26 Mar 2015

Mystery surrounds Germanwings plane that crashed in French Alps

We awoke to a beautiful day in the French Alps, where a charred and smoking mountainside is scattered with the debris of the crashed Airbus airliner, which hit the rocks so fast that it was pulverised into tiny pieces upon impact.26_alps2_w

It will take weeks of DNA testing to identify the remains of all 150 people on board. “No bigger than a briefcase” was how one French official grimly described the biggest body part which has been retrieved so far.

Read more: Germanwings crash – pilot ‘locked out of Airbus cockpit’

Nevertheless, relatives of the dead are flying in today to be as close as they can to the last living moments of their loved ones. What an awful journey they are making, into remote and splendid countryside so scarred by disaster.

A senior French military official says the first transcript of sounds from the cockpit voice recorder reveals that one of the pilots was locked out of his cabin. He can be heard knocking lightly on the door to get in, then attempting to smash the door down when he receives no reply.

Why did the other pilot not let him in? Did he fall ill perhaps, overcome by a heart attack or severe food poisoning? Or was his silence a deliberate part of a plot to bring his very own aircraft down? We just don’t know.

The pilots’ names have still not been released, though we know the captain had flown for ten years, with more than 6000 hours flying on Airbus A320s. We don’t know which pilot was locked out.

There was no attempt to communicate with air traffic control after the plane began its descent from 38,000 feet.  Lufthansa has, up to now, characterised this crash as an accident and yet also says the plane was in good condition.

Human activity – or inactivity – rather than technical failure has now emerged as the most likely cause. Though none of this can be of any comfort to grieving families, who still don’t know, and probably don’t want to know, if their loved ones were conscious that they were about to die.

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