Germanwings flight crash - deliberate?

There has been tremendous pressure on NTSB to be a lot more forthcoming with early releases of factual info. The conclusions still take months, but releases of facts happen almost as fast as they can be verified.

The latest example of this was the Asiana mishap at SFO in 2013 Asiana Airlines Flight 214 - Wikipedia

The airline and several other interested parties were not happy about NTSB releasing info early. The problem being that any release of any facts is enough “evidence” for the media to jump instantly to firm conclusions.

But in a media-driven always-connected world, the desire of the masses to think they know what’s going on *now *trumps the need for careful people to actually know what happened.

Lufthansa has no standard psychological testing after hiring

I suppose the relatives need to be told that their loved ones were in all probability murdered.

I understand exactly what you’re saying, but there’s a difference between informing and concluding. If a review by professionals sounds like one live, heavy-breathing person in the cockpit all the way to the end while another person pounds frantically on the cockpit door, telling us that does no harm. I’m willing to wait any length of time for the investigation and conclusion, but knowing a likely scenario (rather than the absolute mystery of the Malaysia flight) can hardly be called feeding media inappropriately.

What’s the rush, though? The loved ones are dead. Whether it was murder or not is not a matter of urgent must-tell-right-now.

What we are learning from MH370, Egypt Air and this incident is that no matter how safe you make the plane, just like cars, trucks and busses, the weak link is the nut behind the wheel.

The officials will look like proper flats if they weren’t. The families will be unduly stressed if they are told one thing and another turns out to be the truth.

I dunno, how long does a full investigation take? 6 months, a year? I wouldn’t like to be part way through the grieving process, and then find out my child was murdered.

I have only seen and read that the co-pilots breathing was normal and steady. I’ve heard nothing about hard or heavy breathing.

The airline didn’t release the information about the co-pilot crashing the plane. The New York Times got a military person involved in the investigation to spill the beans which they then reported last night.

IIRC it was last year that in the US that a pilot had an inflight freakout and the copilot locked him out while doing an emergency landing as the FAs and passengers restrained him. So this has its two sides.

I’m sure I read “hard” somewhere; it may not have been reliable.

Two questions, though: are cockpit mikes sensitive enough to pick up “normal” breathing? Even from a headset? And wouldn’t “normal, steady breathing” be a little odd for a pilot of a craft rapidly losing altitude and wondering what a mountain goat was doing way up in the clouds?

Doesn’t add up.

Jetblue Flight 191.

This is so disturbing. If this truly is a pilot suicide, why couldn’t he just steal a plane, fly it out and only kill himself instead of including 150 other people?

Maybe for attention. He’s made numerous headlines this way.

Yeah I wondered about that. It’s really a stretch, but it’s not impossible that a brain bleed could cause you to feel an impending sense of doom, lock the door cause you thought the problem was back there or you meant to open it, set the plane up for emergency landing, and then just fade away.
It’s a stretch, but that could happen.

So is there any good reason to do this outside of an emergency situation?

If not, would it be a good (or reasonable) idea to link that override signal to some sort of automated signalling system? May not have helped in this case, but it seems like “Hey, someone in the cockpit initiated an emergency override lockdown” would be a generally useful thing for Air Traffic Control to know about.

Who knows what was in the head of the co-pilot. He could have thought he was taking 150 souls home to Jesus and he wanted a “nice” ride for them. Or, I could imagine him for whatever reason just wanting to set the descent and lean back, close his eyes and meditate on his demons.

I’m pretty sure someone willing to kill himself and 150 others is, by definition, not acting rationally.

I wonder whether there will be any conclusions to come from this at all. If it was a snap decision on his part then there won’t be a suicide letter. If he was calm and calculated enough to bide his time and wait for this opportunity then he was calculated enough to do what was needed to confuse us all should he wish, were he a terrorist then he had all the time he needed to place a statement on the CVR but didn’t.

Not sure where that leaves us. Most likely it sounds like a deeply disturbed young man determined to cause maximum damage and confusion. Why?..I suspect he wouldn’t want us to ever know.

He doesn’t sound like the sort of loon like the grade school mass killer* who specifically wanted to be known as the mass killer with the largest number of victims.

If his leave of absence during training was for emotional/mental reasons, it makes me wonder if, and how often, his mental stability was re-tested after that.

*(purposely not mentioning the name or anything more specific about this so as not to memorialize him further.)