A320 cockpit locking system
 

Looks like the flight crew can override the emergency keypad opening mechanism. Nothing wrong with that except when you have a terrorist or piloting nut job behind that bullet-proof door.
This cockpit security concept essentially introduced a single point of failure vulnerability in the plane.


https://www.dropbox.com/s/s0j0j2coum...ystem.png?dl=1

Get out of our Cockpit
 

I normally sit and watch but this is getting seriously bad. Everyone wants to be the 'Man'.
I have 48 years driving aircraft including A340 and B747-400 and 24000+ hours.

For me if you post an opinion, mislead or copy comments and put them into the media you must be held accountable. And no, not good enough to say "not me sir I was reporting from a source". You must be prepared to put your credibility, proffessional career and personal assets to the test. That is whats required of most International Pilots. So put up or shut up.

Yes, a very good analysis by Capt Kremin .. thoroughly concur with that suggestion!

No it is not dangerous. Attested to by the fact that many airlines have onboard telephony and wifi connectivity! The 'no phone' thing with some airlines is a hang up from the days when mobile phones were new and the effects on aircraft systems was unknown!

Heck - I even remember reaching V1 many years ago in a 340 when my phone started ringing loudly... I got a very pained look from the F/O (possibly becasue of my choice of ringtone) but the 'plane didn't drop out of the sky!!!

I've never noticed the oscillations like that in my V/S in VNAV PATH after the descent stabilizes. While I have seen V/S variations in LVL CHG and VNAV SPD, they are generally trending either up OR down and not up AND down. Is this behavior peculiar to the Airbus managed descent? Oh, and I think you mean GS not IAS regarding winds aloft change through the layers. Thanks for the response.

Thanks BusTRE! So, as I understand this, Open Descent is another way of describing the Airbus Managed Descent - and if so, on a Boeing, the corollary would be VNAV SPD, not PATH.

Yes, NoD, and either my wife or my nephew's dog broke some just now.

The banging frantically on the door is less likely to be panic, than it is to be a purely fictional event that has been exposed to the vacuum of news and as result has explosively spread itself all over the internet.

Sizable fragments have been found even in such sheltered spots as PPRuNe.

Any news at this early stage that doesn't come directly from the BEA should be treated with the disdain it deserves.

French news agency AFP is now supporting the NYT story. They are reporting that first analysis of CVR indicates:

• Normal conversation between flight crew at the beginning of flight
• PIC is heard leaving cockpit before the descend
• Later tried to gain access to the cockpit first knocking than pounding the door
• First officer did not open the door or respond to PIC trying to access the cockpit and is never heard again on the tape from that moment on
• First officer was hired in 2013 with just a couple of hundred flying hours collected at his previous job

SOURCE (German):Stimmrekorder der Germanwings-Maschine: Ein Pilot aus Cockpit ausgesperrt? | tagesschau.de
http://www.zeit.de/gesellschaft/zeit...rankreich-live

Mobile Phone Coverage in flight
 

The problem is not at all lack of coverage but too much coverage - at least with GSM.

When you are at altitude you can see many base-stations within the 25km (or 50km with software mods) range of GSM.

There are not that many frequencies available so they they are recycled across base stations and rely on ground level visibility to prevent interference.

In an aircraft all bets are off as there is no physical limitations on signals. This is also seen when in tall buildings. The higher you get the less likely you will get a clean call. I remember hiding in the toilets to blank out most signals and only use the strong local base station.

When considering SMS there may well be moments when the signal is clean but the phone generally won't try and send. The algorithm is for ever increasing delays between retries - sometimes up to days.

Anyone able to provide a link directly to the AFP's supposed corroboration?

After MH370 and now this incident it is becoming clearer that the media needs a code of conduct in reporting these incidents. Confusing and inconsistent media reports fuels both a lack of trust(and appearance of disorganisation) in the responding agencies and breeds conspiracy theories when the intial media reports are later proven incorrect.


Timelines - UTC and local not just local time
Speculation - clearly marked as such.
Quotes needs to be attributed - so incorrect quotes by the media can be quickly disproven. Unnamed sources with bad information just destroy credibility of everybody involved.

All French media outlets including Crash de l'A320 de Germanwings : un des pilotes bloqué hors du cockpit? | France info have this quote:My translation:

Mode S transponder data should provide information about the selected altitude - assuming the descent was initiated by one of the pilots.

If stories of PIC being locked out are true, doesn't this then point to FO being incapacitated rather than suicidal because if suicidal surely they would have just pointed it at the ground and pressed fast, rather than the 8 min descent?

And if I saw the pilot struggling to return to the cockpit, id certainly be helping him kick that door down.

Surely they must have heard multiple people behind that door after a good 6 or so minutes

They are simply quoting NYT as their source .. there is nothing to confirm it at all.:ugh:

Serious problem.

There is a growing awareness that aircraft are vulnerable when one pilot leaves the cockpit.

If you allow any form of access from the cabin, for instance to avoid a Helios situation, then it might be used by desperate cabin crew during a hijacking. If you don't then either pilots can not leave the flight deck during the flight of if they do the aircraft is vulnerable.

There haven't been nearly as many hijackings since armoured doors were installed but I am a little surprised that once they were mandated no one took the time to think it all the way through.

If the FO was incapacitated, who initiated the descent? That he just happened to be incapacitated to press hard enough on the stick to start a descent but not hard enough to enter a dive or change heading doesn't sound feasible.

Going back a decade and a bit, I was one of those who strongly argued against the concept of a Sky Marshall. Perhaps it is time to reopen the discussion as clearly there are risks/weaknesses associated with cockpit door procedures and mechanisms?

Defending the right to free speech
 

"Isn't this forum called "Rumor" network?:

This defence of blatant trolling is wearing thin, akin to scientology claiming the right to free speech.
Notably, the people best qualified to offer an opinion based on actual line experience have steered clear from the 51 pages of mindless speculation posted in the 48 hours post accident.

Political correctness and inclusiveness is one thing, but when a Professional pilots forum becomes so diluted by guesswork that it's primary purpose is compromised perhaps it is time for a rethink.
Like it or not, these pages are considered a legitimate source of news by popular media, and the latest whacko theory can be plastered over the front page of any headline hungry rag worldwide at the click of a mouse.

It is rather akin to continually adding water to a filter coffee machine: in the end there is nothing in the output that justifies the investment in achieving an objective, the result is hot water, or in the case of this thread hot air from plenty of experts who have yet to operate in anything but a virtual cockpit.

Every time a major incident occurs, the magnitude of the trolling problem increases exponentially, and when challenged, the same defence is used.

Rumours and speculation are not the same animal.
Creating headlines from speculation is not the way that professional aviation operates, sorry if some flight-sim bubbles just got popped.

If there was ever a justification to create a professional forum along the lines of the dedicated airline forums, perhaps this is the time to consider the matter further.

Meanwhile, another thread has appeared on RN, pushing a particular line of speculation. Hopefully it will be removed, but in an increasingly PC justified environment the likelihood is that it will not.

From the information released to date, we know that the aircraft crashed, the location is known, and the number of people who died is also known.
As hard facts are released during the course of the investigation, certainly those will be the catalyst for informed discussion.

Whilst this may be a "virtual" discussion, the accident is all too real.
This is not the time nor the place for virtual cockpit experts to strut their stuff.

This scenario is the same as the suicide of the copilot on an Embraer195 in Mozambique last year, I think.

Unfortunately, banging on the door won't help.

The only way would be to smash a window and provoke a decompression.
In that case the door would automatically unlock.

I had raised the suicide issue years ago, because of the stupid door, but nobody would listen....

Terrible news, and it will for sure be even more disgusting after nothing will have changed because it's not feasible to interrupt the cabin service to have a flight attendant in the cockpit when one of the pilots goes to make a phone call....