Alps disaster jet was so old it needed major refit
THE ageing Airbus A320 passenger jet which crashed with the loss of 150 lives was less t han a year f r om being grounded for urgent refurbishments, it emerged last night.
Parent company Lufthansa confirmed that the 24-year- old Germanwings jet had not yet received the ‘life- extending’ upgrade but would have done ‘sooner or later’.
The aim of the major revamp – to squeeze an extra five to ten years of service – is to avoid older aircraft suffering from increased risk of stress.
But it raises yet more questions about the longevity and maintenance programmes of the planes known as the ‘workhorse’ of the skies.
A r eport by parent company Lufthansa reveals that its fleet of A320 planes reach the end of their natural life when they clock up a total of 60,000 flying hours or 48,000 take-off and landing cycles.
The stricken Flight 4U 9525 from Barcelona to Dusseldorf had clocked up 58,313 flying hours and 46,748 takeoff and landing cycles.
Those having their life-span extended beyond their planned ‘retirement’ limit have to undergo what is termed a ‘heavy maintenance check’. This involves the plane being stripped down and having every piece of machinery and fuselage inspected from nose to tail, inside and out, with worn-out parts or seals replaced and any signs of wear and rear dealt with. It also includes software upgrades.
As Lufthansa admitted the background to the disaster remained ‘inexplicable’, it emerged that:
Sixty seconds of conversation ended abruptly when the pilot of the doomed Germanwings jet broke off contact with French air traffic controllers;
Investigators were last night studying both the cockpit voice recorder and the damaged black box recovered from the scene of devastation in the Alps in the belief they will indicate just went so devastatingly wrong;
Officials spoke of a crash scene of ‘horror’, saying: ‘ The biggest body parts we identified are no bigger than a briefcase.’
Another official said: ‘ There were 150 people on board but we have identified less than 14. The others seem to have been vapourised.’
Yesterday France’s environment minister Ségolène Royal said the seconds between 10.30am and 10.31am were considered most ‘vital’ because they covered the moments Flight 4U 9525 reached its cruising height of 38,000ft and the point when the pilot stopped responding to air traffic controllers.
Carsten Spohr, the head of Lufthansa which owns the budget Germanwings airline, stressed yesterday it remained ‘inexplicable’ that a well- serviced aircraft with an experienced crew would fall from the sky.
Details from the first report submitted by the French to the German government revealed that at 10.31:02, the 24- year- old Airbus A320 f l ying between Barcelona and Dusseldorf left its assigned altitude and began dropping towards the ground at a speed of 3,500ft per minute, before smashing into a ravine at 6,200ft, near Digne-les-Bains in the southern Alps.
The report said controllers tried three times on an assigned radio frequency to contact the pilots before switching to international emergency channels. No one answered and a French Mirage f i ghter j et was scrambled.
Remi Jouty, the technical director of the French air accident bureau, said the final message from the plane was ‘routine’, confirming its trajectory. One minute later, that trajectory began descending.
There remained ‘no explanation’ for the crash, he said, but added: ‘ We succeeded in getting an audio file which has usable sounds and voices.
‘We haven’t fully understood it all yet. I can’t say if the pilots are talking, we’ve only just managed to extract this file.’
The cockpit voice recorder is designed to store two hours of conversation and withstand impacts of as much as 3,400 times the force of gravity. Investigators are hoping it contains clues about whether the crew became incapacitated or were battling a technical malfunction.
The covering of the second black box flight recorder, which logs key flight data, was recovered yesterday from the mountainside but not the recorder itself, which is the size of an iPhone.