Germanwings A320 Crashes in French Alps

[AZOffaly]

Yes. I have seen it. I've seen them come out and go to the jacks.

[orangeman]

Correct if I'm wrong here guys but has anyone ever seen a pilot leave the cockpit. I can't remember ever seeing it!

Yes I've seen it happen. Not regularly but it does happen.



A tragic story made even more horrendous by these revelations.

[Minder]

Some airlines have the bogs behind a secondary door from the cockpit, and using it wouldn't "bar"you from getting back in. Dunno if it is airline policy or depending on the size of the aircraft.

Should a captain/pilot really have to leave the cockpit 20 mins or whatever after takeoff ? Fair enough 3 or 4 hours into a flight but you would think you would have your business done before takeoff.

[sans pessimism]

Correct if I'm wrong here guys but has anyone ever seen a pilot leave the cockpit. I can't remember ever seeing it!

Yes I've seen it happen. Not regularly but it does happen.



A tragic story made even more horrendous by these revelations.

Yes,I've seen them go for a jimmie.

[Eamonnca1]

Yup. Pilot suicide is mercifully rare. I wonder if we'll end up with cameras in the cockpit? If we could stop this quaint practice of local data storage and beam it into the cloud instead then that'd help too. Formula 1 race cars have been beaming telemetry back to the pits for years, so it's not exactly a new technology. When something goes wrong then alarm bells could start to ring on the ground. I wonder if we could even make it possible for ATC to directly intervene and take control of the plane, but as the man said the cyber security implications would be staggering.

[muppet]

Shocking development.

And sadly not the first: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EgyptAir_Flight_990

I agree with anyone who refused to call this a simple suicide. It is mass murder.

But it is very odd on a short flight, because he could have had no guarantee that the Captain would go to the toilet. It was a flight of about 1 hour. Therefore if he wasn't sure, was it an opportunistic action? Had he planned to do it whenever the opportunity arose?

Some of the low cost carriers do a flight of flights in quick succession. The workload at the turnaround can be very high, trying to get the next flight out on time. A pilot could easily decide to delay a trip to the toilet until after 'top of climb'.

On of the problems here is that the locked cockpit was a knee-jerk reaction to 911, imposed on airlines everywhere. While it looks reasonable, normally safety decisions are taken with all stakeholders involved, preferably with consensus. That avoids unintended consequences, which is far better than one agency, in this case national security, imposing a remedy to solve their particular problem, but without giving any though to undesirable side affects.

This may turn out to be a sort of copycat of the missing Malaysian or of the Egyptair I mentioned above. If so I am dreading the potential next knee-jerk reaction.

This is easily remedied by putting the cockpit, toilet and rest area (if needed) all together, separate from the cabin. But the airlines won't pay for that.

[Eamonnca1]

Whatever they end up doing, flying is still a whole lot safer than driving.

[CitySlicker11]

Two of the co pilots properties are currently being searched by German authorities. Hopefully this can provide some answers.

[93-DY-SAM]

If it is the case this guy took the plane down deliberately (the evidence is stacking up this was certainly the case) was it just an opportunistic moment of madness or had he been plotting this for sometime and was just waiting for the right opportunity to present itself. As someone else mentioned before he had no guarantee the captain was going to need the loo and leave him on his own.

Surely in this day and age there has to be a better way to deal with regaining access to the cockpit or control of the plane. Taking remote control of the plane would be an ideal solution but obviously hacking this is a major security threat. A work around might be that this remote control is physically disabled until it's manually activated from one or more locations inside the plane. Only then could someone on the ground be able to step in and take control.

[omagh_gael]

Some articles mentioning that the copilot's original flight training was postponed for a number of months. Will be interesting to see if that had any relation to this tragic turn of events.

[DennistheMenace]

Yup. Pilot suicide is mercifully rare. I wonder if we'll end up with cameras in the cockpit? If we could stop this quaint practice of local data storage and beam it into the cloud instead then that'd help too. Formula 1 race cars have been beaming telemetry back to the pits for years, so it's not exactly a new technology. When something goes wrong then alarm bells could start to ring on the ground. I wonder if we could even make it possible for ATC to directly intervene and take control of the plane, but as the man said the cyber security implications would be staggering.

Won't happen I'm afraid, the technology is there but it would be too expensive.

This tradgey I'd say was probably opportunistic, in that he had in set in his head but was waiting for the opportunity of being in the c**k-pit alone, which on a 2 hour flight schedule this would have been rare.

There will definitely be a procedural overhaul (easyjet already have confirmed 2 crew at all times in CP) and possibly a redesign of the cockpit doors.

The irony of it all is that this tradegy likely wouldn't have occured pre 9/11.

[GJL]

Other than going to use the toilet is there any good reason for a member of the flight crew to leave the flight deck during flight (under normal circumstances)?

Put a bog in the cockpit....

[muppet]

Other than going to use the toilet is there any good reason for a member of the flight crew to leave the flight deck during flight (under normal circumstances)?

Put a bog in the cockpit....

Almost always...no.

However there are exceptions to everything. For example on the ground while taxiing a pilot might want to visually inspect the wings for snow or maybe a passenger says they see something broken or open on an engine (this does happen). But that stuff would be done on the ground.

As an aside, I am not comfortable with the way every piece of info is immediately released to the press. It is hard to see at the moment, but there could still be undiscovered evidence that would change everything. As a wild example, imagine if they now found the co-pilot had been deliberately drugged in some way.

If the investigators were being remotely professional, they would wait until they had gathered and analysed as much evidence as possible, before allocating all of the blame onto one dead person. That is not to say they are wrong, just that they can't be sure they are right yet.

[passedit]

Other than going to use the toilet is there any good reason for a member of the flight crew to leave the flight deck during flight (under normal circumstances)?

Put a bog in the cockpit....

Almost always...no.

However there are exceptions to everything. For example on the ground while taxiing a pilot might want to visually inspect the wings for snow or maybe a passenger says they see something broken or open on an engine (this does happen). But that stuff would be done on the ground.

As an aside, I am not comfortable with the way every piece of info is immediately released to the press. It is hard to see at the moment, but there could still be undiscovered evidence that would change everything. As a wild example, imagine if they now found the co-pilot had been deliberately drugged in some way.

If the investigators were being remotely professional, they would wait until they had gathered and analysed as much evidence as possible, before allocating all of the blame onto one dead person. That is not to say they are wrong, just that they can't be sure they are right yet.

I'd say the pressure was on to take the blame away from the aircraft. I been flying frequently for years and couldn't tell you what the planes were I flew on. On Thursday (before this news broke) I noticed for the first time the aircraft I was flying on was an A320 (or maybe I just thought it was) but I momentarily uncomfortable about flying where usually I wouldn't give it a second thought. Have to say my humour wasn't helped when it had to abort landing at the last second because another plane was on the runway!

I flew back on Friday morning oddly more comfortable that the cause of the crash wasn't equipment failure.

[Hardy]

I don't know what you'd think about this, Muppet, but I heard somebody on the radio on Thursday - former air accident investigator, I think - who said this was a highly irregular and unprofessional act on the part of some U.S. military character who was somehow involved in or had access to the cockpit voice recorder analysis. Apparently this gobshite leaked the information to the N.Y. Times, an action unheard of among accident investigators, it would seem.

Yer man on the radio was suggesting that, even if it was clear that it was pilot error or deliberate pilot action, it would be unusual to release this information in the immediate aftermath of the event, while families are grieving, emotions are raw, etc. Due process would be observed and nothing would be said officially until the full report was issued some months later, at the earliest.

I don't understand why the authorities decided to confirm the leak. I'd have thought all they had to say was that this was speculation and the report would be issued when the thing had been fully investigated. In particular, I can't understand why the Marseille prosecutor jumped into the picture with his press conference. Why the need, at this early stage, for his allocation of blame and his detailed description (including the outrageous and gratuitous stuff about the passengers screaming) unless it was self-promotion, political grandstanding or something.