One Pilot Locked Out Of Germanwings Plane's Cockpit Before The Plane Crashed

Evidence from a cockpit voice recorder recovered from the Germanwings flight 4U9525 that crashed on Tuesday suggests that one pilot left the cockpit before the plane’s descent and was unable to get back in, according to two separate reports.

French air accident investigators say they have extracted a recording that contains “voices and sounds” from the cockpit of the plane before it crashed in the Alps, killing all 150 people on board.


A senior military official involved in the investigation told the New York Times that there was a “very smooth, very cool” conversation between the two pilots during the early part of the flight from Barcelona to Düsseldorf. Later in the recording, the audio suggests that one of the pilots left the cockpit and could not re-enter.

The audio gives no indication of the condition of the pilot who remained in the cockpit.

“The guy outside is knocking lightly on the door and there is no answer,” the investigator, who asked to remain anonymous, told the New York Times.

“And then he hits the door stronger and no answer. There is never an answer.

“You can hear he is trying to smash the door down.”

“We don’t know yet the reason why one of the guys went out,” said the official, who requested anonymity because the investigation is continuing.

“But what is sure is that at the very end of the flight, the other pilot is alone and does not open the door.”

French news agency AFP reported that it had been told by a source close to the investigation that one of the pilots had been ‘locked out’ the cockpit.

The agency said the cockpit recording indicated that one of the pilot’s seats was pushed back and the door opened and closed.

Knocking is then heard, said the source, adding “there was no more conversation from that point until the crash”.

The source said an alarm indicating the proximity to the ground could be heard before the moment of impact.

French air accident investigators confirmed on Wednesday that they have extracted a recording that contains “voices and sounds” from the cockpit of the plane.

The French Bureau d’Enquêtes et d’Analyses (BEA) said it was “optimistic” the second black box, the flight data recorder, would be found and the mystery of the crash solved.

The Airbus A320 that ploughed into an Alpine mountain flew “right to the end”, the investigators said, and did not explode mid-flight. It also appeared not to have suffered a sudden drop in pressure.

A spokesman for the French air investigation bureau, the BEA, said that “usable” material had been extracted from the black box cockpit voice recorder found at the crash site, in the French Alps.

He said it covered the entire flight but would not say what conversations, if any, between the pilots had been captured on the recording, nor what language they had been conducted in.

Neither of the plane’s two pilots have been named, but the captain had more than 10 years of experience and had clocked up more than 6,000 flight hours on the Airbus model. The A320 was on its second flight of the day, having earlier left Düsseldorf for Barcelona, landing at 8.57am, before its second takeoff for the short 90-minute flight.

On Wednesday Lufthansa CEO Carsten Spohr, himself a pilot, said he found the crash of a plane flown by two experienced captains while at cruising altitude “inexplicable.” Cruise is considered the safest part of a flight, with only about 10% of crashes occurring at that altitude.

“We still cannot understand what happened there yesterday,” he said. “Lufthansa has never in its history lost an aircraft in cruise flight and we cannot understand how an airplane that was in perfect technical condition, with two experienced and trained Lufthansa pilots, was involved in such a terrible accident.”

 

 

Culled from TheGuardian