Jeff Wise

What, exactly, are we talking about, when we talk about a man who deliberately flies a plane carrying 149 other human beings into the side of a mountain?

In a sense, we’re talking about a suicide. That’s a common enough thing. Plenty of people carry it out — 40,000 each year in the United States alone. You could also say we’re talking about murder, and that’s true, too. The other 149 people on board Germanwings 9525 had their lives taken from them, just as the 16,000 Americans murdered each year have.

Or you could invoke the specter of murder-suicide, that increasingly familiar explosion of self-consuming, purposeless annihilation — the disgruntled postal employee, the trench-coat-wearing high schooler, the well-armed moviegoer.

These violent acts strike seemingly indiscriminately. But they occur often enough that we can find a sense of understanding. We can draw up psychological profiles of attackers and study patterns of behavior to understand causes.

We know much less about pilots who fly their planes into the ground, because it’s so unusual.

Though pilots are under increasing stress, their mental health is carefully vetted. To become a commercial pilot, one must undergo physical and psychological screening. Additionally, pilots are a self-selecting group. They’ve earned their way to the cockpit through hard work, discipline and a willingness to take on as their regular daily routine an activity that many people consider too dangerous to do at all. In my experience interacting with pilots — I’m a recreational flier and an aviation journalist, so I run into quite a few — they tend to exhibit what psychologists call an “internal locus of control,” meaning that they believe that whatever obstacles lie before them can be tackled using their own resources.

How, then, could such a pilot kill himself along with all his passengers?

Continue reading Washington Post: Don’t Be So Quick to Believe that Andreas Lubitz Committed Suicide

Yesterday morning, an old friend sent me a text: “Did you hear the news?”

I always get a pit in my stomach when I hear that. “No,” I emailed back. “What happened?”

What happened, of course, was Germanwings 9525. At the time all that was known was that an Airbus 321 carrying 150 people had crashed into the Alps. Soon enough details began to emerge, but how strange they were: a 24-year-old aircraft, en route from Barcelona to Dusseldorf, had climbed to its crusing altitude of 38,000 feet and then, within a matter of minutes, begun to descend at 3000 to 4000 feet per minute, apparently fairly steadily and while remaining on course, until it crashed eight minutes later into the French Alps. The flight crew issued no distress call.

I’d never heard of anything like it, but as the conversation developed online, some parallels emerged. Foremost was the case of LH1829, which took off from Bilbao last November and began an uncommanded descent of some 4000 feet per minute after the flight management system became confused by frozen angle-of-attack sensors.

In that case the pilots communicated with technicians on the ground and figured out how to solve the problem before a great deal of altitude was lost, but perhaps yesterday’s pilots had tried to tackle the issue by themselves and gotten too absorbed by the challenge to realize how much altitude they were losing, a la Eastern Air Line Flight 401?

Some speculated that a sudden decompression might have caused the tragedy. There have certainly been incidents in which aging, inadequately repaired aircraft have suffered catastrophic failure of their pressure hulls, leading to destruction of the plane, but those don’t generally look like this–the plane either breaks up at altitude or the pilots are able to don oxygen masks and keep flying the plane and communicating, if only for a while.

Another possibility–one hesitates to raise it in today’s climate of fear–is that a hijacker attempted to take control of the cockpit. I don’t think we can rule this out, either.

At this point, frankly, none of these scenarios make a great deal of sense, and I think the overall sentiment among people who spend a lot of time looking at this sort of thing is bafflement. “I’m at a loss,” one veteran 777 pilot emailed me yesterday. I think that about sums it up. Hopefully, the recovered cockpit voice recorder will provide some clarity.

UPDATE 3/26/2015: At a press conference in Marseille today prosecutor Brice Robin revealed that, according to audio recordings recovered from the Cockpit Voice Recorder, co-pilot Andreas Lubitz locked the captain out of the cockpit and initiated the descent that led to the plane’s crash into the Alps. “He took this action, for reasons we still don’t know why,” Robin said. “We can only deduce he destroyed the plane. He voluntarily allowed the plane to lose altitude. I think the victims only realised at the last moment because on the recording you only hear the screams on the last moments.”

Continue reading Germanwings Flight 9525 — UPDATED

[Editor’s note: IG kingpin Michael Exner has delved into the recent crash of TransAsia Flight 235 with characteristic vigor, and recently sent around some images he generated from ADS-B data that go a long way toward establishing what happened. I asked him if I could reprint the material here and he agreed. — JW]

I reviewed the flight paths for flight GE235 for the previous week. In every case, the path was nearly the same. The plane makes a departure to the east and turns to the right about 160 degrees shortly after takeoff. [See image above.] This is what happened on the day of the crash too. However, in the case of the crash day, the airspeed and altitude just seconds into the flight, at the start of the first right turn, was already low and slow. For all flights in the previous week, the plane was between 2000-3000 feet at the first turn (point furthest east), and the speed was between 130 and 170 kts. For the day of the crash, the plane was at 1250 feet and 83 kts, which is below stall speed for 15 degrees flap setting. [See image below, after the jump; click to enlarge.] This suggests that the left engine was not producing full power from a point very early in the flight. Indeed, the ADS-B data indicates that the airspeed at liftoff was normal (136 knots at 100 feet), but began falling immediately after liftoff. This suggests that the left engine flameout occurred immediately after liftoff, near the east end of the runway.

Continue reading Guest Post: TransAsia 235 Crash Timeline

My thanks to @socalmike_SD, who has been researching airplane crashes that closely resemble AirAsia Flight 8501. Particularly striking is the case of Pulkovo Aviation Enterprise Flight 612, a Tupolev Tu-154 which crashed in 2006 near Donetsk, Ukraine. The plane was flying at 37,000 feet when it entered an area of thunderstorms and experienced severe turbulence. The flight crew asked for (and was granted) permission to climb 2000 feet to avoid the worst of the storm, but soon after doing so entered into manual flight mode, stalled, and entered a flat spin. Here is an excerpt from the cockpit voice recorder transcript:

Continue reading Airliner Stalls, Crashes After Trying to Climb Over Thunderstorm

Independent Group member Bill Holland appears to have sorted out the head-scratcher concerning the location of the QZ8501 tail section. His explanation jibes with where we’d expect the plane’s fuselage to wind up, given the fact that just before it disappeared from radar it was descending with alarming speed. I’m pasting here Bill’s recent email in toto:

I think I have the tail GPS coordinates figured out…

I kept finding references to the tail being found that translate as:
The mapping experts who are in MGS Ship Geo Survey finds it precisely in the coordinate 03.3839S (South latitude) and 109.4343E (East Longitude).

But, I searched and found a version that seems to make more sense:
Aga pun menyampaikan titik koordinatnya, yakni: Latitude 3;38;39S, Longitude 109;43;43 E.
…in English:
Aga also convey the point coordinates, namely: Latitude 3; 38; 39s, Longitude 109; 43; 43 E.

The numbers being quoted are correct, … Only the punctuation was wrong!

-03° 38′ 39″ 109° 43′ 43″ (degrees minutes seconds)
This is about 2.5nm South East of the last SSR/ADS-B location (Google Maps measures 3.03 statute miles = 2.63nm)

In my screen grab [above]:
– the lower yellow start marke the tail section (and the blue annotation is the distance from the purple star)
– the purple circle is the last lat/lon from the SSR (ADS-B),
– the purple star is the approx location from the primary radar image.
– The red box is supposed to be “Most Probable Area 2”,
– the black tilted rectangular outline is the left (Western) section of the “Underwater Search Area”.
– The yellow diagonal line is Route M635 between TAVIP to RAFIS.
– The black diagonal line is the FR24 estimated flight path (the inverted teardrops are individual extrapolations from FR24 after the last valid ADS-B data data they received)

[ignore the white square, the blue square, the Northern yellow star, and the green diagonal line]

-Bill

Really, it’s remarkable that searchers didn’t scour this location right away, and instead spent a week searching far down-current. There appears to have been some confusion between the nature of floating debris, which disperses as it’s carried by currents, and debris on the seabed, which will tend to remain where it falls, more or less directly under the point where it impacts the water.

The latest news is that preparations are underway to raise the tail section and hoist it onto a ship. Hopefully, the black boxes will be found within, and the cause of the accident one step closer to being revealed.