Just wondering how strong a door like that really is when your life is at stake?? Just watched video. Ever more curious as the door can be opened from the outside. The door is not that thick and opens inwards. You would think a big fella with a good shoulder barge should be able to do the job. Perhaps it is distasteful to be speculating but all seems very odd indeed. Don't wish take away at all from the human distress and pain of the bereaved.
I wonder did the co-pilot have any links/sympathies to a terrorist organisation? Can't believe suicide would have been the sole motive.
This isn't suicide,it's mass murder! There's no difference between this or flying a plane into the twin towers!
More likely he had taken out a life insurance plan. When this happened the other day I said to my colleague that I reckoned it was suicide. The reason being I seen an episode of Air Crash Investigation which sounded very like the details coming out about this flight, in which the Pilot took out a policy on himself to take care of his family and tried to down his airliner so it would look like an accident. In that case the co-pilot's managed to eventually overpower him and save the plane.
I saw that episode too,American planes never leave just one pilot alone in the cockpit.It's time to change the way other airline companies think,particularly European one's where one pilot is allowed to solely fly the plane and be alone in the cockpit!
Actually there is a big difference. The 9/11 terrorists were simply out to kill as many infidels as they could, and their own lives became of no consequence. It's not that they wanted to die, they were very focused on killing as many innocents as possible. It appears that this guy was seriously mentally distuebed to the point where he wanted to end his own life, and the tragedy we see unfolding is the way he did it. I'm sure you can't say for certain that the lives of his passengers were even part of his thought processes. That's the difference, even though there's still the dead people.
Door locks have been known to malfunction on occasions, we seem to be concluding that the most likely scenario is indeed what actually happened. That may very well be the case but can we be absolutely certain that it was a deliberate act on behalf of the copilot?
It was a deliberate act mate. The physical act of locking the door from inside the cockpit cannot be done accidentaly. The switch to do this is a toggle which requires two deliberate movements, pull-up and pull-back. The co-pilot then exercised silence when requests were made by the pilot to unlock the door. On the recording you can apparently hear the pilot screaming for the door to be unlocked, but the co-pilot Andreas Lubitz chose not to respond either verbally or physically. He could be heard breathing normally and was fully conscious as he flew the aircraft into the mountains during an accelerated descent. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-32063587
If a good shoulder barge would do the job there wouldn't be much point in strengthening the doors to prevent terrorists entering the cockpit would there?
He might have been having a petit mal fit. (Staring into space as if in a trance, as opposed to a grand mal fit. Eg, collapsing to the floor and shaking.) Take a look at the Moorgate train crash. Neuroscience wasn't advanced enough in the 60's for it to be considered then. (Long shot to be fair and just a touch of devils advocate from me.) I'm waiting for the FDR to be analysed. That will give us the technical input into the plane systems. The thing I don't get is how the French prosecutor can say it was an accelerated dive, without the FDR information. Most planes descend by reducing power. If he had collapsed at the controls and shaken the stick enough, it may have disengaged the autopilot (I may be wrong on this but I was of the understanding that rough input to the stick/yoke can do this on some models of aircraft) and put the plane into a nose down attitude. Without reducing power it would appear as an accelerated dive on radar systems. Edit: As for the Pilot not getting in the cockpit, he may have just forgotten the override in his panic as the plane dived. Many air emergencies have been made fatal by things being forgotten in the panic of a situation.
Just so that I haven't aged anymore than I have already Moorgate was actually in the early 70's, 73 or 74 if I remember correctly, but the point about Neuroscience is very valid.......
Was it? I'll go check but apologies if I've got the dates wrong. Yep. 75'. Sorry about that. EDIT: My dad was an ambulance driver at the time and was one of the first crews on the scene. It haunted him for quite a number of years.
No don't apologise Quality, It was a truly dreadful incident at the time......the only reason I remember it from the 70's was that we were on a school field trip somewhere on the South Downs and heard about it on the coach radio. Being from London you never even considered that something like that could happen on the underground. I'm not surprised that the rescue services personnel were affected by it long after the event I'm sure nothing could have prepared them for what they encountered in that tunnel. I suspect that there will be more to come out from this crash during the next few days and weeks.....
I was only born in 73' so I have no memory of it at the time myself. My Dad never spoke of it, it was my Mum that told me about it after he died. A friend of mine who was a safety officer for LU has studied it comprehensively and has always said he felt that the blame the driver got was unfair. As for the Alps crash, I fully agree, more to come on that.
