Millennium features a civilization that has dubbed itself "The Last Age". Due to millennia of warfare of every type (nineteen nuclear wars alone), the Earth has been heavily polluted and humanity's gene pool irreparably damaged. They have thus embarked on a desperate plan; time travel into the past, collect healthy humans, and send them to an uncontaminated planet to rebuild civilization.

The time travelers can only take people that will have no further effect on the timeline: those who have vanished without a trace, or died without being observed; otherwise they would be changing the past, which risks a temporal paradox and perhaps even a catastrophic breakdown of the fabric of time. Though they collect everyone they can, they exert a great deal of effort on those destined to die in various disasters such as sinking ships and crashing airplanes (and once a century of Roman soldiers lost and dying in the North African desert). As such incidents leave no survivors to report interference and change the timeline, they can freely remove the living but soon-to-die victims, and replace them with convincing corpses they have manufactured in the future.

Either that (haha looong stretch) or it's a intelligence operation. That other plane that went missing in the ocean had some very important business people on it. 150 lives is not a big deal if it means taking out one 'hard to get" person and no matter what it has to look like a accident.

The United States didnt blink a eye when they killed 69 school children with a drone strike in order to take out - one man.

Either way, very strange.

[Glacier]

The sad thing is that if Europe would have adopted the same policy as Canada and the US, this would not have happened because they would not have had only one person in the cockpit.

[zerograv]

although early the details seem a little odd to me. pilot goes to bathroom, co pilot locks the door and drives the plane into a mountain. What if the pilot never went to the bathroom? is there any chance that maybe the copilot was unconscious or had sort of medical emergency? why do they instantly jump to the conclusion that it was intentional? (not saying it wasn't)

[The Green Barbarian]

The United States didnt blink a eye when they killed 69 school children with a drone strike in order to take out - one man.

.

And those suicide bombers in Yemen didn't bat an eye when they took out 139 people in a mosque either. That's just as relevant to this discussion.

[OREZ]

although early the details seem a little odd to me. pilot goes to bathroom, co pilot locks the door and drives the plane into a mountain. What if the pilot never went to the bathroom? is there any chance that maybe the copilot was unconscious or had sort of medical emergency? why do they instantly jump to the conclusion that it was intentional? (not saying it wasn't)

Probably because he had to manually lock the pilot out and then he took it out of auto-pilot to put it into a sharp descent.

[The Green Barbarian]

although early the details seem a little odd to me. pilot goes to bathroom, co pilot locks the door and drives the plane into a mountain. What if the pilot never went to the bathroom? is there any chance that maybe the copilot was unconscious or had sort of medical emergency? why do they instantly jump to the conclusion that it was intentional? (not saying it wasn't)

If the guy was unconscious how could he have locked out the other pilot? It had to be a deliberate act to lock out the other pilot, otherwise the pilot that left to go to the bathroom would have been able to get into the cockpit again. He was locked out on purpose. And the actions of the plane show that they were under human control in the last minutes of operation, once again ruling out incapacitation of the pilot. All signs point to a deliberate act, the only question now is why.

I see that the bureaucracy has already lurched into action with yet another knee-jerk...

http://www.castanet.net/edition/news-st ... htm#136145

There's probably going to be a lot more pilots now "holding it" rather than leaving the cockpit, especially if they don't know the person that they are flying with. I always wondered why pilots couldn't take care of business before take-off, as you do see a lot of them leaving to go to the bathroom during flights, even short two hour hops.

[JLives]

I thought cockpit doors had to always be locked now. It doesn't make sense that they would remain locked except if the pilot or co-pilot needed to go to the bathroom as that would create a security risk. Don't they also suspect the Malaysian airliner may have been brought down intentionally by the pilot?

[The Green Barbarian]

I thought cockpit doors had to always be locked now. It doesn't make sense that they would remain locked except if the pilot or co-pilot needed to go to the bathroom as that would create a security risk. Don't they also suspect the Malaysian airliner may have been brought down intentionally by the pilot?

They have to be locked, yes, but my understanding is that there are two types of "Locked":

1. Locked, but in a mode where the pilot can enter a code and still access the cockpit
2. Locked, and only the person inside the cockpit can allow entry

The second lock mode was to combat the scenario where someone with the code who is outside the cockpit could still enter a locked cockpit. This is the mode that the co-pilot put the door in, and so the pilot couldn't get in, as his access code did not work. Which once again points to a deliberate act.

[OREZ]

That's correct. The article I read said that the code to access from outside had been over-ridden.

[Glacier]

Clearly the government doesn't know the Canadian standard already in place because the minister is saying that effective immediately two must be in the cockpit at all times, when in fact this is already the case for Canada and USA. I suspect it will be for inter-European flights as well now too.