In general, it’s much harder to override the flight controls on an Airbus (from what I’ve understood from conversations I’ve had with pilots).
I’m fairly confident I could learn to fly a jet airliner with the FADEC and the NAVCOM and all those things… but understanding this lock, this might keep me from getting a pilot’s license.
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So I guess the pilot could slump over unconcious and override the autopilot, which then puts the plane in a dive, but the plane then limits the control input at a certain speed or descent rate… causing the controlled 8 minute plunge.
Makes sense, but I suppose not a lot of people outside the manufacturer and the airline is going to know exactly how that specofic plane’s AP is going to be set up authority wise?
Here’s an A320 manual that Delta has online: Airbus A320 Aircraft Operations Manual
sorry for the bad explanation. i think the idea is that if someone is trying to get in (brute forcing the code?) the pilots can temporarily disable the outside keypad from the inside.
having said that, some other pilot on another message board said the lockout is only 2 minutes. the consensus is that if the pilot left in the cockpit were incapacitated the other pilot will still be able to get in. apparently in this scenario the only logical answer is that the pilot in the cockpit was actively keeping the other pilot out.
or maybe the locked-out pilot forgot the code??
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A guy I fly with once had a freak water short which activated his autopilot, he ended up making the emergency approach and landing using engine power, rudder, and trim tabs. Since it was a freak activation and he though it was a mechanical jam of some sort he didn’t try to pop the autopilot’s breaker as he had already decided on his emergency action.
I fully understand the need for autopilot to be able to be overridden by manual control, the though of making that hacked together approach and landing is terrifying.
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At 38,000 feet, it doesn’t really matter. Cell towers are designed to communicate with the ground. It’s possible to pick up a signal from above, but no higher than 10,000 feet or so even under optimal conditions. It would have been possible to make a call for only the last two and a half minutes or so at the very outside, probably much less than that; add the time required to establish a connection and to place a call/send a text, and the odds of anyone getting a message out are pretty slim.
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Apparently the door lock has two codes - a “normal” code that buzzes the cockpit and allows the person outside to request entry - the pilot in the cockpit acknowledges the normal code by flicking a momentary switch to “unlock” to open the door - and an emergency code that sounds an alarm in the cockpit and then unlocks the door automatically after ~20 sec, unless the pilot in the cockpit denies access by flicking the momentary switch towards ‘lock’ during those 20 seconds, in which case the keypad is locked out for 20 minutes…
So it can’t just be that one pilot leaves the deck and the second has a heart-attack, etc. There would also have to be at least a sticky key on the keypad so that the emergency code can’t be entered.
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Over on pprune it has been suggested that decompression will unlock the flight deck door. The question is: how to decompress the plane? It might not be as simple as we expect.
I wondered if the remaining crew could have had all the passengers walk to the rear of the cabin, shifting the C of G towards the back, raising the nose and possibly maintaining enough altitude to clear the terrain.
The odds are non-zero.
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You seem to know a lot about the motivations of the Germans French military official and the pilot. To suddenly commit mass murder and suicide without showing any signs beforehand seems odd (ETA: not impossible though), and it’s a very serious accusation to level against a pilot and his grieving family. If I were the investigators and only had inconclusive audio recordings to go on, I would be very careful before making that suggestion.
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What are the chances that the door wasn’t locked from the inside, and the pilot just forgot the code? Is there any way of finding out whether the door had actually been securely locked?
Friend of mine flies A320s. I asked him and he emailed me “I won’t try to guess. We don’t know enough…there are about 20 scenarios I can think of. Most are not intentional. But I don’t know enough to guess. Most crashes happen because of multiple mistakes, some of which are so unlikely that no one thought they would happen. The Air France pilot who crashed the plane in the Atlantic a few years ago was an experienced pilot who panicked and did exactly the wrong thing despite training and experience. It was hard to believe, but it turned out to be true. We don’t know enough to make good guesses, no matter how hard we want to.”
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Best post in the thread.
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I think we should just cut and paste this into any and all plane crash comments threads. Now and in the future.
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He could also have tripped, lost his voice, hit his head, and leveled off after grasping at a straw.
There is also this:
Like I needed another reason NOT to fly the un-friendly skies…
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I wasn’t speculating so much as pointing out the clear implication of the statements of the German safety officials.
Clarified today with the stiory I linked above to @micah
We really don’t want to believe such things. But pilots crashing their planes into terrain intentionally remains ENORMOUSLY more common than hijacking.
We just want to trust the Pilot. We can’t always. Sometimes they’re just human, too.
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That’s pretty speculative, considering it’s a fly by wire system.
