March 25, 2015

On March 24, 2015, 150 people were killed when a German airliner crashed in the Alps mountains of southeastern France. The Germanwings Airbus A320 passenger plane was flying from Barcelona, Spain, to Düsseldorf, Germany. Germanwings is a budget airline owned by Lufthansa, Germany’s largest airline. French emergency crews arrived quickly on the scene, but determined there was little or no chance that anyone survived the crash. Investigators soon suspected that the crash was not accidental, and that the Germanwings copilot apparently had intentionally flown the airplane into the mountain.

A Germanwings A320 passenger jet, similar to the one shown in this picture, crashed in the French Alps on March 20, 2015, killing all 150 people onboard. Officials soon suspected that the crash was not an accident and that the copilot had deliberately flown the plane into the mountain. Credit: © Nicolas Economou, Shutterstock

Germanwings flight 9525 left Barcelona just after 10 a.m. local time. About 30 minutes later, air traffic controllers lost contact with the flight, which had veered from its flight path and begun to descend. Ten minutes later, the aircraft disappeared from radar. Before long, observers on the ground confirmed that the plane had crashed into a mountainside near the remote French village of Prads-Haute-Bléone.

The plane’s cockpit voice recorder was recovered from the crash site, and investigators were shocked and horrified by what they heard. According to officials, the captain left the cockpit while in flight. The copilot took control of the plane and locked the captain out of the cockpit. The copilot silently ignored inquiries from air traffic controllers as the plane began its rapid descent. He also ignored the increasingly frantic pleas of the captain to let him back into the cockpit. In the voice recorder’s final seconds, screaming can be heard coming from the cabin, as well as the sound of the captain trying to break down the cockpit door.

Officials did not suspect any links with terrorism, but they soon learned that the copilot, a 27-year-old German citizen, suffered from depression. The victims of the crash were mostly German and Spanish, including 16 high school students returning from an exchange program in Spain. The Airbus A320 has an excellent service and safety record, as does Germanwings.

April 7, 2014

An Australian ship searching for the missing Malaysia Airlines plane in the southern Indian Ocean yesterday detected signals consistent with those from “black box” flight recorders. Using a towed pinger locater, the crew of the Ocean Shield picked up the signal twice–once for 2 hours and 20 minute–about 1,040 miles (1,680 kilometers) northwest of Perth, Australia. The leader of the search team, Australian Air Chief Marshal Angus Houston, told the media “two distinct pinger returns were audible. Significantly this would be consistent with transmissions from both the flight data recorder and the cockpit voice recorder.” A Chinese vessel also detected signals on April 5 in the same general area. The southern Indian Ocean in that region is approximately 14,770  feet (4,500 meters) deep.

Flight MH370 was flown in a Boeing 777-300, a large twin-engine passenger jet. The airliner can fly about a fourth of the way around the world without refueling. (The Boeing Company)

Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, carrying 239 people, was en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8 when it disappeared, most likely in the southern Indian Ocean. Authorities describe the search operation as a race against time because the batteries operating the flight recorders are about to run out. “I believe they have got three to four more days of good, solid output,” the BBC quotes Chris Portale, the director of the American company that makes the device that emits signals from flight recorders.

Additional World Book article:

• Turbulence: Hidden Threat in the Skies (a special report)