Germanwings Crash In Alps

[Pensador]

Now it appears one of the pilots was locked out of the cockpit during the incident according the black box. Hmmm this might get interesting.

 

[Ceviche]

Three fellow Agies also died in it.

Feeling crestfallen.

 

[scotttswan]

one pilot leaves, other pilot has heart attack / aneurysm and hits the autopilot descent button by accident, the door is shut and the plane crashes?

 

[wineguy999]

I did not know flight attendants took the pilot's spot in case she/he needed to use the bathroom. My understanding was that the doors were shut and never to be opened during flight? I just assumed they had a bathroom in the cockpit... Clearly, I am plane ignorant. GS_Dirtboy (almost wrote Dirtyboy -- feel as though I've done that in the past), what say you?

Not GSDirtboy here, but flown in luxe class enough to observe that, if a pilot leaves the cockpit, a flight attendant goes in. And they are always on guard at the door when it's open.

 

[scotttswan]

Basically, if both pilots are passed out in the chair the flight staff can enter an emergency code into the key pad. An alarm will ring for 30 seconds in the cockpit. Whoever is in the cockpit can disable the request for access.
In the event of an emergency whereby something happened to the pilots, or the cockpit was empty it'd take 30 seconds to get into the cockpit.
In the event of an attempted hijacking using the emergency code, the pilots could repeatedly pull the deny switch and cancel the requests.
So.. Basically, this just got really fucking interesting.
Either everyone onboard forgot the emergency code, and the other pilot was passed out.. Or the other pilot was cancelling the door open request.
The quick descent is also apparently about as quick as the plane would allow you to do a nose dive..
Why aren't they releasing the names of the pilots? Is that normal procedure?

taken from reddit

 

[johnw100]

Now it appears one of the pilots was locked out of the cockpit during the incident according the black box. Hmmm this might get interesting.

Exactly why airlines need cctv on the plane. Was this pilot awake or unconscious. They may never know.

 

[GS_Dirtboy]

Putting cctv in the cockpit has not been accepted by pilots or airlines. Privacy issues have been cited by pilots. Further, if they had cctv in this jet's cockpit it would only tell you what happened. It would not provide for a solution to the problem during the emergency which is always the priority. There are clear procedures for cockpit management that appear not to have been followed in this incident. Those procedures are explicitly designed to prevent a scenario such as what we are witnessing.

Putting cctv on the aircraft exterior to let the pilots see what is going in areas of the a/c they can't see from the cockpit has been supported. This would give pilots critical information about failures that are difficult to determine in modern airliners. Installing real-time downlinks of the CVR and FDR has been discussed as well - especially after MH370. This would provide investigators with critical information in the event that the CVR and FDR either cannot be found or if the data is unusable.

In the end it is a cost / benefit question. The number of accidents per mile / kilometer flown is incredibly small. You can check statistics to see the many more common ways you are likely to die than from being in a crash of an airliner.

 

[steveinbsas]

Now it appears one of the pilots was locked out of the cockpit during the incident according the black box. Hmmm this might get interesting.

According to the French prosecutor in Maeseille, it's beginning to look sinister, as in an intentional (and sucicdal/homicidal) act on the part of the co-pilot, Andreas Lubitz.

 

[GS_Dirtboy]

One of the scenarios that occurred to me and fit the evidence that we had early on was murder / suicide by the one of the pilots. That is extremely rare - I can think of only one other instance and that was EgyptAir 900 where the pilots were actually fighting each other over the controls. They determined the cause by looking at the FDR which showed each control column going in opposite directions of the other and the CVR which captured the audio of the fight.

 

[steveinbsas]

There is no evidence that the co-pilot was incapacitated. His breathing (as heard on the CVR) has been reported as normal while the plane was descending and the pilot could be heard pounding on the cockpit door. Apparently, the co-pilot did not utter a single word during the descent, but passengers could be heard screaming just before the impact.

CNNI is giving the story almost nonstop coverage (as they have other recent airline disasters).