that we really need the FDR to make a conclusive assessment.

It would also seem that we have just discovered a flaw in the security system. Suppose the same scenario, but the remaining pilot suffers a seizure/stroke/heart attack. How does the remaining pilot get back into the cockpit to regain control of the plane?

Apparently he can't, and that is a problem.

...i.e, a flight attendant would take the place of the missing crew member (not to fly the plane, but to have a 2nd person to open the door should the remaining flight crew member pass out or something).

they certainly could kill the 2nd person in the cockpit.

Killing by machine is a lot different from killing hand-to-hand.

Even if assaulted, the second person could gain access to the door.

plane. The flight attendant might not be able to stop him...

The FA would at least have a better chance of getting the door open to let the other FO in.

over rides that feature.

The solution to the door problem is for the cockpit surveillance to disallow the door lock mechanism from locking if there is only one company person in the cockpit.

In the situation you described the pilot would be able to get back in through a keycode system. The co-pilot had used the lockout button which overrides the keycode and keeps the door locked.

a lockout button. Wow. No wonder he took an axe to try to break down the armored door. Good God, one sick person. Could have tried to get more medical help or just done it at home with pills-

Horrible.

that the airline was going to fire him. It is illogical to think that a 28 year old, with a good future, would consider suicide. If the airline was considering firing him, they should not have allowed him back into an airplane cocpit.

Not so illogical to think this person may have done this.

However, it is all speculation - there are dozens of scenerios that could have created this outcome.

both physical and psychological. Surely there is some medical literature on young, healthy people committing suicide.

physically than us old farts.

apparently are the expert on suicide. i question your mental health as you feel the need to reply to posts in a negative manner, like calling someone stupid.

If mental illness was logical, it wouldn't be an illness.

Glad you're here. I'm just really personally messed up by the very thought of this. My husband's a pilot, not of jets, certainly. Just at the civil aviation level. This is so damn sad, so distressing. I feel so terrible for all those people - I guess it was the reports that tell of people in the plane being heard screaming. They probably knew at some point that they were doomed. How horrible is that!

And I actually feel for that copilot, too. I guess there's no way to know why. Haven't heard anything in the coverage about him facing being fired or reprimanded. Can't help but wonder if his personal life had caved in on him in one way or another. Girlfriend dumped him? Friend betrayed him (or that's how he saw it)? We may never know what made him do this, if indeed it was one of those "goodbye cruel world" kinds of things. One has to be in a pretty dark place to do something like this.

I don't, he took another 149 people to their deaths with him, that makes him a mass murderer. He could easily have done this at home with pills or engine exhaust or jump off a bridge or high building...none of which would have killed 149 other innocent people.

It's hard to understand. Very true - it's hard to justify. And I'm not trying to make any excuses. It just doesn't make sense. Yet I do find myself wondering what could have caused him to do this. Nobody just does something like this on a lark, seems to me. But I'm certainly no expert.

And he took them in the most horrifying, frightening way possible (imo). I am no stranger to depression, but that was a supremely selfish thing to do.

News so far doesn't indicate that the employer was going to fire him, in fact news reports say they weren't even aware of his illness which he hid. The airline is also getting ready for legal battles, wants to play like it was a big surprise to them also, so they aren't responsible according to some. Terrible tragedy for the innocent and all.

The First Officer was Andreas Lubitz. He was "young". He was from Montabaur, in Rhineland-Palatinate. He had 630 flight hours. He joined Germanwings in September 2013 straight from the Lufthansa Flight Training School in Bremen.

From: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/11496066/Andreas-Lubitz-and-Patrick-S-What-do-we-know-about-the-pilots-on-Germanwings-flight-4U9525.html

That seems a bit low. I was told I couldn't even consider an ATP job w/ less than a thousand hrs...

requirements in the US but I think it's more than that.

on an airline.

manually begin the descent and crash the plane into a mountain without saying a word for 10 minutes? That all of that happened because he was a 'beginner'?

Perhaps you should alert the appropriate authorities because it seems like they are headed in a very different direction with this.

I was referring to the article claiming the FO had been recognized for some sort of aviation excellence.

No pilot with just 620 hours has had enough time to be recognized as an outstanding aviator.

However, the fact that he was almost a beginner had nothing to do with this crash. It appears that he was hell bent on killing himself and others. He had enough skill to cut the power and allow the plane to crash into the mountains.

You could have gotten clarification from me without the sarcasm of your last sentence.

However, while it's likely that the FO did carry out a suicide attempt, we still might not know the full story. We could hear the Captain beating on the door and passengers crying. However, as far as we know, the Captain said nothing. That seemed odd.

I just watched the update on NBC, truly horrifying.

No distress call, controlled descent, wow...

primarily young international students, I mourn especially the deaths of the 16 German high-school students who, in another setting, could easily have been my students. I'm going to be depressed as fuck teaching today but will try not to let my students see it.

FYI: The New York Times also has an excellent top-of-the-fold article but it hides behind a subscription paywall (at least for me). I was able to read it on my smartphone, but can't get the link to paste here.

You're not alone. This story is gonna be bothering me all day, too. Probably a whole lot of people are feeling the same way today - even those (like me) who are far removed from a tragedy like this.

It just does not make any sense--to have so much hatred for people--that
if you decide to commit suicide you take 150 innocent souls with you. If he wanted
to go out flying...well, rent a plane and drive it into a mountain by yourself.

How terribly, awfully sad for everyone. I cannot imagine it.

In a very dark place. Maybe in that state of mind, you don't even have the presence-of-mind to think about anybody else. You're just in deep desperate darkness. Convinced that no one can help, that the situation is un-correctable, beyond desperate? Maybe he'd been nursing this silently, alone, for awhile? Maybe he'd been trying to push it aside? And just move on? And he just couldn't? And he finally snapped? I don't know that anyone will ever be able to determine what drove him to do this. Makes me think of Robin Williams.

It's so sad. Horribly sad. Heartbreaking.

Robin Williams was found to have presence of Lewy bodies in his brain
on autopsy. He was facing a horribly progressive, degenerative, terminal neurological disease.

You're totally correct. But at least we have SOME explanation in his case. I'd guess we're ALL at a loss to explain this one. Feeble attempts being made at the moment, including mine. I guess it's human nature to try to make sense of stuff, including the stuff there's no way to make sense of.

Slightly different headline at link now...

IMHO--murder-suicide although the words not used.


Germanwings co-pilot intended to destroy plane, says French prosecutor – live updates

Co-pilot crashed plane deliberately, says French prosecutor
Co-pilot named as Andreas Lubitz, a 28-year-old German citizen
Investigators have recording of cockpit ‘voices and sounds’
Villagers in Alps prepare for arrival of families


.........Cries could be heard just before the impact, the prosecutor said. “The death would have been sudden, immediate.”
Air traffic controllers attempted to contact the plane in the last few minutes before the crash but received no reply from the cockpit.

I will never understand it.

It was a rapid descent but it was NOT a true nose-dive suicide like Egypt Air 990 or Silk Air 185. It only takes a couple minutes to nose-dive from cruising altitude, this flight descended over the course of several minutes, more consistent with an emergency descent due to depressurization. Obviously, suicide is still a very likely hypotheses, but given this distinction you can't rule out a medical situation either.

What if the co-pilot was having some sort of aneurysm or stroke and mistook his declining cognitive function and disorientation as the signs of hypoxia instead? He would have tried to don oxygen and enter an emergency descent... which wouldn't have helped the situation as his problem was not lack of oxygen due to pressure...

That was a deliberate act which overrode the ability of the captain to get back in using his keypad code.

A medical emergency is unlikely, but possible even in a 28 year-old. But it would not have caused the copilot to manually lock the door which is the only thing that could have prevented access by the captain for this long.

I'm sure mental illness was involved - suicidal depression. Some have suggested that the trigger was the ongoing labor situation - Germanwings was due to have major changes in a few months, and these were not at all favorable for the staff. There was a labor action.

It also turns out that the plane had the video so the copilot could see who was requesting entry - so no hijack theory holds up at all. This was deliberate destruction of the plane.

to lock the flight deck door at all possible times now?

if the co-pilot was in the midst of blacking out due to some medical condition he wouldn't be able to open the door again, nor do much of anything really.

i think the devil is in the details of which the public is not privy to at this point in the investigation. E.g. "there is the sound of breathing", was this breathing uniform and calm up until the end (consistent more with medical incapacity) or variable and seemingly reactive to the situation (consistent more with deliberate and conscious action)?

i don't trust a general prosecutor to get the conclusions right over actual professional air crash investigators this early in the investigation.

In normal mode, the door automatically locks. The crew inside the cockpit can see who is requesting entry and unlock to admit.

But pilot incapacitation is a possibility, so there is a key-code that flight crew can use to get in from the outside. That key-code has about a half-minute of delay, so in a hostage situation in which attackers were trying to gain entry, the flight crew can then manually override the key-code to prevent access by locking the door after the key-code has been entered. That is what the copilot did. In the event of incapacitation or emergency, he would not have done that.

The manual lock has an expiration, but one too short in this instance for the outside pilot to get back in (or the the manual override was used twice).

In the event of a decompression, there are features which are supposed to open the door. Well, perhaps that wouldn't have worked, but the manual lock wouldn't have been used.

Apparently they have recovered some cockpit video from the crash site indicating nothing abnormal in the cockpit, and a decompression would have involved other sounds, and is inconsistent with everything else. For one thing, in a decompression the pilot outside and the flight crew would have had to run for their oxygen bottles. The fact that there appears from the recording to have been no general alarm until just before fatal impact is entirely inconsistent with any sort of systems integrity problem.

They wouldn't have announced this unless they were quite sure.

What we have is one pilot locked outside and a controlled and deliberate flight into terrain selected by the pilot in the cockpit, and the flight trajectory would have involved a manual override of the autopilot's safety systems (it was too steep a decline to be automatically selected by the autopilot).

doesn't have a key/keycode defeat the purpose of the security door? If I am a bad guy I can get the key or code from you and gain the flight deck. The idea of the lock was to keep people out. They may have overlooked this possibility.

The doors have unlocked, secured (open with key code), and locked (where the codes don't work)...

The co-pilot put the door from secured to locked.

I swear... People on the internet think they are a freakin' expert at everything...

I asked a question, which you and several other people answered.

The snark was uncalled for.

right up to impact. There was nothing wrong with the guy's health...at least physically. There was no depressurization. None.

He had to override the locking system to keep the pilot out. He had to manually initiate the decent.

This was done deliberately. The question is why.

The co-pilot would have had to physically hold a toggle switch to lock to keep the door locked.

There is a keypad entry for emergencies which any crew member could otherwise have used to gain entry.

There is an automatic expiration, but either it was set for longer than time to impact or the copilot used it twice.

I can't imagine the horror of the survivors on hearing this news.

then yes, deliberate action would be the explanation.

the point about breathing though i find pretty vague, breathing just means you're not dead yet (and "breathing normally" is not very well specified either).

(I forget NYT or Guardian). The timing of the keypad is very specific: the door remains locked for 30 seconds and then allows 5 seconds to enter. So the co-pilot only had to hold that toggle switch for a short time. On the recording, the pilot can be heard calling to the co-pilot, then yelling to him, then desperately trying to break the door down.

There are other parts of the description, eg that the co-pilot actively put the plane on a specific descent path that would prevent people from feeling or noticing the descent until the last moments. On the recording, they don't start screaming until the very end, just before it hits.

"the system uses a 'flight protection envelope' to prevent pilots from what is called “over-corrrecting”—forcing the airplane into a maneuver that could destabilize it—the Germanwings A320 did not breach this safeguard in its descent"

...where it crashed is nearly vertical, so even if he were flying straight and level, the impact w/ the mountain would've been just as catastrophic.

Just guessing, take it with as many grains of salt as you want.

I assume you are thinking this young pilot took out a large policy and then tried to fake an accident? But if he had done that, he wouldn't have put the plane into an controlled descent. It was the descent path, clearly controlled, which showed that the plane had not suffered any major malfunction.

and "Terrorism" is ruled out if there are no "ties" to Arabs or Muslims.

. . . it will stand as a classic illustration of the perils of unintended consequences. The extremely secure cockpit doors were installed after 9-11. But apparently, in trying to guard against one kind of threat, aircraft designers created another.

This is precisely why I have said, ever since 9-11, that all of the "security measures" taken after 9-11 ultimately fail to make us any safer. One can never anticipate every vulnerability, and someone determined to do harm will always find whatever vulnerability we failed to foresee.

Among the general population the chance of a passenger being a terrorist is far greater than the pilot being one (or suicidal). Among the population of pilots, that's going to be much more limited.

Maybe a code that the other pilot can use. We can come up with a way to keep everyone out but pilots and at the same time make it so one pilot cannot lock out another.

There was another case awhile back where a pilot wanted asylum and flew the plane somewhere else, locking his co-pilot out. So it's not even always death and suicide.

. . . There is something close to 30,000 commercial flights in the U.S. <i>alone</i>, per day, ferrying approximately 2,000,000 passengers per day. God knows what those numbers are worldwide. And how often has there been a deliberate crashing of a plane? From 2000 through 2009, there were 18 commercial hijackings worldwide, four of which (on 9-11) were deliberately crashed. At 2,000,000 passengers (in the U.S. alone) per day, that nearly 1.1 billion passengers per year, and over 10 years, that's 11 billion. In that same period, there were, worldwide, 19 hijackings (including the 4 from 9/11) carried out by 51 hijackers. Even if they had all occurred in the U.S., 51 hijackers out of 11 billion passengers is an infinitesimally small number: 0.000000463636363636364%.

Now, let's assume that each of these 30,000 daily commercial flights were piloted by a separate crew of 2 pilots. (Actually, there would be a great deal of overlap, but for the sake of argument, let's assume a different crew for each of those flights. That's 60,000 pilots flying per day, 21,900,000 per year, and over the 10 year period 219 million. Now, even if we only counted the current incident and the other one you mention among deliberate pilot hijackings, that's 2 out of 219 million, or 0.000000913242009132420%, or nearly DOUBLE the rate of hijackings by passengers. And of course, we know the number of pilots is nowhere near that high, because many would fly multiple flights over that period. So, if anything, the actual statistical rate of deliberate crashes/hijackings by pilots is significantly higher still.

The statistics simply don't support your theory. The historical data show that the reinforced passenger doors, in helping to prevent a cockpit from being overtaken by passengers, actually create a vulnerability that, historically at least, has been MORE likely to occur.

But people tend to see the hijacking as more of a fear factor. But yes it could be that crazy pilots might be more likely.

...for the only reason that, should the remaining crew member become incapacitated, the flight attendant would be able to open the door for the returning flight crew member. I guess that's not something they do in other countries?

Maybe the'll adopt it now in Germany/Europe.

and no, we can not always be safe--even as we try.

I call this foul play. Wonder if those folks will show up soon.

but we know lots more today from that French investigator. He sure did a quick but thorough job. Lufthansa must be breathing a little better now that it wasn't a defect in the plane. But jeez, it sure calls into question its capability to screen out new pilots who have psychological issues at that magnitude...if it is indeed possible to do that 100%...

Lufthansa is probably in respiratory arrest.

As is the person who let this kid fly. I can't wait to see where his clout came from.

Committing suicide is one thing, but taking 150 people with you is quite another. Deliberate mass murder.

Workplace violence is sadly not rare. In most cases, it involves a disgruntled man with a gun who goes after colleagues and everyone in the vicinity. In this case, the man didn't need a gun.

Where a disgruntled employee got on the plane without going through security and had a gun and used that to get the pilot out of the way. Then they realized that employees should go through security, too.

at the crash site.

And there was another case -- a FedEx or UPS plane -- where the pilots were attacked by a fellow employee, but they managed to fight him off and land the plane.

Pacific Southwest Airlines flight 1771 was a commercial flight that crashed near Cayucos, California, United States, on December 7, 1987, as a result of a murder–suicide by one of the passengers. All 43 people on board the aircraft died, five of whom were shot to death before the plane crashed. The man who caused the crash, David Burke, was a disgruntled former employee of USAir, the parent company of PSA.

I still shiver at the thought of it.

I didn't know the man, it was a large regional office for the late Digital Equipment Corporation. It was still completely shocking.

mental health issues.

the details pretty much confirm it.

I don't understand people who need to take a bunch of strangers with them.

Union Strike over Lufthansa cutting benefits, raising retirement age, to cut costs

This pilot would have been personally affected by the proposed changes that caused the strike.

from the article.

The ultimate Strike Action.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1014&pid=1049589

Not a bunch of innocents that have nothing to do with it! That's something I don't get about Muslim terrorists. Go after those who are making the policies that are exploiting your nations and your people. That is the only way to stop it. They don't give a crap if you kill civilians. As long as it is profitable for them they aren't going to stop what they are doing. Ok, rant off.

Not saying it's not true, but Stern is being pretty coy about it. Basically, they have an unidentified source who reports rumors internally at Lufthansa. It may cash out, but that's as close to a non-news item as one gets and still gets published.

Also, a non-Google translation.

Stern source: Co-Pilot Known to have Psychological Problems

The co-pilot, named Andreas Lubitz according to the prosecutor, was 28 years old, and lived in the Rhineland-Palatinate town of Montabaur, according to the town's mayor, Gabriele Wieland. Lubitz lived there with his parents, who would have been informed of all the findings, according to investigators. His parents were at the crash site, like the other families. "However, we have not placed them together with the other families," said the prosecutor.

In addition, he had kept a residence in Dusseldorf. He had worked at Germanwings since 2013. With 630 flight hours under his belt, he was relatively inexperienced. As Stern has learned, there were internal rumors at Lufthansa that he had struggled with psychological problems.

-----------------------------------

Thanks for the source, anyway!

said that the co-pilot interrupted his training for a few months 6 years ago, but he was not at liberty to say why.

Too many of these planes going down. Was the co-pilot some kind of religious fanatic..? Somethings up is my sense. Something common to all these disasters.And it still may be my observation and crazy idea that a "timed release" orderless gas canister was installed in cockpit to render the pilots dead or unconscious.Wild theory but possible.

They have a keycode they can use to get back in if the one inside doesn't open the door, but it has about a half minute of delay, during which the crew inside the cockpit can use another control to manually lock the door for a longer period. That's to prevent an attacker from getting in who either is a member of the flight crew or who has forced a member of the flight crew to divulge the code.

So if the pilot inside were incapacitated, the pilot outside would still have been able to get back into the cockpit in under a minute.

Also if the pilot inside were incapacitated, the descent would not have been selected with at least a manual override of the rate of speed (to go down faster).

There have been multiple suicide/murder incidents by pilots before. Some airlines have codes saying that there must always be a second person in the cockpit. But would that always work? A deranged pilot could probably take out an unsuspecting crew member.

"Spohr addresses the issue of cockpit saftey. “What has happened here is a tragic individual event,” he says. “We are trying to deal with an enigma.” No systems could prevent such an event, he says.

He acknowledges that, in response to terror threats, cockpit doors have been reinforced such that they cannot be opened even “by weapons”. The doors can only be opened by pilots using a code that all air crew know off by heart. But this can be over-ridden from the cockpit. So even if the pilot entered the code in the door from the outside, the co-pilot would have been able to press a button that deployed a five-minute over-ride."

So at least once, the manual override was triggered to prevent the pilot from getting back into the cockpit. The individual airline will know what their programmed interval was for this plane.

The pilot was deliberately locked out and the plane was deliberately set onto its fatal trajectory.

The weak point in systems here was located in the wetware.

The co-pilot had to actively lock the pilot out to prevent the external keypad entry from working. He actively chose the descent path. His breathing sounded normal to the end.

He says that for the airline for which he flew, after 911, if either the pilot or co-pilot needed to leave the cockpit for a call of nature or any other reason, a flight attendant had to go in and stay there until the pilot returned.

I wonder why this German airline did not do that?

I would be more worried about suicide and mental illness with pilots than I would terrorism.

Obviously this is lingo. What does "terrapin" mean in this regard?

Thanks.

Last edited Fri Mar 27, 2015, 10:22 AM - Edit history (1)

forum, so couldn't log on to ask.

Sounds in context like 'intruder' or 'evil doer'?

That is a computer controlled plane, with at least one wreck already blamed on the computer - which was functioning as intended.

There is no evidence of anything criminal. At all.

If the co-pilot has a headset on, traffic, is descending and trying to watch, might lose situational awareness and not realize what the computer has done. Might not even hear the door, if a bunch of alarms are going off.

There is a 30 second delay on the door, pilot might have entered the code and started beating on it out of frustration. Or he might have entered the wrong code, causing a short lockout. Co-pilot could have heard, but with a headset on, and perhaps seeing that there was a problem would have had his hands on the controls, not trying to open a door. It is just a switch but it would take concentration away from a suddenly terrifying situation...

There is nothing in this which can't be explained by a malfunction which wasn't recognized in time- and I don't care to waste a bunch of time arguing with people ignorant of the job.

On the other hand, there are a whole raft of people who first want to find a worker to blame, most of whom aren't worth listening to.

> That is a computer controlled plane, with at least one wreck already blamed on the computer - which was functioning as intended.

Care to compare the number of wrecks due to the computer against the number of wrecks due to the humans "in charge"?


> There is no evidence of anything criminal. At all.

Other than the change of programming of the autopilot on to a trajectory that was deliberately fatal.

And the locking of the door (manual override of the keypad unlock).

And the decision not to communicate with the pilot outside the door.

And ...


> I don't care to waste a bunch of time arguing with people ignorant of the job.

Yet you *did* care to waste a bunch of time posting your reply that depended heavily on "if", multiple "might"s,
"could"s and "perhaps" in order to "prove" that the co-pilot was an innocent victim of his nasty mean flightdeck ...?

I really doubt there is a labor issue here. They are just trying to figure out what happened.

“Alarms went off signalling the aircraft’s proximity to the ground, and we heard the sound of violent blows as if someone is trying to force the door. Just before the final impact we hear the sound of an impact on the [rock] embankment. There was no distress signal, no ‘mayday, mayday, mayday’ received by air traffic control.

My heart just aches for those families.

When a commerical pilot leaves the cockpit, a flight attendent must go into the cockpit. Never knew that. The reason being that there cannot be only ONE PERSON in the cockpit all alone.

Read this on an Aviation Site, which said we did this as a precaution after 9/11.

Unless said flight attendant can fly a plane.

I don't want to think about it...

Said flight attendant could shove their thumbs into the fucking eyes of the piece of shit trying to lock out the sane pilot and stop the worthless fuck from killing everyone on board.

This co-pilot over-rode the emergency entry code that the pilot tried to use from the outside. (S)he could have over-ridden his over-ride.

The Airbus basically flies itself. Pilots input the destination and a little bit of other data into the flight computer, and after take-off, the plane pretty much does the rest all by itself until final approach. This co-pilot had to force this plane to descend into the ground. It's not like a Cessna or even a Boeing where you just push forward on the yoke and the plane dives.

At least would hope so.

I saw it on French news tonight.

The Airbus basically flies itself. After take-off, the computer does it all until approach to the destination. If the co-pilot had keeled over for some reason, then that plane would have maintained altitude and continued on until Düsseldorf.

He had to actively force the plane to descend. It's not possible that somehow this happened by accident.

Sorry if I gave that impression. The computer will handle a lot of that, and depending upon the airport and conditions, it will do most of the work to land the plane (through the glide-slope and some other such information), but the pilot is still in charge of actually putting the rubber on the runway.

What's important here, though, is that what the plane won't do is just go and descend and crash into a mountain if someone doesn't have their hand on the controls making it do so. Left to its own devices, the plane would have just kept on its own path to DUS as programmed before they left BCN. As such, this rules out the co-pilot having some manner of medical emergency that had him "abandoning" the controls: he had to force that plane into the ground.