German Airbus crashes in French Alps with 150 dead, black box found

Co-pilot suspected of deliberately crashing Germanwings jet Thu, Mar 26 18:07 PM EDT image 1 of 26 By Tim Hepher and Jean-Francois Rosnoblet PARIS/SEYNE-LES-ALPES (Reuters) - A young German co-pilot barricaded himself alone in the cockpit of Germanwings flight 9525 and apparently set it on course to crash into an Alpine mountain, killing all 150 people on board including himself, French prosecutors said on Thursday. They offered no motive for why Andreas Lubitz, 27, would take the controls of the Airbus A320, lock the captain out of the cockpit and deliberately set it veering down from cruising altitude at 3,000 feet per minute. German police searched his home for evidence that might offer some explanation for what was behind Tuesday's crash in the French Alps. The scenario stunned the aviation world. Within hours of the prosecutors' announcement, several airlines responded by immediately changing their rules to require a second crew member to be in the cockpit at all times. That is already compulsory in the United States but not in Europe. Canada said it would now require it of all its airlines. EasyJet, Norwegian Air Shuttle and Air Berlin were among other carriers that swiftly announced such policies. Among those that didn't was Germanwings parent company Lufthansa, whose CEO said he thought it was unnecessary. But the airline came under swift pressure on social media to make such a change and later said it would discuss it with others in the industry. French and German officials said there was no indication Lubitz was a terrorist but offered no rival theories to explain his actions. Acquaintances described him as an affable young man who had given no sign of harmful intent. Lubitz acted "for a reason we cannot fathom right now but which looks like intent to destroy this aircraft", Marseille prosecutor Brice Robin said. Setting the plane's controls for rapid descent was an act that "could only have been voluntary", Robin said. “He had... no reason to stop the pilot-in-command from coming back into the cockpit. He had no reason to refuse to answer to the air controller who was alerting him on the loss of altitude." The captain, who had stepped out of the cockpit, probably to use the toilet, could be heard on flight recordings trying to force his way back in. "You can hear banging to try to smash the door down," Robin said. Most of the passengers would not have been aware of their fate until the very end, he said: "Only toward the end do you hear screams," he said. "And bear in mind that death would have been instantaneous...the aircraft was literally smashed to bits." FlightRadar24, an online air tracking service that uses satellite data, said it had found evidence the autopilot was abruptly switched from cruising altitude to just 100 feet, the lowest possible setting. The plane crashed at about 6,000 feet. "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. Lufthansa CEO Carsten Spohr said its air crew were picked carefully and subjected to psychological vetting. "No matter your safety regulations, no matter how high you set the bar, and we have incredibly high standards, there is no way to rule out such an event," Spohr said. Attention was focused on the motivations of Lubitz, a German national who joined the Lufthansa-owned budget carrier in September 2013 and had just 630 hours of flying time - compared with the 6,000 hours of the flight captain. "SUICIDE" THE WRONG WORD "Suicide" was the wrong word to describe actions which killed so many other people, Robin, the French prosecutor, said: "I don't necessarily call it suicide when you have responsibility for 100 or so lives." The family of the co-pilot, whose age was earlier misstated as 28, arrived in France for a tribute alongside other victims. They were being kept apart from the others, Robin said. Police searched the co-pilot's home in Montabaur, Germany, leaving with large blue bags of evidence and a computer. A man was led out of the building, shielded by police holding up jackets. Acquaintances in the town said they were stunned. "I'm just speechless. I don't have any explanation for this. Knowing Andreas, this is just inconceivable for me," said Peter Ruecker, a long-time member of the local flight club where Lubitz received his flying license years ago. "He was a lot of fun, even though he was perhaps sometimes a bit quiet. He was just another boy like so many others here." A photo on Lubitz's Facebook page, which was later taken down, shows a smiling young man posing in front of San Francisco's Golden Gate bridge. Investigators were still searching for the second of the two black boxes on Thursday in the ravine where the plane crashed, 100 km (65 miles) from Nice. This box would contain data from the plane's instruments. Under German aviation law, pilots may temporarily leave the cockpit at certain times and in certain circumstances, such as while the aircraft is cruising. Cockpit doors can be opened from the outside with a code, in line with regulations introduced after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks in the United States, but the code can be overridden from inside the cockpit, making the door impenetrable. Germanwings said 72 Germans were killed in the first major air passenger disaster on French soil since the 2000 Concorde accident just outside Paris. Madrid revised down on Thursday the number of Spanish victims to 50 from 51. As well as Germans and Spaniards, victims included three Americans, a Moroccan and citizens of Britain, Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Colombia, Denmark, Israel, Japan, Mexico, Iran and the Netherlands, officials said. However, DNA checks to identify them could take weeks, the French government said. The families of victims were being flown to Marseille on Thursday before being taken up to the zone close to the crash site. Chapels had been prepared for them with a view of the mountain where their relatives died. (Additional reporting by bureaus in Paris, Berlin, Frankfurt and Madrid; Writing by Peter Graff; Editing by Mark Trevelyan) ===== German Airbus crashes in French Alps with 150 dead, black box found Tue, Mar 24 17:30 PM EDT image 1 of 17 By Jean-Francois Rosnoblet SEYNE-LES-ALPES, France (Reuters) - An Airbus operated by Lufthansa's Germanwings budget airline crashed into a mountainside in the French Alps on Tuesday, killing all 150 people on board including 16 schoolchildren. Germanwings confirmed its flight 4U 9525 from Barcelona to Duesseldorf went down with 144 passengers and six crew on board. One of the plane's black box recorders has been found at the crash site, about 100 km (65 miles) north of the Riviera city of Nice, and will be examined immediately, France's interior minister said. In Washington, the White House said the crash did not appear to have been caused by a terrorist attack, while Lufthansa said it was working on the assumption that the tragedy had been an accident, adding that any other theory would be speculation. Aerial photographs showed smoldering wreckage and a piece of the fuselage with six windows strewn across the steep mountainside cut by ravines. "We saw an aircraft that had literally been ripped apart, the bodies are in a state of destruction, there is not one intact piece of wing or fuselage," Brice Robin, prosecutor for the city of Marseille, told Reuters after flying over the wreckage in a helicopter. Germanwings believed 67 Germans had been on the flight. Spain's deputy prime minister said 45 passengers had Spanish names. One Belgian was also aboard. Also among the victims were 16 children and two teachers from the Joseph-Koenig-Gymnasium high school in the town of Haltern am See in northwest Germany, a spokeswoman said. Barcelona's Liceu opera house said on Twitter that two singers, Kazakhstan-born Oleg Bryjak and German Maria Radner, had died while returning to Duesseldorf after they had performed in Wagner's Siegfried at the theater. French police at the crash site about 2,000 meters (6,000 feet) above sea level said no one had survived and it would take days to recover the bodies due to difficult terrain, snow and incoming storms. Police said search teams would stay overnight at altitude. "We are still searching. It's unlikely any bodies will be airlifted until Wednesday," regional police chief David Galtier told Reuters. In Paris, Prime Minister Manuel Valls told parliament: "A helicopter managed to land (by the crash site) and has confirmed that unfortunately there were no survivors." It was the first crash of a large passenger jet on French soil since the Concorde disaster just outside Paris nearly 15 years ago. The A320 is a workhorse of aviation fleets and one of the world’s most used passenger jets. It has a good safety record. However, according to data from the Aviation Safety Network, Tuesday's crash was the third most deadly involving an A320. In 2007 a TAM Linhas Aereas A320 shot off a runway in Brazil, killing 187 people, while 162 people died when an Indonesia AirAsia jet went down in the Java Sea in December. SHARP DESCENT Germanwings said the plane started descending one minute after reaching its cruising height and continued losing altitude for eight minutes. "The aircraft's contact with French radar, French air traffic controllers, ended at 10.53 am at an altitude of about 6,000 feet. The plane then crashed," Germanwings' Managing Director Thomas Winkelmann told a news conference. Winkelmann also said that routine maintenance of the aircraft was performed by Lufthansa on Monday. Experts said that while the Airbus had descended rapidly, its rate of descent did not suggest it had simply fallen out of the sky. France's DGAC aviation authority said air traffic controllers initiated distress procedures after they lost contact with the Airbus. "The aircraft did not itself make a distress call but it was the combination of the loss of radio contact and the aircraft's descent which led the controller to implement the distress phase," a DGAC spokesman said. In emergencies, pilots are trained to try to fly the aircraft as their first priority, then pay attention to navigation and only then communicate with the ground. The aircraft came down in an alpine region known for skiing, hiking and rafting, but which is hard for rescue services to reach. The search and recovery effort based itself in a gymnasium in the village of Seyne-les-Alpes, which has a small private aerodrome nearby. STORMS, SNOW, CLOUD As helicopters and emergency vehicles assembled, the weather was reported to be closing in. “There will be a lot of cloud cover this afternoon, with local storms, snow above 1,800 meters and relatively low clouds. That will not help the helicopters in their work,” an official from the local weather center told Reuters. Lufthansa Chief Executive Carsten Spohr, who planned to go to the crash site, spoke of a "dark day for Lufthansa". "My deepest sympathy goes to the families and friends of our passengers and crew," Lufthansa said on Twitter, citing Spohr. German Chancellor Angela Merkel said she would travel to the site on Wednesday. Germanwings and the Catalan regional government were preparing to take Spanish relatives there. Family members arrived at Barcelona’s El Prat airport, many crying and with arms around each others’ shoulders, accompanied by police and airport staff. In Llinars del Valles, the Spanish village that hosted the German schoolchildren, Mayor Marti Pujol said the whole village was distraught. "The families knew each other," he told Reuters. "The parents had been to see them off at 6 this morning." King Felipe and Queen Letizia of Spain called off a state visit to France in a sign of mourning for the victims. They had arrived in Paris minutes after the crash happened. In Washington, President Barack Obama said his thoughts and prayers were with Germany and Spain after what he called the "awful tragedy". Airbus confirmed that the plane was 24 years old, having first been delivered to Lufthansa in 1991. It was powered by engines made by CFM International, a joint venture between General Electric and France's Safran. (Additional reporting by Robert Hetz, John Irish, Nicolas Bertin, Gregory Blachier, Tim Hepher, Alwyn Scott, Elena Gyldenkerne, Robert-Jan Bartunek, Matthias Inverardi and Sabine Siebold; writing by Giles Elgood and David Stamp; editing by Mark John and Peter Millership)

Bad weather hampers search for AirAsia wreckage after debris, bodies found

Weather frustrates divers as more AirAsia wreckage found Sun, Jan 04 05:53 AM EST image 1 of 20 By Fergus Jensen and Fransiska Nangoy PANGKALAN BUN/SURABAYA, Indonesia (Reuters) - Divers tried to reach sunken wreckage from a crashed AirAsia passenger jet on Sunday but were forced to return to their ship by bad weather, as Indonesian officials said they had detected a fifth large underwater object believed to be part of the plane. Indonesia's meteorological agency has said seasonal tropical storms probably contributed to the crash, and the weather has persistently hampered efforts to recover bodies and find the black box flight recorders that may explain why the Airbus (AIR.PA) A320-200 plunged into the sea a week ago. "The weather is bad. There's a storm. It's windy," said a Reuters photographer on board a search and rescue ship in the search area off Borneo island. "Earlier, four divers were transferred to (Indonesian navy ship) KRI Banda Aceh but they canceled the diving because the sea currents were too strong." Flight QZ8501 crashed into the Java Sea last Sunday, about 40 minutes after taking off from Indonesia's second-largest city Surabaya en route for Singapore. There were no survivors. Indonesian officials were hopeful of a breakthrough in the operation when they announced on Saturday that ships using sonar had pinpointed four large pieces of debris on the sea bed. The head of Indonesia's search and rescue agency, Fransiskus Bambang Soelistyo, told a news conference in Jakarta on Sunday that a fifth object almost 10 meters long had been found. But although nine ships from four countries have converged on the area, with teams of divers including seven Russian experts standing ready, winds and high waves have meant progress has been agonizingly slow. WEATHER LIKELY A FACTOR Air Force Lt Col Johnson Supriadi, speaking at a briefing for pilots in Pangkalan Bun, the southern Borneo town where the search operation is based, said efforts on Sunday would be divided between recovering bodies and locating wreckage and the all-important cockpit voice and flight data recorders. Until investigators can examine the recorders the cause of the crash remains unknown, but the area is known for intense seasonal storms. BMKG, Indonesia's meteorological agency, has said bad weather was likely a factor. "The flight document provided by the BMKG office shows fairly worrying weather conditions for the aircraft at cruising level on the chosen route," the agency said in a report. A source close to the investigation told Reuters that radar data appeared to show the aircraft made an "unbelievably" steep climb before it crashed, possibly pushing it beyond the A320's limits. The Indonesian captain, a former air force fighter pilot, had 6,100 flying hours on the A320 and the plane last underwent maintenance in mid-November, according to Indonesia AirAsia, 49 percent owned by Malaysia-based AirAsia (AIRA.KL). SHALLOW WATER The objects that are the main focus of the search were located by ships about 90 nautical miles off the coast. The largest object is around 18 meters long. The suspected wreckage is lying in water around 30 meters (100 ft) deep, which experts say should make it relatively straightforward to recover if the rough weather abates. Efforts to capture images with remote operated vehicles (ROVs) were frustrated on Saturday by poor visibility. Thirty-one bodies of the mostly Indonesian passengers and crew have so far been recovered, including some still strapped in their seats. Many more may be still trapped in the fuselage of the aircraft. Nine Indonesian victims have been identified. The crash was the first fatal accident suffered by the AirAsia budget group, whose Indonesian affiliate flies from at least 15 destinations across the sprawling archipelago. The airline has come under pressure from Indonesian authorities, who have suspended its Surabaya to Singapore operations saying the carrier only had a license to fly the route on Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. Indonesia AirAsia said it would co-operate with the transport ministry whilst it investigates the license. A joint statement from Singapore's civil aviation authority (CAAS) and Changi Airport Group said that AirAsia had the necessary approvals to operate a daily flight between Surabaya and Singapore. (Additional reporting by Beawiharta ABOARD KN PURWOREJO, Nilufar Rizki, Adriana Nina Kusuma, Chris Nusatya, Cindy Silviana, Kanupriya Kapoor, Michael Taylor, Charlotte Greenfield and Nicholas Owen in JAKARTA, and Anshuman Daga in SINGAPORE; Writing by Alex Richardson; Editing by Michael Perry & Kim Coghill) ================= Bodies, debris from missing AirAsia plane pulled from sea off Indonesia Tue, Dec 30 16:21 PM EST image 7 of 12 By Gayatri Suroyo and Adriana Nina Kusuma SURABAYA, Indonesia/JAKARTA (Reuters) - Indonesian rescuers searching for an AirAsia plane carrying 162 people pulled bodies and wreckage from the sea off the coast of Borneo on Tuesday, prompting relatives of those on board watching TV footage to break down in tears. Indonesia AirAsia's Flight QZ8501, an Airbus A320-200, lost contact with air traffic control early on Sunday during bad weather on a flight from the Indonesian city of Surabaya to Singapore. The navy initially said 40 bodies had been recovered, although other media later quoted the head of the search and rescue agency, Fransiskus Bambang Soelistyo, as saying only three bodies had been retrieved. The plane has yet to be found. "My heart is filled with sadness for all the families involved in QZ8501," airline boss Tony Fernandes tweeted. "On behalf of AirAsia, my condolences to all. Words cannot express how sorry I am." The airline said in a statement that it was inviting family members to Surabaya, "where a dedicated team of care providers will be assigned to each family to ensure that all of their needs are met". Pictures of floating bodies were broadcast on television and relatives of the missing already gathered at a crisis center in Surabaya wept with heads in their hands. Several people collapsed in grief and were helped away. Yohannes and his wife were at the center awaiting news of her brother, Herumanto Tanus, and two of his children who were on board the doomed flight. The Tanus family had been on their way to visit Herumanto's son, who studies in Singapore and who traveled to Surabaya on Monday after the plane went missing. "He cries every time he watches the news," Yohannes said. The mayor of Surabaya, Tri Rismaharini, comforted relatives and urged them to be strong. "They are not ours, they belong to God," she said. SEARCHING THROUGH THE NIGHT A navy spokesman said a plane door, oxygen tanks and one body had been recovered and taken away by helicopter for tests. "The challenge is waves up to three metres high," Soelistyo told reporters, adding that the search operation would go on all night. He declined to answer questions on whether any survivors had been found. About 30 ships and 21 aircraft from Indonesia, Australia, Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea and the United States have been involved in the search. The plane, which did not issue a distress signal, disappeared after its pilot failed to get permission to fly higher to avoid bad weather because of heavy air traffic, officials said. It was traveling at 32,000 feet (9,753 metres) and had asked to fly at 38,000 feet, officials said earlier. Pilots and aviation experts said thunderstorms, and requests to gain altitude to avoid them, were not unusual in that area. The Indonesian pilot was experienced and the plane last underwent maintenance in mid-November, the airline said. Online discussion among pilots has centered on unconfirmed secondary radar data from Malaysia that suggested the aircraft was climbing at a speed of 353 knots, about 100 knots too slow, and that it might have stalled. Investigators are focusing initially on whether the crew took too long to request permission to climb, or could have ascended on their own initiative earlier, said a source close to the probe, adding that poor weather could have played a part as well. He cautioned that the investigation was at an early stage and the black box flight recorders had yet to be recovered. CLUES WHEN THINGS GO WRONG The plane, whose engines were made by CFM International, co-owned by General Electric and Safran of France, lacked real-time engine diagnostics or monitoring, a GE spokesman said. Such systems are mainly used on long-haul flights and can provide clues to airlines and investigators when things go wrong. Three airline disasters involving Malaysian-affiliated carriers in less than a year have dented confidence in the country's aviation industry and spooked travelers across the region. Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370 went missing on March 8 on a trip from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 passengers and crew on board and has not been found. On July 17, the same airline's Flight MH17 was shot down over Ukraine, killing all 298 people on board. Bizarrely, an AirAsia plane from Manila skidded off and overshot the runway on landing at Kalibo in the central Philippines on Tuesday. No one was hurt. On board Flight QZ8501 were 155 Indonesians, three South Koreans, and one person each from Singapore, Malaysia and Britain. The co-pilot was French. U.S. law enforcement and security officials said passenger and crew lists were being examined but nothing significant had turned up and the incident was regarded as an unexplained accident. Indonesia AirAsia is 49 percent owned by Malaysia-based budget carrier AirAsia. The AirAsia group, including affiliates in Thailand, the Philippines and India, had not suffered a crash since its Malaysian budget operations began in 2002. (Additional reporting by Fergus Jensen, Wilda Asmarini, Charlotte Greenfield, Fransiska Nangoy, Cindy Silviana, Kanupriya Kapoor, Michael Taylor, Nilufar Rizki and Siva Govindasamy in JAKARTA/SURABAYA, Al-Zaquan Amer Hamzah and Praveen Menon in KUALA LUMPUR, Saeed Azhar, Rujun Shen and Anshuman Daga in SINGAPORE, Jane Wardell in SYDNEY, Tim Hepher in PARIS and Mark Hosenball, David Brunnstrom and Lesley Wroughton in WASHINGTON; Writing by Dean Yates and Robert Birsel; Editing by Nick Macfie and Mike Collett-White)