[SystemSafety] Germanwings 4U 9252 / GWI18G

Fri Apr 3 20:35:20 CEST 2015

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Folks,

Distressing news. Preliminary BEA readout of the FDR leaves deliberate action of the FO (the pilot
flying) as the only plausible explanation of the Germanwings crash.

The link to today's BEA communique, as well as my translation of the pertinent paragraph, is at
http://www.abnormaldistribution.org/2015/03/24/germanwings-flight-4u-9525/  which also includes
comments back to 24 March.

I've been updating my blog post judiciously; up until today I had considered that the only
demonstrated pilot action was the one manual setting of the FCU to a target altitude of 100ft (=
96 ft QNH). I didn't go with the suggestion that this was clearly deliberate; neither did I
necessarily go with the suggestion that the CAP was deliberately denied reentry to the cockpit.
Neither of these assertions appeared to me to be unequivocally supported by the evidence of which
we had been made aware. Mental events of an epileptic or stroke-type nature had seemed to me
consistent with what we knew. No longer.

I have found and find this entire event quite distressing. I had two and a half days of constant
news-media contact after it happened. Many colleagues abjure such interviews, but I feel that I
should try to perform such a public service, even when I (inevitably) screw up.

This appears to be the worst mass murder in recent German history, and the fourth-worst in
European (after Srebrenica, Lockerbie and Madrid. Fifth-worst if you consider Ukraine part of
Europe.) We've had some really awful stuff in aviation in the last year: MH 370, MH 17 and 4U 9525.

PBL

Prof. Peter Bernard Ladkin, Faculty of Technology, University of Bielefeld, 33594 Bielefeld, Germany
Je suis Charlie
Tel+msg +49 (0)521 880 7319  www.rvs.uni-bielefeld.de