We hear this time and time and time again, on every single accident thread. It's a RUMOUR network, so either people just accept that for what it is (speculation and theory), or the forum is locked away to pilots only. I don't see the point of comments like yours (though this will probably be deleted anyway!)

As Wiggy says, Helios lead to a change in some SOPs - certainly ours, for an apparent non-reaction to a decompression.

If this turns out to be a partial / incomplete reaction to a decompression, and there is something feasible the CC could have done (e.g. rouse pilots), then I suspect we will see SOPs change again. But there is only so much second guessing you can expect CC to do over our job.

As I posted earlier, if there was a complete decompression, pilots not on oxygen, and it took 5mins or more to get below ~25K' Cabin Alt, I am afraid my limited AvMed knowledge indicates your SOP is not going to further involve the pilots :oh:

@Wiggy
 

"He's the head of the organisation and judging by the TV coverage in the last 24 this gent has been working flat out (interviews, statements to French TV, meeting with the politicians) since the accident happened. I suspect he's been far too busy to listen to recordings, even if it was part of his job spec."

I take the point you make in the first sentence.

Yet I beg to disagree with the conclusion.

Given the magnitude of this catastrophic accident and given also the possibility of these cockpit recordings throwing significant light on the "mysterious" causes, I stand by my observation that his failure to listen to the cockpit recording is very striking.

Assuming for a minute the depressurisation/hypoxia scenario is correct, the flight path seems to have been exactly as the cabin crew would have expected, until they descended below 10,000 feet. So for a minute or two people may have thought 'we are getting close to the ground, why are we still descending?'. The FR24 flight path then suggests the aircraft levelled off c 3000 feet above the local terrain and then a minute later .... when the 350 knot aircraft intersected the rapidly rising terrain.

I would have thought the cabin crew would have been focusing on breathing, making sure the passengers didn't do anything dumb, and hoping to get warm soon for most of the descent and letting the flight crew get on with resolving whatever problems they were dealing with.

The Guardian reported this at 18:26:

Jouty said it was too early to give details of the cockpit recording. However, he said the information investigators had put together suggested the plane had not exploded and did not suffer a “classic decompression situation”

Voices heard on recorder from cockpit of Germanwings plane crash | World news | The Guardian

If there was an explosive decompression, that descent took too long. The oxygen generator masks for the passengers would not have provided sufficient oxygen at sufficient pressure to keep them awake for that duration to get below 25,000'. At 38,000' you are really looking at pressure breathing apparatus if spending too much time up there.

I am amazed when I read of PJ crews, cruising at FL510 for example. Get a blowout up there you are a gonna. Period. Forget about the passengers, they will most likely be dead very quickly. End of.

From what I can find, it is the lower-left forward fuselage, I would assume as close to the flight deck as possible.

Suicides are not rare at all (compared with the overall frequency of fatal crashes in the cruise phase).

There were 3 pilot suicides with killed passengers in the last 20 years (EgyptAir 990, SilkAir 185, LAM 470).

Compare this with just 2 fatal mechanical failures during cruise flight in the same time period (China Airlines 611 and Helios 522).

If the pilots were indeed incapacitated by hypoxia, is it possible that one or both could regain consciousness upon reaching lower altitudes?

Yes Navcant...entirely possible....

Asked and answered earlier. The short answer is maybe. The longer answer is it depends - fitness, time unconscious, time to regain useful consciousness.

Germanwings crash investigators review cockpit recordings found on black box | World news | The Guardian

Rémi Jouty is a BEA spokesperson.

Make of that what you will.

This might cause some trouble over certain mountain ranges ... :eek:
Vertical Speed:
Fewer mountain ranges cause trouble with this.

I disagree with kwh that such over-automation is needed. Additional complexity for what value that cannot otherwise be mitigated? Further this point, the recent concerns over Normal Law Alpha Protect taking control from pilots (due to a malfunction) reminds us that with every feature like this you put in, you induce the potential for yet another novel failure mode.

Fix one perceived problem and raise another that you won't discover ... until it happens, perhaps in flight.

Further a point ia raised a bit earlier:

Task saturation/task focus.
Whatever went wrong at altitude, there is the potential, as with AF 447 and the recent Indonesian accident, that the two pilots were consumed with the first two prime directives of flying -- aviate navigate -- (and part of aviate being get plane in control and fix / trouble shoot what's wrong with it) that their task loading did not get to the communicate/squawk change step. While in those two cases upset looks to have been the core problem, and in this case not, that doesn't mean that a serious malfunction didn't occur that wholly occupied the attention of the flight deck crew.

If you go back about ten pages and re read the strange case of the leaking fluid that sickened the captain and the FO in the terminal environment ... a rare but nasty malfunction.

Regarding possible cockpit window issues
 

this link may help

When Windshields Fail | Business Aviation content from Aviation Week

@aterpster
 

"He's doing his job. The CVR is probably in Paris by now, being carefully disassembled, properly set up in a specially equipped sound proof room, then preferably having a full CVR team present to listen to the recorder.

That's the way it's done at the NTSB. I resume the French follow a very similar protocol."

As one who is not professional in the airline world I find this confusing.

The implication of what you write is that the initial process of listening to which the Head of BEA (as I understand the gentleman's rôle) alluded in his press conference took place in less than optimum conditions and away from the main base.

Yet I understood, perhaps wrongly, that the device was delivered to the main base at 9:45 am and that the press conference took place there some 7+ hours later.

Edit:
Based on a doubt raised by a recent post on here which describes M Jouty as a BEA spokesperson, I found press reports on-line from last year which confirm my understanding that he is in fact the Head of BEA.

The BEA is an organisation of many people, including specialists in flight recorder data recovery and interpretation - there's no need for the head of the organisation to personally involve themselves in that kind of work.

ECAM_ACTIONS

Thankyou for providing the parts about pressurisation. I didn't really catch that. I did hear him talk about the flight path though, and due to helpful people here on Pprune understood that he wouldn't comment on the question on what was heard on the CVR during the descent period before the crash.

No, that additional minute is almost certainly an extrapolation artifact to hide temporary loss of realtime data and provide smooth animation of the little airplanes symbols on the FR24 website. If you download the raw data, it ends in a descent and there is no levelling off.

As has already been described, there is a lot of work to be done between "listening" to a recording and issuing an annotated transcript. At the very least, timelines have to be established, unclear and noisy words deciphered, and decisions taken on what to omit out of respect for the dead and their relatives.

Knowing that he was going to face the press, I personally am certain that "the boss" did not listen to the recording, and deliberately so. I am equally personally certain that he has a pretty good idea of the contents, and that these will be released when the job is complete.

And is the language in cockpit one that the BEA head would understand? In an emergency situation would you revert to your language of birth, aviation English or a mixture. Surely as a professional investigator he would wait for a native speaker to interpret the language used and its idiosyncrasies.
IIRC with the Spanair Madrid accident - it took quite a while to come up with an accurate translation - despite much rubbish being talked on here when an audio file was released.

Because it is a serial process:

1. Receive and document the CVR condition
2. Determine how to dismantle the CVR given it's condition
3. Technically treat the CVR innards with the highest level of care, and with minimum risk, attempt to extract data
4. In the event you get data, preserve and document that data (backups, file characteristics)
5. Using a copy of the data, check it is readable / valid data i.e. not blank or corrupt
6. Preliminary assessment of the data - timings, matching to other data, clear / easy to interpret output
7. Process of establishing formal transcript

The above is a guess, but I got the impression we are somewhere about 3 from the bottom. When we get second from bottom, there will be political and commercial implications of releasing the info.

Much as we on pPrune might like some "hot info", we have no right to it, and the BEA will not be concerned about our wishes. Their priority is not to establish what happened (that comes later), but if there are immediate safety implications for other aircraft?

I understand all precautions and different interpretations that you must go through to decipher a CVR.

What I do not understand is why the question if anything was heard from the CVR during the descent was dodged. The answer to that would be at least some sort of clue. Was there voices - yes? - no?