Plunge jet grounded 24 hours ahead of Alps crash
Pilots from same airline passed out at controls on a previous flight
THE jet that crashed in the French Alps yesterday killing all 150 on board had been grounded 24 hours earlier, it emerged last night.
The Airbus A320 had suffered technical issues, including a landing gear problem.
The revelation will put pressure on owner Germanwings to explain why the plane was allowed to fly.
Last night, as Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond revealed there may have been Britons on board, urgent safety checks were being carried out on other A320s, which are popular with budget airlines.
In eight terrifying minutes, the plane plunged from its cruising altitude of 38,000 feet before smashing into a mountain ravine 6,000ft above sea level. The pilots made no mayday call.
Among the dead were 16 German school pupils. They were flying back to Dusseldorf following an exchange visit to Barcelona.
An opera singer died with her baby, one of two on board.
Experts said Flight 4U 9525’s rate of descent did not suggest the plane had simply fallen out of the sky – prompting speculation that the two pilots may have suddenly fallen unconscious.
As the French authorities appeared to rule out terrorism, it also emerged that:
Five years ago two pilots from the same Germanwings airline nearly passed out as
they landed in Cologne and contaminated air was suspected;
It is the third serious incident involving the Airbus ‘family’ in the past six months – two of them fatal crashes that have left more than 300 dead;
A safety warning was issued last November after a sister plane went into an uncontrollable dive over Spain, falling at a rate of 4,000ft per minute before the pilot managed to regain control.
Sixteen German schoolchildren and two teachers on an exchange trip were among those that were killed yesterday.
Other victims included a 37 yearold Spanish woman who lives in Manchester – whose child also died – and Spanish opera star Maria Radner, who also lost her child.
All 144 passengers, two babies and six crew aboard the morning flight between Barcelona in Spain and Dusseldorf, Germany, died in France’s first air crash since Concorde crashed minutes after take-off from Charles de Gaulle airport, near Paris, in 2000, killing 113 people.
Last night, one of the black box flight recorders which could hold the key to what happened had been recovered as more than 500 members of search and rescue teams worked to reach the remote site of the disaster above the small village of Barcelonette in the Massif des Trois Evêchés.
Pictures taken from helicopters of the crash site showed debris and wreckage scattered on the bare, bleak mountainside over an area said to be more than a mile square at a height of 2,700 metres.
Christophe Castaner, deputy of t he Alpes- de- Haute- Provence region where the j et crashed, tweeted: ‘Horrible images in this mountain landscape. There is nothing left but debris and bodies.’
Such was the disintegration of the 24-year-old jet yesterday that little appeared recognisable apart from a section containing several of the windows.
One local spoke of hearing an explosion ‘like dynamite’ as the jet went down, while another told how moments earlier he had seen it flying so low it was obvious it would not clear the mountains.
Sebastien Giroux said: ‘There was no smoke or particular sound or sign of anything wrong, but at the altitude it was flying it was clearly not going to make i t over the mountains.
‘I didn’t see anything wrong with the plane, but it was too low. I didn’t see much, perhaps for two or three seconds… it seemed it was going down. I said to myself, “It won’t pass the mountains”.’
Gilbert Sauvan, a local council spokesman, said the plane ‘disintegrated on impact’, leaving the ‘largest piece of wreckage the size of a car’.
The weather was calm at the time of the accident, with the sky ‘completely clear’ with almost no wind.
Sandrine Boisse, a tourism official, said: ‘At first we thought it was on the ski slopes, an avalanche, but it wasn’t the same noise.’
Bookshop owner Dominique Casson, 38, said: ‘ I heard a loud bang and then saw just smoke and flames at the top of the hillside.
‘The plane came down so quickly there was no notice at all. The crash is a tragedy but there could have
‘Horrible images’
been even more loss of life if it came down in a more populated area.’
Bruce Robin, a prosecutor from Marseille, said: ‘The body of the plane is in a state of destruction, there is not one intact piece of wing or fuselage.’
Germanwings chief executive Thomas Winkelmann said the aircraft began descending again shortly after it reached its cruising height of 38,000ft, having taken off from Barcelona at about 10am local time.
It started losing altitude to 37,975 by 10.31am, with the speed reportedly increasing to 548mph.
But at 10.53am, the last reported radar returns had the aircraft descending to 6,800 feet at 434mph.
Mr Winkelmann said the captain on board was experienced and had been with the Germanwings’ parent company Lufthansa for more than ten years, having clocked up 6,000 flying hours.
The plane, he said, had had a normal service at Dusseldorf on Monday and its last major check-up had been in the summer of 2013. It flew regularly to London and was there last Sunday.
Aviation expert Chris Yates said it was difficult to explain why the pilots would not send an emergency call.
‘Air crash investigators will need to examine the black boxes, the flight data recorder and the voice recorder to determine exactly what happened,’ he said.
‘It is possible that the pilots sent a distress signal that was not received by air traffic control.’
Around 100 of the dead are German and Chancellor Angela Merkel is to visit the crash site today together with some of the families of the schoolchildren.
Another 45 of the victims are Spanish and relatives were bussed to hotels near Barcelona’s El Prat airport.
Since its introduction in 1988, Airbus claims the A320 has carried more than six billion passengers and boasts one of the best safety records of any aircraft.
But some pilots remain uneasy about the highly automated systems used by Airbus which means actions in the cockpit are interpreted electronically via an electronic side stick – like a video game joystick – rather than a mechanical control column.
There have been 60 incidents known as ‘aviation occurrences’ since the aircraft family was introduced – including a 11 previous fatal crashes – resulting in 789 fatalities.
In December last year, an Airbus crashed into the Java Sea killing all 162 people on board in an as-yet unexplained incident. The plane flown by AirAsia vanished from radar screens in bad weather.
The A320 forms the backbone of British Airways’ fleet of around 300 aircraft, accounting for 127 (42 per cent) of its total aircraft.