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Post by billhammond on Mar 25, 2015 23:34:25 GMT -5
Today's NYTimes reports that the cockpit voice recorder reveals that one pilot left the cockpit, presumably to use the biffy, and later can be heard knocking on the door to get back in, getting no response, then knocking louder, then obviously trying to smash the door open (which would be impossible with the latest doors).
The descent has been examined and it is steady, controlled, not in the least bit erratic -- it sure does lean toward indicating that whoever was in the cockpit while the other one was away reset all the many autopilot controls to order a descent to a fatal altitude setting. And that the airplane dutifully followed that assignment, at a smooth if steep, constant speed rate of descent.
Which would seem to mean a pilot wanting to crash the plane.
And I hereby retract my two earlier theories.
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Post by theevan on Mar 26, 2015 5:28:15 GMT -5
Uh-oh
Dear God, those poor people.
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Post by Deleted on Mar 26, 2015 6:11:45 GMT -5
Yikes. I have to fly to Dubai tonight for my 90-day-leave-the-country-and-come-back thing. Not the type of news one wants to read before climbing on an airliner.
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Post by theevan on Mar 26, 2015 7:00:26 GMT -5
Now the Beeb is reporting that the copilot took sole control of the plane and intentionally started that descent..
And the JetBlue chairman had warned that the new doors would fail to protect the plane from the pilots. So, now what?
It's a crazy, terrible world.
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Post by millring on Mar 26, 2015 7:04:13 GMT -5
Waiting for the motive.
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Post by fauxmaha on Mar 26, 2015 7:59:21 GMT -5
Bizarre. Tragic. Horrific.
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Post by drlj on Mar 26, 2015 8:33:02 GMT -5
I read yesterday that the pilot was locked out of the cockpit and now it is a matter of trying to figure out a motive. It is scary to think this may be the new method of using planes as instruments of terror.
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Post by godotwaits on Mar 26, 2015 8:34:36 GMT -5
And what's really cruel and unusual, Sully, indicated that the racket that the pilot made trying to regain entry probably alerted the passengers and crew of what was imminent.
Sick
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Post by Deleted on Mar 26, 2015 8:45:44 GMT -5
Was it malicious suicide or forced suicide?
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Post by Dub on Mar 26, 2015 8:58:53 GMT -5
Was it malicious suicide or forced suicide? Neither. It was mass murder. German authorities are saying they don't believe it was terrorism. They've evidently been monitoring the co-pilot. Unfortunately, mass murder doesn't always involve terrorism or any political motive.
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Post by brucemacneill on Mar 26, 2015 9:15:30 GMT -5
I suspect we'll eventually learn more about the co-pilot than we know now.
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Post by fauxmaha on Mar 26, 2015 9:30:48 GMT -5
I have a point of morbid curiosity about how they identify the bodies in a situation like this.
I assume that most of the passengers were pulverized. A quick back of the napkin calculation says from the moment the nose hit the ground, the back of the tail hit 0.15 seconds later. I really don't know what happens to people in those sorts of events, but its obviously severe beyond words.
Anyway, they are talking about DNA testing remains, and that's where my morbid curiosity comes in.
The debris field is probably filled with countless thousands of very small bits and pieces of the passengers. Is there some minimum size below which they just put those pieces in a central collection and declare them "unidentifiable", or do they actually go through the incredibly laborious process of trying to do a DNA match on every spec of passenger they find?
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Post by Deleted on Mar 26, 2015 11:23:45 GMT -5
I have a point of morbid curiosity about how they identify the bodies in a situation like this. I assume that most of the passengers were pulverized. A quick back of the napkin calculation says from the moment the nose hit the ground, the back of the tail hit 0.15 seconds later. I really don't know what happens to people in those sorts of events, but its obviously severe beyond words. Anyway, they are talking about DNA testing remains, and that's where my morbid curiosity comes in. The debris field is probably filled with countless thousands of very small bits and pieces of the passengers. Is there some minimum size below which they just put those pieces in a central collection and declare them "unidentifiable", or do they actually go through the incredibly laborious process of trying to do a DNA match on every spec of passenger they find? Not to be morbid, but the contents of the cabin (involving people) are usually shredded. When the fuselage strikes the ground, it tends to "accordion." That creates a lot of stored-up energy, which is released when the metal of the fuselage rebounds. All this occurs in a fraction of a second and you're talking about a lot of energy being released. You find bits and pieces that can be identified as viscera and that's usually it. I saw the aftermath of an inflight-collision-with-terrain crash first-hand in my two years spent with the NTSB. It was a business jet (an Israeli Aircraft Industries 1124A Westwind 2) with two crew and five passengers. Hit the ground at roughly 600 mph. As we walked around the crash site, deputies would stick an orange flag in the ground when they saw something that looked organic. What they wound up collecting (in a garbage bag) just weighed a couple of pounds, as I recall. The two biggest pieces were what looked like a heel and the back of somebody's neck. Then again, there were things that had been inside the cabin that seemed undisturbed. I remember seeing a stack of computer printouts laying neatly on the ground, still bound by a rubber band. There were unbroken bottles and cans from the galley.
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Post by coachdoc on Mar 28, 2015 3:16:28 GMT -5
Once again I am reminded of John Brunner's 'Stand on Zanzibar.' It is all coming true.
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Post by dradtke on Mar 28, 2015 17:40:56 GMT -5
More items of interest I heard on the radio.
On US planes, when one person leaves the cockpit, someone else from the flight crew waits in the cockpit so there is never only one person there. On the European plane there's a code to punch in to open the door, but someone inside the cockpit can deny the code.
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Post by epaul on Mar 28, 2015 18:59:57 GMT -5
There has been a lot of talk about how under U.S. rules a stewardess would have been in the cockpit with the suicidal/mass murderer/chemically imbalanced and likely overly medicated copilot...and that would have saved the day.
Would it have?
If a co-pilot puts the plane into a steep dive and refuses to unlock the cabin door, what is the stewardess supposed to do? Kung Fu the copilot, reset the airplanes controls and force the freshly kung-fued pilot to divulge the cabin lock code?
Or you can give all the stewardesses the cabin lock code, then all she would have to do is successfully and quickly subdue a man who might outweigh her by eighty or ninety pounds. (it works in the movies. women beat men up all the time in the movies.)
Or you can arm the stewardesses. And then hope one of the stewardessses doesn't hide a mental illness and go air-postal.
European airlines will now adopt U.S. cockpit protocol. Very possibly several new protocols will be enacted...each one with its own someday to be revealed unintended tragic consequence.
All to prevent another one in a billion occurrence from occurring again.
If there is a reasonable solution, go for it. But, maybe there isn't a solution. And all we can do is thank our stars that some of these unfixable events are extremely rare.
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Post by jdd2 on Mar 28, 2015 21:47:03 GMT -5
Hey, if it hadn't been for Karen Black, that plane in Airport would surely have crashed into the mountain.
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Post by Deleted on Mar 30, 2015 8:15:49 GMT -5
Hey, if it hadn't been for Karen Black, that plane in Airport would surely have crashed into the mountain. I remember seeing an interview with Karen Black around the time the movie was released in which she said the producers had several flight attendants take their turn in a 747 simulator while an instructor tried to talk them through an emergency landing. All of them crashed the plane. I asked my step-son-in-law about the cockpit door code thing and he said it works only if the person in the cockpit hasn't disabled it. He started as a flight attendant for Kuwait Airways, but is now head of "outstation security."
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