Apparently (according to some news story I read) US airlines have a policy of not leaving anyone alone in the cockpit. If one pilot leaves, a flight attendant takes their place. Seems like a pretty good idea imo.

I am just really not sure how you test for these things. There's also a huge difference between just being depressed and suicidal and wanting to take hundreds of people with you to the grave.

Being depressed is something you'd admit to a psychiatrist. That you have the desire to become a mass murderer is not.

Until one of them flight attendants snaps ...

You basically proved my point. You named 5 flights in the past 18 years that possibly had suicidal pilots willing to crash a plane with passengers on it. It's not some red flag going up where all of a sudden we need to start worrying about pilots committing suicide.

Interesting to know.

Does Airbus even allow nosedives?

Has fumes from the air compressors that feed the cabin been floated much as a possible theory for the crash? We mentioned it a week or so ago in W0X0F's thread—the air people breathe on planes is (sometimes/often?) contaminated since the engine components compress the air before it is sent into the cabin. I read another article saying that about 1 in 2000 flights suffers badly enough from this phenomenon to be called a "fume event." If the air was sufficiently bad in this case, you could understand how everyone, including the pilots, would have been too mentally stultified to avoid flying into a mountain. It's been suspected of causing previous disasters, though I don't know if it gets talked about much.

That theory doesn't explain anything. It doesn't explain the descent, it doesn't explain the pilot being locked out of the cockpit. It can be ruled out on current information.

Confirmed.

W0X, while I know it'll be based in part on speculation, what's the most likely theory being discussed in flying circles right now?

Committing suicide is not the same as committing suicide/murder.

Pilots who fly planes into the ground would only make up a small portion of those pilots who took their own lives by other means, and not harming others in the process.

I would be surprised to find out that the "suicide" rate of pilots would be much different than that of accountants, lawyers, engineers, teachers, etc. See no reason why it would be lower.

Also, I wonder -- given that it was apparently a controlled descent -- whether any passengers used their cell phones to record whatever was going on, or maybe even messages to loved ones in the awful event they could tell something was going dreadfully wrong. I've seen the debris field, and I guess most things were obliterated, but hopefully it's something the investigators are at least looking into. Not inconceivable that a phone's SD card could have survived in 1 piece, or even be recoverable if damaged.

This paragraph is lifted (verbatim) from the NYT article reporting one of the pilots being locked out of the cockpit.

At the crash site, a senior official working on the investigation said, workers found the casing of the plane’s other so-called black box, the flight data recorder, but the memory card containing data on the plane’s altitude, speed, location and condition was not inside, apparently having been thrown loose or destroyed by the impact.

Addressing a question concerning this "missing" Flight Data Recorder, an aviation expert on CNN last night stated that the FDR and the CDR are designed to withstand an impact of 800 G's. So even if the aircraft smacked into the side of the mountain at a speed of close to 600 mph, would that be enough force to "destroy" the FDR? Also, how does the CVR survive while the FDR disintegrates?

The Times article also states that flight data is stored on a memory card (housed inside the FDR casing) and it is this "memory card" that was [apparently] destroyed. Somebody correct me if I'm wrong, but I was under the impression that both flight data and cockpit voice data are recorded on a 30-minute tape which continually runs throughout the flight, so the final 30 minutes of each flight are always preserved. (I wonder if this is another case where overexcited editors and reporters - anxious to get out their scoop - have reported incorrect information as facts?)

Wox,

What are some things a pilot could do with in 20 seconds that would doom an aircraft?

http://news.aviation-safety.net/2013...pilot-suicide/

If they retrieve the flight data recorder it will be easy to tell if the pilot was still controlling the plane, and then we can rule out 1) cockpit decompression 2) pilot medical emergency 3) asleep which leaves us with pilot suicide assuming the plane was still being flown.

Read from a user on another forum that when he was on a flight each time the co-pilot leaves the cockpit an air steward/stewardess enters it until he returned. Not sure if that's common practice or required.

Also, the fact that the flight took 8 minutes to crash seems to me that the flight was neither on autopilot nor uncontrolled. Seems deliberate but what do I know.

Man it must be so morbidly thrilling to be the group of people who are the first ones to listen to the last moments of the cockpit audio recording before a crash.
The recording from AF 447 was chilling to say the least.

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Suicide/voluntary crash has to be the most likely scenario here given the information thus far. Unless of course there was a series of highly unlikely events leading to some extraordinary circumstances.

Also, Lufthansa owns Germanwings right? I traveled on Lufthansa recently and there was a lot of news about sporadic strikes from pilots and staff regarding retirement age and certain other issues. I was worried my flight would be cancelled but international routes were relatively stable despite the strike.

Did those strikes/discontent spread through operations at Germanwings too?

Yes, Germanwings also went on strike earlier this year.

W0X0F

Tesla announced last week that a software update this summer will allow one of their car models be a self-driving car. This is clearly going to be a reality in the automobile industry within 10 years or so. How far are we from this (self-flying airplanes) being a reality in the airline industry?

Thx

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Lots of people backtracking on their earlier firm belief that this wasn't terrorism.

Yes, pilot suicide/homicide is a form of terrorism. Hell, it's possible that all these suicidal pilots could be part of some new terrorist strategy. It's known that some of the 9/11 people had pilot training. It's hard for them to overcome security to do it as passengers, but as pilots? Foolproof. Please don't deny that this is possible. If someone had predicted 9/11 they would have thought he was nuts. It's a new age people, it's time to wake up and recognize the monsters we are fighting every day.

Lol no, suicide by itself is not a form of terrorism. The rest of that post just gets more hilarious with every word.

The hostess replacing the pilot thing on a break is possibly only an American thing, not European.

Source. Some random article I read.

Japan Airlines 123 crash in 1985 is is insane too

Its been a while iirc rugby, where have you been ?