My family are flying to Jamaica in about 3 weeks.... 9 of them,my daughters, two of my grandchildren, the other one we are looking after as she's only a few weeks old. I cannot comprehend what those other parents/grand parents, family/ friends are feeling right now...
Where are they flying from? In the early 1990s my ex-missus shared a house in Hounslow with several Heathrow air traffic controllers. They were always highly stressed and pressured and spent most of their time off completely stoned. Never ceased to amaze me how they managed to avoid runway catastrophes every day!
Just reading the Mail on line. Says this particular plane was grounded the day before the flight to go 'technical issues' and a pilot refused to fly the aircraft on that day. Scary stuff if true.
The issue was a fault with one of the landing gear covers, but it was a noise issue not a safety one. It's a red herring that I reckon. My guess is a cockpit depressurisation - a window blowng or similar and the pilot started to put the plane into a downward path, but only got the thing to a semi sensible descent rate before losing consciousness and the plane merely continued it's descent. I hope that's how it happened as at least they wouldn't have know much about it in the cabin 30 seconds max.
according to Yank News channels I saw online, One pilot left the cockpit for some reason, and on his return - the cockpit door was locked from the inside. On the blackbox-voice recorder, you can hear the pilot trying to break the door down.
Other pilot tricked pilot into leaving cockpit?....highly unlikely and a terrorist would do more with the plane surely. Co pilot taken ill suddenly heart attack or something i reckon...but y pilot left cockpit a mystery.
Can you imagine being a passenger on that plane and seeing a pilot desperately trying to smash the cockpit door down to get back in? Jesus ****ing H..... It would seem that the pilot left in the cockpit either had some kind of health issue / blackout or he just wanted to crash the plane. I suspect some kind of new technology system will now be introduced so pilots cant get locked out.
Theres a secret system in place to get back into cockpit..pilot had 10mins locked outside y he couldnt back in the mystery.
It seems there have been similar occurrences previous to this - where the pilot has been unable to open the door.
When I first started flying they had a curtain entry into the cockpit and if you asked nicely you could go in and watch the action for a short time.
Weird how plane wasnt on auto pilot etc...guy in cockpit had 630hours flying experience according to BBC
