Wednesday, March 25, 2015

Every crash starts the same: "What was that?!?"

Breaking tonight: "Germanwings Pilot Was Locked Out of Cockpit Before Crash in France."
A senior military official involved in the investigation described “very smooth, very cool” conversation between the pilots during the early part of the flight from Barcelona to Düsseldorf. Then the audio indicated that one of the pilots left the cockpit and could not re-enter.
“The guy outside is knocking lightly on the door and there is no answer,” the investigator said. “And then he hits the door stronger and no answer. There is never an answer.”
He said, “You can hear he is trying to smash the door down.”
It seems from this description that the pilot in the cockpit is silent ("no answer") as the plane is plunging into the Alps.  This is exactly the situation that occurred with Egypt Air 990 in 1999: the co-pilot just kept repeating "I rely on God" as he pushed the plane into the Atlantic.  Here's Bernard Loeb, head of aviation investigations at the NTSB describing the first couple seconds of every crash:
"Look, first we sit through this cockpit voice recording in which ... " He shook his head. "How many cockpit voice recordings have I heard? Hundreds? Thousands? When someone has a problem with an airplane, you know it. One of our investigators used to say to me, 'These damned pilots, they don't tell us what's happening. Why don't they say, "It's the rudder!"' They don't do that. But I'll tell you what they do say. They make clear as hell that there's something really wrong. 'What the hell's going on? What is that?' Every single one of them. When there's a control problem of some sort, it is so crystal clear that they are trying desperately to diagnose what is going on. Right to when the recorder quits. They are fighting for their lives.

"But this guy is sitting there saying the same thing in a slow, measured way, indicating no stress. The captain comes in and asks what's going on, and he doesn't answer!
This story is scary similar.  Stay tuned.

1 comment:

siacd999 said...

Now they're saying the co-pilot was depressed, and hiding the fact he was seeking treatment & had a letter saying he was unfit for duty.

And the liberals are now worried this will lead to further stigmatization of people with depression and/or the mentally ill.