GermanWings a320

[jb747]

Just read this.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/03/26/us-france-crash-flightradar-idUSKBN0MM2EV20150326

Jon

[John H Watson]

The delays on the doors are programmable (just as the entry codes are). Engineering programme them to suit airline specifications. Now that the standard time delays have been made public, I can imagine some  airlines changing these.

Note that there has always been a locking system on cockpit doors (even pre-9/11). However, the doors are now, basically, impenetrable . If the person in the cockpit doesn't want you to get in, you won't get in. Even overriding the electrics (which is also next to impossible because the circuit breakers are inside the cockpit) won't guarantee you entry.

[farrokh747]

Online web tracking service FlightRadar24 said its analysis of satellite tracking data had found that someone had changed the altitude to the minimum setting possible of 100 feet: well below the crash site lying at about 6,000 feet.

how does FR24 know the alt settings in the MCP?

[United744]

It's part of the ADS-B data stream. The data is only available on request by a ground station.

[HercMighty]

Online web tracking service FlightRadar24 said its analysis of satellite tracking data had found that someone had changed the altitude to the minimum setting possible of 100 feet: well below the crash site lying at about 6,000 feet.

how does FR24 know the alt settings in the MCP?

According to their website:

Flightradar24 combines data from several data sources including ADS-B, MLAT and FAA.

Reading into ADS-B maybe their source. Now your quote above doesn't provide full context, but was the MCP altered or as has been reported the FMC was changed?

[farrokh747]

the quote is from jb's link above here....  

"Between 09:30:52 and 09:30:55 you can see that the autopilot was manually changed from 38,000 feet to 100 feet and 9 seconds later the aircraft started to descend, probably with the 'open descent' autopilot setting," Fredrik Lindahl, chief executive of the Swedish tracking service said by email.

Are these data streams carrying this amount of detail? I was under the impression it's just lat/long and alt.....

[farrokh747]

OK It appears they have a ton of data streaming:

http://forum.flightradar24.com/threads/8650-We-have-analysed-the-raw-data-from-the-transponder-of-4U9525-and-found-some-more-dat?p=64616

09:30:51Z.636 T,3c6618,43.120453,5.675092,38000,GWI18G
09:30:52Z.386 MCP/FMC ALT: 38000 ft QNH: 1006.0 hPa
09:30:52Z.567 T,3c6618,43.122208,5.676482,38000,GWI18G
09:30:53Z.036 T,3c6618,43.122894,5.676993,38000,GWI18G
09:30:53Z.546 T,3c6618,43.124271,5.678166,38000,GWI18G
09:30:54Z.083 MCP/FMC ALT: 13008 ft QNH: 1006.0 hPa
09:30:54Z.096 T,3c6618,43.125295,5.678689,38000,GWI18G
09:30:54Z.676 T,3c6618,43.125961,5.679421,38000,GWI18G
09:30:55Z.156 T,3c6618,43.127157,5.680259,38000,GWI18G
09:30:55Z.397 MCP/FMC ALT: 96 ft QNH: 1006.0 hPa
09:30:55Z.453 MCP/FMC ALT: 96 ft QNH: 1006.0 hPa

about 3 secs to dial down the knob from 380 to 96 ft

So reading the discussion in the fr24 thread, it appears that ATC can request certain params via the xpdr?

[Phil Bunch]

I am confused about the reported training hours of the copilot.  From cnn.com (repeated by other major news media):

"He had been with Germanwings since September 2013 and had completed 630 hours of flight time, the company said. Lubitz had trained at the Lufthansa flight center in Bremen, Germany."

"He only had about 100 hours of experience on the type of aircraft he was flying, but he had all the necessary certifications and qualifications to pilot the aircraft alone, the prosecutor said."

----------------

I don't understand how 100 hours in a type could be enough to allow you to fly an airliner unless you were transitioning from a very similar aircraft.  

Also, I don't see how 630 hours (total hours as a commercial pilot???) would be enough to qualify as a copilot in any airliner.  

My superficial understanding is that in the USA, it would be typical for an aspiring pilot to acquire something like 1500 hours as a commercial pilot, perhaps in the Caribbean, etc, in order to *begin* at a commuter airliner, probably a turboprop.

What am I misunderstanding?

[United744]

I don't understand these arguments about any pilot not having sufficient hours to fly an airliner. What people are saying with that statement is that the training is inadequate and/or the test standards are not stringent enough.

My superficial understanding is that in the USA, it would be typical for an aspiring pilot to acquire something like 1500 hours as a commercial pilot

A bit of history is in order. This 1500 hour rule was a typically ill-conceived, knee-jerk piece of legislation, in response to the Colgan Air Flight 3407 crash. The mentality was that "something must be done!", and that was it.

The reality is that the experience (or lack thereof) of the First Officer in the germanwings crash is utterly irrelevant, as it was apparently a conscious act to commit a devastating crime (mass murder).

It's time we told it as it is, instead of trying to wish the problem away by looking for things that aren't there.

Really, the metric of hours to measure experience is flawed. Let's say a long-haul pilot, on average, spends 8 hours flying somewhere. It takes maybe 2 minutes to takeoff, 25 minutes to reach cruise, 20 minutes to descend, and 5 minutes to land.

Adding all that up gives us 52 minutes of flight time doing something other than sitting and watching the automation fly the aircraft (assuming the climb and descent are hand-flown). That is only 10.8% of the entire flight duration. Based on that, a pilot with 10000 hours, is only worth 1080 hours actual hands-on flying experience.

Compare that to your short-haul crew who spend maybe 30 minutes at cruise on a 1 hour flight. Their 10000 hours experience is worth 5000 hours.

With the level of automation dependence that crews are forced to endure by company SOP, these numbers are probably much lower (some airlines stipulate AP ON at 400 ft and OFF at DH). Whilst the crews are guiding the aircraft, they don't have any real "stick time" with the aircraft. We are starting to see crashes that are the result of this inexperience (AF447, Asiana Airlines Flight 214).

IMHO, the training provided to pilots needs to be re-evaluated. More emphasis on flying the aircraft manually needs to be made, and much more time spent on "stick and rudder" skills than systems management. We've fallen down the other side of the safety bell-curve.

O/T: the forum is malfunctioning and extremely slow since whatever maintenance was performed on it earlier this evening.

[Jeroen D]

"He only had about 100 hours of experience on the type of aircraft he was flying, but he had all the necessary certifications and qualifications to pilot the aircraft alone, the prosecutor said."

----------------

I don't understand how 100 hours in a type could be enough to allow you to fly an airliner unless you were transitioning from a very similar aircraft.  

Also, I don't see how 630 hours (total hours as a commercial pilot???) would be enough to qualify as a copilot in any airliner.  

My superficial understanding is that in the USA, it would be typical for an aspiring pilot to acquire something like 1500 hours as a commercial pilot, perhaps in the Caribbean, etc, in order to *begin* at a commuter airliner, probably a turboprop.

What am I misunderstanding?

When I got my pilots license in 2010 in the USA the minimum requirement to get your ATP was only 250 hours. A few years ago they bumped that up to 1500 hours.

But in those days 250 hours plus whatever it takes for a type rating got you into the right seat of many a (commuter) airliner. Not sure about other aviation authorities around the world, but I believe this co-pilot hours are not unusual in Europe or in Asia

The FAA has done considerable research into finding a correlation between pilots experience (flight time) and fatal accidents and have found none. To put it differently you have the same statistical chance of a fatal accident flying with a very low hours pilot as with a pilot with very high number of hours!

The FAA research resulted in the FAA WINGS program which aimed to increase safety and reduce GA fatalities. It did not focus on hours or even flying technique, but it did focus on saftery awareness, improving aeronatical decision making etc. Three years into the program, it was proven that GA pilots participating in the WINGS program had statistically a 50% smaller chance of having a fatal accident then pilots not participating.

Admittedly this was all around GA, but in the USA that involves also a huge number of business jets. Maybe smaller then your average commercial liner, but often faster, able to fly higher and just as complex and advanced if not more so then some commercial liners.

Just another little nerdy/anorak fact; if you want to improve the safety in the cockpit from the human point of view, you might want to look at at least a male / female crew, or better yet, an all female crew. As the other gender is making it into the worlds civilian and military cockpits more and more evidence is beginning to appear that female pilots have fewer (fatal) incident and accidents than male pilots.

Jeroen

[cagarini]

The only thing I would certainly require from an ATP candidate would be to have a current Glider Pilot License, just like Lufthansa required from their pilots up to the late seventies...

I also remember that through all my pilot ( private ) life ( more than 34 yrs now ) I was "observed" by a psychologist only once.  A friend of mine, who was an airline pilot for many years, had to give up due to stress / panic attacks.

I believe stress, and today's way of living our lives pretty much promotes the most unexpected behaviours from us, or causes us problems that we would probably otherwise never experiment.

Maybe the rules will now try to adapt to this new reality. At least two known accidents of the same type in a year starts to make us think...

[falconeye]

In this context an interesting test a university in Germany made together with the Lufthansa. They tested the skills of pilots landing the plane manually in difficult situations.
The pilots were divided in two groups. One group were only pilots flying on longhaul routes. And the other group only shorthaul flyers. The result was that the shorthaul pilots had significant better results then the other group, even though they had  less flying hours. The reason for this is, that the shorthaul pilots are flying much  more manually approaches then the longhaul pilots. So the conclusion is or was, that the number of flying hours is not necessarily a  sign of the quality of the pilot. The exact data were kept secret unfortunately, but Lufthansa has changed their simtraining since then, they said.

[falconeye]

The only thing I would certainly require from an ATP candidate would be to have a current Glider Pilot License, just like Lufthansa required from their pilots up to the late seventies...

The germanwings copilot had also a glider pilot license. He was flying in an local glider club since his youth.

[cagarini]

Yep,

I noticed that too.

I'm still finding it difficult to believe what happened was exactly was is being described, but, then again - there's that lack of psicological / psychiatric evaluation along a commercial / line pilot career, that many professions, not obnly pilot's, should have...

[DougSnow]

the quote is from jb's link above here....  

"Between 09:30:52 and 09:30:55 you can see that the autopilot was manually changed from 38,000 feet to 100 feet and 9 seconds later the aircraft started to descend, probably with the 'open descent' autopilot setting," Fredrik Lindahl, chief executive of the Swedish tracking service said by email.

Are these data streams carrying this amount of detail? I was under the impression it's just lat/long and alt.....

One fundamental part of the ADS-B data stream that FR24 gets is whats called intent. Intent gets the positions of certain switches on the MCP (Commanded Altitude for one), the active waypoint and Next WP and Next WP + 1, and a whole bunch of other parameters.  They can also see if the aircraft has one of the emergency codes set in their transponder.

ADS-B has saved several gross nav errors in the North Atlantic from becoming much worse because the controller can see all that data - or at a minimum their flight data processing system can at least warn the controller when the intent data in the ADS-B isn't set to what they expect.

[Avi]

Let's say a long-haul pilot, on average, spends 8 hours flying somewhere. It takes maybe 2 minutes to takeoff, 25 minutes to reach cruise, 20 minutes to descend, and 5 minutes to land.

Adding all that up gives us 52 minutes of flight time doing something other than sitting and watching the automation fly the aircraft (assuming the climb and descent are hand-flown). That is only 10.8% of the entire flight duration. Based on that, a pilot with 10000 hours, is only worth 1080 hours actual hands-on flying experience.

It's even worse if you take into account that only one pilot is actually flying the aircraft (so the 1080 hours drops to 540) and in the very long legs you may have a third if not a fourth crew member who doesn't fly the aircraft at all.

Cheers,

[OmniAtlas]

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3016656/Killer-pilot-Andreas-Lubitz-dreamed-flying-Boeing-747-carry-660-people.html

Revealed: Killer co-pilot wanted to fly a BIGGER Airbus

[Jeroen Hoppenbrouwers]

The more I read, the sicker I get of all the allegations. Why is it so simple to lock a cockpit door? Why can't you get in easier? Why can you descend an aircraft with just the twist of a knob? Isn't this unsafe? Are big aircraft not too inviting to crash?

Its NEVER good.


Hoppie

Next installment: make it mandatory that both pilots have guns.
After that: require all tanker trucks to have two drivers, both with steering controls.
Next: and guns.

[Phil Bunch]

I am increasingly frustrated with sensation-driven news headlines related to this tragedy.  Some examples from major news sites as well as less well-regarded news sources:

"Killers in the cockpit"  

"Germanwings killer Andreas Lubitz 'trawled internet for suicide and sexual perversion websites"

"Twisted obsessions of killer in cockpit: Lubitz trawled 'dark side' of the web""

-----------------------
In reality, such incidents are unimaginably rare, when measured in terms of pilot illness caused crashes divided by the number of flights per year.  By reporting events in the style described above, news media stereotype pilots in a very inappropriate way and contribute nothing to improving aviation safety.

[falconeye]

Now two persons have to be in the cockpit all the time.
A pilot and a stewardess together alone in the cockpit? I think very dangerous!
Much more dangerous then a pilot alone in the cockpit.