Yet another Airbus crash.

[308Mike]

Liking the thought of being in an Airbus less and less.

I don't blame you, but if you're going to be flying in Europe, you might have little choice besides employing a bunch of puddle-jumpers!!

[Termite]

It's pretty easy to find a mountain in the Alps at 8500 feet.

Granite clouds are really hard on planes.

Shortly after the plane reached cruising altitude (?) it began to descend. Then followed eight minutes with the plane continuing to loose altitude.............
........ The aircraft then fell in a speed that indicates that there may have been a problem with the cabin pressure, or alternatively that the pilots tried to land the plane, says the german paper Spiegel.

OK, that's weird.

IIRC, there are several alarms for loss of cabin pressure and O2 levels.

[Jericho941]

You see what happens, Larry? You see what happens when you fly an Airbus in the Alps?

[Darrell]

I read that they already found the black box, perhaps we'll know soon what happened.

[evan price]

My pilot friend didn't think it was funny that I was using the GPWS tone as their ring tone on my cell.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2HFc6x_AtWs

[Aesop]

I'm spitballing that this will turn out to be another Air France-style computer-controlled descent into terrain problem.
The fact that they didn't maneuver other than descent points to an inability to do so, for my money.
Whether that was the plane, hypoxia, or guys with box cutters remains to be seen, but they aren't thinking that latter way.

We'll know Airbus is getting serious when they start issuing parachutes to passengers. In eight minutes they could have mass-jumped the entire plane.

[Darrell]

Report is out now that the pilot was locked out of the cockpit before the crash:

Update, Wednesday: 7:42 PM ET: An investigator told the New York Times that the recording from the cockpit voice recorder indicates that one of the plane's pilots left the cockpit before the Airbus A320 began descending. The anonymous investigator says you can hear that the pilot was locked out of the cockpit, describing a light knocking on the door, no answer from the inside, a harder knock, and still nothing. The investigator told the New York Times, "You can hear he is trying to smash the door down."

Could Plane Cockpits Be Too Secure?

The New York Times also reports that during the plane's rapid descent there was no "indication of the condition or activity of the pilot who remained in the cockpit."

"We don't know yet the reason why one of the guys went out," said the official, who requested anonymity because the investigation is continuing. "But what is sure is that at the very end of the flight, the other pilot is alone and does not open the door."

BuzzFeed notes that Airbus implemented new cockpit security features following 9/11 that included reinforced panels, electronic entry pads, and a toggle control inside the cockpit that could be used to secure the door.

The door's features included a reinforced, bulletproof main panel, electrical latching, an electronic entry pad in the cabin, and a toggle control in the cockpit that could secure the door if necessary.

In 2014, we reported on concerns about these new high-security doors, and former JetBlue CEO David Neeleman told us that "perhaps there needs to be a way to get back in that door."

Meanwhile, things aren't getting any easier on the ground.

http://www.popularmechanics.com/flight/ ... in-france/

Sounds like it was one or more bad actors after all... or perhaps the remaining pilot was incapacitated?

[JAG2955]

This is another one of the six million reasons why I don't like flying. It's a control thing.

[Kommander]

Well it does say something for the safety of flight when they only way planes are lost is when something really weird happens or they are just flat out shot down. It seems like all the "regular" causes of plane crashed have been more or less eliminated, leaving only the really weird ways left to crash a plane.

[JustinR]

I wish that were the case Kommander, but it's not. Colgan 3407 and the recent ATR crash in Taiwan are both recent examples of poor basic airmanship. We've certainly improved, but we are nowhere near that standard yet. AOPA's yearly Nall report is a good demonstration of that.

It's looking like a pilot suicide where he decided to take everyone else with him. Bastard.