Author Topic: BREAKING NEWS: Passenger plane carrying 148 people crashes in the French Alps en route from Spain to Germany  (Read 1586 times)

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Offline mountaineer

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BREAKING NEWS: Passenger plane carrying 148 people crashes in the French Alps en route from Spain to Germany

Airbus A320 sent distress signal at 9.47am GMT before vanishing off radar
Aircraft was carrying 142 passengers, two pilots and six cabin crew
President Francois Hollande does not expect there to be any survivors
Jet was operated by Lufthansa's Germanwings budget airline

By Simon Tomlinson and Darren Boyle for MailOnline
Published: 05:45 EST, 24 March 2015  | Updated: 06:23 EST, 24 March 2015


A plane carrying 142 passengers and six crew has crashed in the southern French Alps en route from Spain to Germany.

The Airbus A320 was flying from Barcelona to Dusseldorf when it disappeared from radar in the Alpes de Hautes Provence after sending a distress signal at 10.47am local time (9.47am GMT).

French president Francois Hollande said that he did not expect there to be any survivors.

Debris from the jet, operated by Lufthansa's Germanwings budget airline, was found near Barcelonnette, according to the French Interior Ministry.

French Prime Minister Manuel Valls said he understood between 142 and 150 people were on board and feared dead. ...


More at Daily Mail

Offline mountaineer

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27s ago
09:03

During the flight the Airbus was in contact with air control at Marseilles. The message was “mayday, mayday,mayday” and the pilot requested an emergency descent meaning ATC had to clear all air space below the route of the aircraft. Apparently, an emergency descent generally happens at a rate of 5,000 feet a minute, but the Germanwings flight was descending at 3,375 feet a minutes.

Gerard Feltzer, an aviation expert told BFM TV that the plane was already extremely low when it issued its distress signal and he imagined the pilots had tried to deal with the emergency before issuing their message, at which point it appeared they had already lost control of the aircraft.

Francis Hermitte, mayor of Seyne-Les-Alpes,a village near the site of the crash told BFM TV it happened in the Massif des Trois Evêchés which would have been the first major mountain range in the southern Alps that the aircraft would have come across. It’s around 2,700 and 3,000 meters high.


More at The Guardian (live updates)

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Offline kevindavis007

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Based on Druge, the plane Disintegrated...
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http://news.yahoo.com/germanwings-says-jet-plunged-eight-minutes-150706074.html

Germanwings says jet plunged for eight minutes

Cologne (Germany) (AFP) - The Airbus A320 jet which crashed in the French Alps Tuesday had only just reached a cruising altitude of 38,000 feet before it descended rapidly for eight minutes, the low-cost carrier Germanwings said.

The pilot had "more than 10 years of experience" and some 6,000 flying hours under his belt and the jet had undergone a thorough check in the summer of 2013, Germanwings executive Thomas Winkelmann told a news conference.
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Offline kevindavis007

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Offline mountaineer

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I haven't heard the pilot's name yet, but I hope this wasn't a homegrown jihad thingey.

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I haven't heard the pilot's name yet, but I hope this wasn't a homegrown jihad thingey.

Well they found the black box...that should tell them a lot..even if one of the pilots was screaming allah akbar during the plane's desent..
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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/germany/11493388/Several-Germanwings-flights-cancelled-after-crew-refused-to-fly.html

Several Germanwings flights cancelled after crew refused to fly
Pilots and cabin crew refused to fly over concerns the Germanwings flight 4U 9525 crash may have been linked to a repair to the nose-wheel landing doors



By Justin Huggler, Berlin

9:59PM GMT 24 Mar 2015

Several Germanwings flights were cancelled on Tuesday after their crews refused to fly, as it emerged that the aircraft which crashed in the French Alps had been grounded for an hour for repairs the day before the accident.

Pilots and cabin crew refused to fly over concerns the crash may have been linked to a repair to the nose-wheel landing doors on Monday, according to an unconfirmed report in Spiegel magazine.

Lufthansa denied that there was any link between the repair and the cancelled flights.

Crews were refusing to fly for “personal reasons”, a spokesman for the airline group said.

The airline confirmed that the aircraft which crashed into the Alps had been grounded for an hour on Monday for repairs to the nose-wheel landing doors, but insisted the issue was not “safety-related”.

“The repair was purely to fix a noise that the door was making, and the aircraft was flying again from 10am on Monday,” the spokesman said.

It completed several flights safely after the repair before the accident, she added.

Lufthansa admitted that several Germanwings flights had to be cancelled after crews refused to fly, but said it was because they were in “deep distress” over the accident.

A report in the online version of the widely respected Spiegel claimed that the crews’ reluctance to fly was linked to concerns that the repair may have contributed to the flight.

Further disruption is expected today after Germanwings flights from Dusseldorf to several destinations were cancelled.

Three flights from Stuttgart were also cancelled.

There were reports of lights at Dusseldorf being cancelled as passengers waited to board at the gate, and of airline ground staff advising passengers to hire cars to complete their journeys instead.

Reports that Lufthansa’s own flights were also affected were denied by the airline.
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rangerrebew

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Germanwings French Alps crash: Why did doomed Airbus A320 descend for eight minutes without issuing distress signal?

Officials say there remains confusion over the final moments of the lost plane, which was carrying 150 people when it came down in southern France




 Adam Withnall   Author Biography
 


Airline officials say confusion continues to surround the final moments of the Germanwings Airbus A320 that crashed in the French Alps on Tuesday morning.
 


All 150 passengers on board the plane are feared dead, as reports from the crash site suggest it could take “days” to recover the bodies of victims from an area of debris spanning kilometres.

President Francois Hollande has said there will be a full investigation into what caused the plane to plummet into the side of a mountain in a remote region 100 miles north of Nice, calling it “a tragedy on our soil”.

French Prime Minister Manuel Valls said that search teams had managed to land near the site but found no survivors, adding that there were no indications as to what caused the crash.


Last moments of the plane

Speaking in Cologne, Germanwings CEO Thomas Winkelmann revealed that the plane began descending shortly after it reached cruising height following take-off from Barcelona airport.

10.01am CET Flight 4U 9525 takes off

10.44am Plane reaches cruising altitude

10.45am Plane begins unexplained descent

10.47am Air traffic controllers issue ‘third phase’ distress call

10.53am Radar and radio contact breaks off

A long descent

According to Mr Winkelmann, the plane started to descend very shortly after it reached its cruising altitude – and continued to do so for eight minutes until it crashed into the mountain at an altitude of some 5,000ft.

He said there was no explanation for why this descent from 38,000ft began, but said the 24-year-old plane was checked the day before the flight and that the captain on board was very experienced, with more than 10 years’ service and 6,000 hours of flying time.

Was there a distress signal?

France's aviation regulator has said that the plane “did not itself make a distress call” during its eight-minute descent from cruising altitude.

While Germanwings’ Mr Winkelmann said there was still some confusion as to whether a distress signal had been sent from the plane, the DGAC authority said that controllers on the ground issued the “distress” call – the third and most serious of three stages of alerts used to help coordinate rescue efforts when an aircraft is considered in difficulty.

“The combination of the loss of radio contact and the aircraft's descent which led the controller to implement the distress phase,” a spokesman said.

Why no word from the cockpit?

The fact that there was seemingly no distress signal issued by the pilots themselves does not necessarily tell us much about what was going on in the cockpit at the time.

Speaking in London, aviation expert Mary Schiavo told CNN that a sudden disaster that disabled the crew, like rapid decompression, was just one of a number of possible explanations.

“[The fact there was] no distress call would explain why the pilots didn’t turn back for other airports or veer from the course that was heading straight for the mountains,” she said.

Read more:  • Live updates on the Airbus crash
 • 'A tragedy on our soil': Latest from the site in France
 • Plane 'flew into the side of the mountain', say witnesses
 • First images emerge from crash site in the Alps

“[But] with no distress call we don’t know what the pilots knew, what the plane was doing and we don’t know the emergency.

“There are a lot of different scenarios [that involve] no distress call and that explain why they continued to descend into the Alps,” she added.

Another analyst, David Soucie, told the broadcaster that the very act of putting out a distress signal takes some concentration and time and would not necessarily be “the priority” for pilots struggling with an emergency situation.

Did the plane crash in a storm?

UK meteorologists have said they expect bad weather to be ruled out as a cause for the crash at an early stage in the investigation.

Though it is mountainous, there were no significant storms reported in the area.

French emergency services workers (back) and members of the French gendarmerie gather in Seyne, south-eastern France, near the site where a Germanwings Airbus A320 crashed in the French Alps French emergency services workers (back) and members of the French gendarmerie gather in Seyne, south-eastern France, near the site where a Germanwings Airbus A320 crashed in the French Alps  Dr Rob Thompson, from the University of Reading, told Sky News: "The weather conditions in the area of southern France where the crash is reported to have occurred look like nothing out of the ordinary for this time of year."

What about terrorism?

While there has been little word on the possibility that the crash could be a terror attack in France or Germany, the US has been quick to rule it out as a likely cause.

White House national security spokeswoman Bernadette Meehan told Fox News: "There is no indication of a nexus to terrorism at this time."

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/germanwings-french-alps-crash-why-did-doomed-airbus-a320-descend-for-eight-minutes-without-issuing-a-distress-signal-10131005.html
« Last Edit: March 25, 2015, 09:13:06 am by rangerrebew »

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http://www.scotsman.com/news/transport/germanwings-a320-crash-plane-fell-for-18-minutes-1-3728106

11:29Wednesday 25 March 2015

NEW evidence has emerged that the Germanwings Airbus A320 that crashed in southern France yesterday dived for 18 minutes, and not eight as previously thought.

France’s Transport Minister Segolene Royal said this morning that the crew had stopped responding to radio messages at 10.30am, with the plane flying over the Mediterranean sea.

The aircraft crashed into the side of a mountain in the French Alps at 10.48am, suggesting that the plane had descended from 28,000ft to 2,000ft without signalling an emergency.

Ms Royal added that events in the cockpit in the 60 seconds between 10.30am and 10.31am were ‘crucial’ and could shed light on what caused the disaster.

There were apparently no survivors from the 144 passengers - including 16 schoolchildren and two teachers - and six crew on board Flight 4U 9525, which crashed near Digne in the French Alps.

The aircraft was on its way from Barcelona to Dusseldorf when it crashed yesterday morning on a mountainside near Meolans-Revels and the popular Pra Loup ski resort.

continued
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A careful check of the passenger list may offer further insight.

That is true but this particular type of plane has previously been involved in some very similar incidents and the most telling thing I've heard so far is that the computers not the pilots have the final say in flying the thing.
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Offline EC

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Would it kill the chattering monkeys of the press to WAIT FOR THE DAMNED RECORDER TRANSCRIPTS? They have both been found already.

But no - let's speculate wildly instead.

Well, here's speculation based on experience.

The plane will have crashed due to shoddy and infrequent maintenence. The crews know this, which is why several have refused to fly. The end report will, to save Lufthansa's blushes and share price, primarily blame pilot error since they are both dead and can't complain.
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Offline flowers

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http://www.foxnews.com/world/2015/03/25/investigators-face-daunting-search-for-clues-to-germanwings-flight-disaster/?intcmp=trending

Quote
Searchers Wednesday found an empty second “black box” from the doomed German passenger plane that crashed into the Alps, killing 150 people including two Americans.

French President Francois Hollande said the flight data recorder case was found without any contents. The crash apparently dislodged the recorder's memory card which is still missing.

Search teams found the mangled first black box, the cockpit voice recorder, just hours after the Germanwings plane crashed Tuesday. French officials said Wednesday afternoon that investigators had retrieved an audiophile form the recorder with "usable sound and voice." They hope to make conclusions about recordings in a few days.

Investigators need the two black boxes to solve the biggest mystery: what caused the Airbus A320 to descend over an 8-minute period without any pilot indication the aircraft was in trouble. The experienced pilot had the plane at 38,000 feet, but only for a minute. Then suddenly and inexplicably, the jet descended apparently


Offline flowers

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Germanwings Crash Investigation Hits Snag in Retrieving Data

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/26/world/europe/germanwings-airbus-crash.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=photo-spot-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=2

Quote
PARIS — Rescuers resumed the difficult task of searching for the 150 victims of a deadly plane crash in the French Alps, as the search for clues was dealt a setback Wednesday afternoon.

Investigators said they had so far been unable to retrieve any data from the plane’s cockpit voice recorder, and the inquiry has been hampered further, an official said, by the discovery that the second black box, which was found on Wednesday, was severely damaged, and its memory card dislodged and missing.

The plane, an Airbus A320 operated by the budget carrier Germanwings, was en route to Düsseldorf, Germany, from Barcelona, Spain, on Tuesday morning when it lost altitude rapidly and slammed into the French Alps, killing all 144 passengers and six crew members on board.

Oh my CNN will have a field day with this news.