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Black box recovered from Airbus crash site in French Alps; 150 dead

19 Comments
By GREG KELLER and ANGELA CHARLTON

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Statisically the last 12 months have been the safest for air travel (as calculated in flights and passenger miles) ever, but seems to me we see a lot more of this in the news.......

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It is puzzling why there was no transmissions of any kind for those eight minutes of descent. Hopefully the VDR and FDR will shed some light in this tragedy.

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Sounds like a catastrophic malfunction causing the decent perhaps with napping pilot(s). Reduced airspeed could also be a culprit.

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My condolences to the families and friends for all the victims of this tragedy.

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Terrible. All best wishes to the families of everyone involved.

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At least they will find the black boxes this time, so they can reconstruct what happened unlike with the Malaysia crash.

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Sounds like something triggered sudden decompression that incapacitated the pilots. Many pilots will not bother to radio problems as they're too busy trying to fix them, but eight minutes is a long time.

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Germanwings said 144 passengers and six crew members were on board. Authorities said 67 Germans were believed among the victims, including the 16 high school students and two opera singers, as well as many Spaniards, two Australians and one person each from the Netherlands, Turkey and Denmark.

..and two Japanese nationals, according to Japanese media reports, RIP.

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I'm beginning to openly wonder if there was a rapid decompression of the cabin at 38,000 feet (11,582 meters) and the flight crew tried to start an emergency descent but lost consciousness before the plane nosed down enough for a rapid descent. As such, the plane--with no crew to control the plane--appeared to do a normal descent and hit the mountainside in a perfect controlled flight into terrain (CFIT) crash.

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I'm thinking it is something more serious that decompression. Whenever the cabin pressure rises above approx. 10,000 feet, an alarm will sound. And the first action is don the O2 mask and establish radio communication. That's also part of the pre-flight inspection. @Mark, napping pilots, not hardly. Napping pilots usually fly past the airport or don't descend on schedule. If the crew became incapacitated I'm guessing smoke in the cockpit and they weren't able to get their PBE's on in time. But with smoke in the cockpit usually you will smell it before you see it and can prepare.

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Sabotage? Hijacking? There was no communication from the pilots as to any type of trouble so they may have been under duress. Could have also been like the one in Greece where the pilots were unconscious and therefore not able to contact the control tower. Very tragic. Condolences to the families and RIP to all the lost souls.

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WilliBMAR. 25, 2015 - 12:00PM JST At least they will find the black boxes this time, so they can reconstruct what happened unlike with the Malaysia crash.

Well they recovered both flight recorders of the Air Asia flight QZ 8501, on January 14th but the public still hasn't been given an update, even though it was said (the info would be released within a month.) I guess it depends upon how sensitive the findings are, wether or not the info gets released.

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The odd thing about the descent, of course, is that there was no radio for help or to even report the descent. I wonder if they somehow lost coms, or power altogether. I could see them descending if the weather was bad and then not seeing the mountains, but again if descending like that they would ask permission or report it if they decided without permission. There was also no alarm signal sent out. So again, loss of power? If the weather WAS bad at the time could they have been hit by lightning?

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Haven`t there been incidents before, where the super-smart board computer on the Airbus made the plane do crazy things and almost crashed it? I thought I remember several. The whole Airbus philosophy is based on the idea that their software is smarter than the human pilot, or so they hope.

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It's the mountains, but wonder if there's enough few seconds of cellular signal for the passengers to send their last farewells. RIP

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eight-minute dive

Pretty much the worst part for me to read.

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It's not the black box but the voice recorder they found. And even though it was heavily damaged, French officials confirmed they could save the audio file.

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"The White House and the airline chief said there was no sign that terrorism was involved"

That's an odd stance to take. At this point, there are no signs of anything that can be pinpointed. The authorities need to be open minded at the early stage -- when the cause is still a complete mystery.

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