Sky news have also just reported that the aircraft was travelling at ” full speed 24 knots”. Unbelievable rubbish being spouted but it does look as though there may not be any survivors. Tragic.

A spokesman for France’s DGAC aviation authority said the airliner crashed near the town of Barcelonnette about 100 km (65 miles) north of the French Riviera city of Nice. A statement from the prime minister’s office said the crash happened in Meolans-Revel, a remote and sparsely inhabited commune in the foothills of the French Alps.

@Tony, sky news reporters are idiots, they still don’t know the difference between a tidal wave and a tsunami. Ron burgundy comes to mind.

I wonder do the French know something that the rest of us don’t.. Already their saying there will be no survivors and the French President has said there may be other consequences relating from this crash… A bit early to be making them statements when the plane has just gone down imo..

There was no transponder communication for 7700 manually inputted from the aircraft. The emergency was communicated by radio verbally to ATC as ‘Emergency, emergency.’ The A320 is also able to send an automated 7700 if the engines power down at altitude. Any of the transponder tracking I’ve seen all show non-emergency squaks.

A very sad time for the families who lost there loved ones. Lets hope and pray the press will leave them along. They have enough to handle with there loss.

Except the airline industry as a whole has been shrinking, not growing.

I didn’t mean sound cold in my comments, and my heart goes out to all who have lost loved ones and of course to those that have lost their lives.
But I was staying just inside france near the alps for a few months on a student exchange and that part of the world is about as flat as the top of a toblerone, what we call mountains here, they call bumps.

That’s a paddlin’, religious nonsense to you. Could you not adopt a live and let live approach.
You don’t have to agree with someone to still be respectful of their view

That’s a paddlin so if someone says something at odds with your belief systems you can’t accept it ?

@tom I am not actually anti-religious. But when someone says ‘may god help them’ in a case like this. It just seems so illogical. Why didnt god stop the plane from crashing then? Why would he choose to help any of them now? I appriciate those who say such things have their hearts in the right place… but lets not completely detach from logic.

I don’t have the answers to your questions That’s a paddlin’, but there are assumptions being made by you around peoples beliefs. Personally I dislike the word “God” as it means such different things to so many. 1000 people in a room and someone says the word God, you’ll have 1000 different images/ideas around the word God. From an Interventional God, as was your image, to all kinds of religious and spiritual images. But to dismiss the belief system of anyone is disrespectful.
God bless :)

Jesus wept.

Perhaps the industry could at wait a couple of hours before ghoulishly worrying about the business repercussions.

That doesn’t mean that something can’t go wrong.

Just watching German news. Ex LH pilot saying this is almost unthinkable a believes it’s terror related. I know too early to tell. I’m just relaying German media.

In most cases it’s not. Your forwarding unfounded rumours please stop.

Why Charles, Bob simply said what was reported as a possibility, a possibility that hadn’t even crossed my mind. An accident is bad enough but that would be so much worse in my mind anyway

Here is an image covering its final altitute and speed changes

http://bt.mnocdn.no/external/drfront/images/456f34c53b6afb90b01282c5394192f6.jpg

At least it’s occured on land so the black box should be promptly recovered. Then we’ll get details.

That’s some descent indeed. Poor people.

Paul is that from Plane Finder or Flight Tracker ?

In the meantime traffic overflies the area as normal. This is routine and there are no problems with this, but it must be so disturbing for these flight crews knowing that some of their own are below.

Boganity – FlightRadar24.

crap just looking at flightradar and seeing a small plane read Tramore – then it disappeared. How accurate is flight radar Paul?

Apparebtly the were planning to land in that Barcellonette place and then the plane suddenly descended

400 knots/460 MPH at impact according to that graph… RIP to all those souls lost today… tragic…

@ Paul

Just looking at the graph you put up, the issue is clearly groundspeed as it is fluctuating so much, It cannot be indicated air speed as the speed should only change + or – minus 5 knots, especially at that altitude as your in coffin corner. The rate of decent based on altitude vs time indicates that the aircraft would have had an uncommanded nose pitch down due to, more than likely, the operational engineering bulletin 48 (OEB V-Alpha Prot) which affects the angle of attacks probes. In lehmans terms, two out of the three air data computers would presume the plane is stalling and the self preservation system on board the aircraft (normal law) would force the nose down in an attempt to recover from the stall (instrument error).

Paul according to that the aircraft maintained cruise speed of 400kts (740kph) but still dropped 38,000 ft in eight minutes while maintaining that speed…very strange.

Accidents are always gonna happen. Wether you’re taking a flight, driving somewhere etc there’ll always be that risk. The industry will survive & possibly learn from the cause, friends & families may never recover. RIP to the deceased & my thoughts are with their loved ones.

This is an incredibly safe A320 and does not just fall out of the sky. This was a catastrophic incident where something very major and rare has obviously happened. There are so many of these planes flying every day carrying so many people. Everyone involved (in the industry) with these planes will be concerned or worried by this incident and will want to know the facts as soon as possible to ensure that their A320′s will not be subject to the same – whatever that is.

It is fairly obvious to all that the families, friends (and the Germanwings staff) will suffer traumatically because of the incident. I actually didn’t think it was neccessary to qualify my original comment as such, but it looks like I should have.

Paul it simply looked as your only concern was commercial

What are you trying to do here?? Don’t you have a job to be at?? Idiot

Who are you directing your bad manners at Mark ?

In other words no one has a clue what happened but they have to fill the news channels with drivel somehow. Talking heads being encouraged to talk sensational nonsense. Sky News is the worst, circling like vultures.

Tom cynical as it may sound there’s a commercial world’s best practice in the airline industry for major crashes: Your brand car survive one catastrophic event ever ten years.

No May Day Charles, just the transponder transmitting a distress code 7700 which was inputted by the flight crew. All that tells us is the aircraft was in some kind of emergency situation.

Nothing wrong with the age of the aircraft, same fault could of easily happened with a much a newer model. The Lufthansa A320 fleet isn’t exactly ancient anyway as they have plenty of brand new models of the A320 & many more to be delivered

@Damian, this A320 was built in 1990 and delivered to Luthansa in 1991. Age (unless you are talking 30+ years) really has little to do with the reliability of modern jets. Airlines every 10 years usually update their jets’ interior (seating, avionics bay and cockpit). An aircraft can fly for 30-40 years, and yet 60-70% of its critical parts could be less than ten years old. Engines could be renewed multiple times over two decades. Modern aircraft are often still in production for more than two decades, let alone service. The 747 was launched in the 1960s, and Boeing still make the 747-800 50+ years later.

This A320 had the latest AV bay and systems installed when it was switched from Lufthansa to Germanwings.

Thanks Mick. Yeah I’m well aware of aircraft maintenance and upgrades procedure over the years. There was no info to suggest that they had done this to hand so it might have been a factor until we knew better. In saying that there could have been some airframe structural issue. One expert was talking about a cabin breach in the cockpit with the crew losing consciousness as a possible scenario. We don’t know for sure. I think air incident investigation teams will have a very difficult job from the debris pictures that are floating about.

To say that the Boeing 747-800 built today shares any technology with the first 747s is a bit disingenuous. As you mention, avionics and flight systems as well as materials used have come a long way since the 60s.

Agree on the 747, and many aircraft in service for a long time; you can’t judge a book by it’s cover. A twenty year old aircraft can look identical to one off the production line but be completely different under the skin. That was my point.

The cockpit breach is something being examined with MH370. An exploding oxygen bottle using a decompress and seriously maiming one or both crew members and taking out some of the wiring below on the left side of the AV bay.

With this one, 9525, the descent was rapid but controlled. Something you would expect with a fire or decompress, but I can’t understand why no level off at 10,000ft. The ground proximity alert would have been screaming at them in the cockpit, yet they continued to descend. Locating the cockpit recorder is critical here.

Yeah quite strange that there was no level out if it was a decompression scenario. Someone mentioned that it could have been the flight computer reacting to a stall scenario that tried to make the nose dive… If they were unconscious they couldn’t react etc. They’ve found one of the flight recorders anyway. Hopefully the data can be read.

Those 148 people wouldn’t say it’s very safe..

Flying is not safe? Ridiculous comment!

& how many millions of people will fly today & not encounter the smallest problem at all?

We live on a rock floating around in space that has a mass of 6,000,000,000,000,000 billion kg moving at 67,000 mph around a burning nuclear reactor. My point is nothing is really 100% safe or fail proof.

The drive to the airport is the most dangerous part of any commercial flight, as has been documented again and again. One reason air crashes seem so awful is that they are so incredibly rare, compared to the daily tally of deaths on our roads that almost pass without note.

Munster people obviously don’t see a lot of planes… I’m on a mostly long haul flight on average twice a week. It’s a way of lives for some of us.

How would acquiring Swiss give more power to IAG transatlantic? Finnair would be a good fit with their excellent connections to Asia & Oneworld ties. Swiss & their Star Alliance connections wouldn’t be worth it.

Swiss would exit star Alliance and join Oneworld… That’s what killed the acquisition last time there was no appetite among the Swiss board for the costs of switching alliances.

But that was a weaker BA… Now it has Iberia and what’s left of BMI behind it.

Transatlantic is irrelevant… Ski and business out of Switzerland traffic is huge business. It could stem an underperforming european market for IAG.