French authorities release preliminary report on the Germanwings crash investigation

On 6 May 2015, the BEA (Bureau d'Enquêtes et d'Analyses pour la Sécurité de l'Aviation Civile) released a preliminary report on the crash of Germanwings flight 4U9525 which highlighted the following findings:

• At about three minutes after the aircraft reached its cruising altitude of 38,000 feet, the captain left the cockpit.

• Within 30 seconds of the captain leaving the cockpit, the first officer commanded the aircraft to descend to 100 feet, which is well below ground level.

• Within five minutes of the commanded altitude change, the airspeed was changed at least ten times, reaching a maximum of 350 knots (402 mph, 648 kph).

• The descent rate reached a maximum of 5,000 feet per minute, and averaged about 3,500 feet per minute.

• The descent was continuous, and controlled by the autopilot.

• Air traffic controllers and the French military attempted to contact the aircraft several times, but received no response.

• Before the collision with the terrain, there were multiple aural warnings heard on the CVR.

• The aircraft impacted the ground about 10 minutes and 13 seconds after the aircraft started its descent.

• Autopilot and autothrust remained engaged until impact.

• On the previous flight, while the captain was out of the cockpit, the first officer twice commanded the aircraft to descend to 100 feet for short periods of time.

The role of the first officer in the crash
The preliminary report did not state a definitive cause of the crash, but it did state that during the cruise phase, the first officer was alone in the cockpit and intentionally modified the autopilot instructions to order the aircraft to descend until it collided with the ground. The report also stated that the first officer did not open the cockpit door during the descent, despite requests for access made via the keypad, with cabin interphone, and by knocking on the door.

Aircraft trajectory

(click to enlarge)

First officer training history
The preliminary report provided an outline of the first officer's training history, including the fact that he started his flight training at the Lufthansa Flight Training Pilot School in Germany on 1 September 2008, but that his training was suspended for medical reasons for over eight months, from 5 November 2008 to 26 August 2009. It was during this period, specifically from April to July 2009, that the first officer did not have a valid medical certificate due to depression and his medical treatment for his condition.

From October 2010 to March 2011, he continued his flight training in the US, but was under contract as a flight attendant with Lufthansa for over two years before beginning his training to become an A320 first officer. He was appointed as an A320 copilot in June 2014.

Related information
Germanwings crash details from AirSafe.com
Lufthansa plane crashes
Other A320 crashes
Germanwings Wikipedia page
Flight 9525 Wikipedia entry

Air France BEA investigation update from 27 May 2011

The latest BEA update on the Air France Flight 447 investigation, which was released on 27 May 2011, is based primarily on data recovered from the cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder. This update is not a full or final report on the investigation, and only provides a small amount of the data that was contained in the black boxes.

The update indicates that the aircraft experienced a stall at high altitude, and remained in a stall condition until the aircraft struck the surface of the ocean. While the update implies that combination of pilot inputs and faulty flight data may have played a role in the crash, no probable causes or contributing causes were given.

Below is a summary of the events in the latest update:


- Three pilots were on board, (two-pilot cockpit)

- Captain takes rest break about two hours after takeoff

- About eight minutes later at 2:08:07, flight crew adjusts heading to avoid area of turbulence

- Starting at about 2:10:05, the autopilot and autothrust disengaged, and the crew took over manual control of the aircraft. Shortly thereafter, the airspeed indicated in the cockpit dropped from 275 knots to 60 knots and the stall warning sounded twice. Note that the flight data recorder only recored some of the airspeed indicators in the cockpit, not all of them.

- At 2:10:16, one of the pilots stated that airspeed indication had been lost, and that the flight control system was in a condition where it would no longer automatically prevent the aircraft from going beyond an angle of attack limit. This limit prevents the aircraft from losing aerodynamic lift and entering a stall condition. The A330 would however still provide stall warnings. Note that there is no angle of attack indicator available to the pilots. Angle of attack is the angle between the airflow and the longitudinal axis (an imaginary line running through the middle of the fuselage).

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Angle of Attack
The angle of attack is the angle at which relative wind meets an airfoil. The angle is formed by the chord line of the airfoil and the the direction of the relative wind over that airfoil. The angle of attack changes during a flight as the pilot changes the direction of the aircraft. Increasing the angle of attack increases lift up to a point. Too high an angle of attack results in a loss of lift, and can cause an aircraft to stall.

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- Aircraft pitched up and climbed from about 35,000 feet to about 37,500 feet

- At about 2:10:50, one of the pilots attempted to call the Captain back to the cockpit, and about a second later the stall warning sounded again. The engines were at a high thrust setting, and the pilot flying maintained a nose-up flight control inputs and the recorded angle of attack continued to increase, with altitude increasing to about 38,000 feet and angle of attack increasing to 16 degrees at about 2:11:06.

- At about this same time, the speed recorded on a standby instrument system increased to 185 knots, and was now consistent with the speed recorded on the primary flight display.

- The Captain entered the cockpit at around 2:11:40 (about 90 seconds after the autopilot disengaged), and in the following seconds, all of the recorded speeds became invalid and the stall warning stopped. This may not indicate that the plane exited the stall condition since the flight control system considers the angle of attack value to be invalid when measured speeds are below 60 knots. Also, speed values become invalid below 30 knots.

- The aircraft rapidly lost altitude, dropping to about 35,000 feet with a vertical descent rate of -10,000 feet per minute.

- The recordings stopped at 2:14:28. The last recorded values were a vertical speed of -10,912 feet per minute, a ground speed of 107 kt, a pitch attitude of 16.2 degrees nose-up,and a roll angle of 5.3 degrees left.

- The descent lasted about three and a half minutes, during which time the airplane remained in a stalled condition, with the angle of attack increasing to and remaining above 35 degrees.

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Join the AirSafe.com Discussion on Air France flight 447
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Related AirSafe.com and AirSafeNews.com articles

Initial AirSafe.com Reports on This Event (4:10)
Audio: MP3 | Video: iPod/MP4 | WMV | YouTube

Additional Resources
AirSafe.com Flight 447 page
Synopsis of second BEA interim report (English)
Complete second BEA interim report (English)
Complete second BEA interim report (French)
First BEA Interim Report (English)
First BEA interim report (French)
Other Air France Plane Crashes
Other Airbus A330 Plane Crashes
BEA Flight 447 page
Wikipedia Flight 447 page

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Wreckage found from 2009 Air France A330 Crash

Air France flight 447, an A330-200 (F-GZCP) on a scheduled international flight from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil to Paris, France, departed Rio late on 31 May 2009, and crashed in the Atlantic Ocean in the early hours of 1 June 2009. While some wreckage and the bodies of about 50 of the 228 passengers and crew were found floating on the surface of the ocean in the weeks after the crash, most of the aircraft and aircraft occupants remained lost.

On April 4th, the French Bureau d'Enquetes et Analyses (BEA), which is leading the accident investigation, announced that significant portions of the aircraft, including an engine, a landing gear assembly, and a large part of the fuselage, were found on the ocean floor about 4,000 meters (about 13,000 feet) below the surface. Some passenger remains were also spotted (BEA presentation).

This fourth search was concentrated in an area of about 10,000 sq km (about 3,900 sq mi) about 75 km (46.6 mi) from the last known position of the aircraft. So far, the black boxes (cockpit voice recorder and flight data recorder) have not been located, but the French government plans to continue searching for additional wreckage and to begin an effort to raise some of it to the surface.

Photos of wreckage on the sea floor







Related AirSafe.com and AirSafeNews.com articles

Initial AirSafe.com Reports on This Event (4:10)
Audio: MP3 | Video: iPod/MP4 | WMV | YouTube

Additional Resources
AirSafe.com Flight 447 page
Synopsis of second BEA interim report (English)
Complete second BEA interim report (English)
Complete second BEA interim report (French)
First BEA Interim Report (English)
First BEA interim report (French)
Other Air France Plane Crashes
Other Airbus A330 Plane Crashes
BEA Flight 447 page
Wikipedia Flight 447 page

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Initial AirSafeNews.com article 3 June 2009
Air France Flight 447 Update 9 June 2009
Air France Flight 447 Update 10 June 2009
Air France Flight 447 Update 15 June 2009
Air France Flight 447 Update 19 June 2009
Air France Flight 447 Update 26 June 2009
Todd Curtis BBC Interview about Air France Flight 447 - 9 July 2009
FAA orders A330 pitot tube replacements - 3 September 2009
Article on Second Interim Report from the BEA - 18 December 2009

Second Interim Report on Air France Flight 447 Investigation Released - No Causes Found Yet

Report Summary
The organization responsible for investigating the 1 June 2009 crash of Air France Flight 447, the French Bureau d’Enquêtes et d’Analyses pour la sécurité de l’aviation civile (BEA), released their second interim report on the accident investigation. Although the BEA did not identify one or more causes of the crash, it did conclude that inconsistencies in airspeed measurement led to the disconnection of various flight control systems, the autopilot, and the autothrottle.

Similar airspeed inconsistencies had occurred on other A330 and A340 flights, and the BEA performed a detailed analysis of 13 significant events involving five airlines operating these aircraft models. These events had several similarities with the accident flight. They occurred when the aircraft was in an area of unstable air masses with deep convective phenomena, the autopilot disconnected, and invalid airspeeds were reported to the flight control system. However, unlike Flight 447, these five aircraft had altitude deviations less than 1000 feet, and all remained within their normal flight envelope.

The BEA concluded that inconsistency in the measurement of airspeeds was one of the elements in the chain of events that led to the accident, though these inconsistencies did not fully explain why the airplane crashed. The BEA has so far not been able to recover the flight data recorder or the cockpit voice recorder. The information from these black boxes, as well as an examination of additional wreckage, may help the BEA figure out the cause of the accident.

The second interim report went into quite a bit of detail about what has so far been uncovered in the investigation, and the highlights of that interim report are below.

Accident Overview
The aircraft aircraft, an Air France A330-200 (F-GZCP), operating and flight 447, was on a scheduled international flight from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil to Paris, France. The aircraft departed late on 31 May 2009 from Rio, and crashed in the Atlantic Ocean in the early hours of 1 June 2009. The crash occurred about three hours and 45 minutes after takeoff, in an area of the Atlantic Ocean about 435 nautical miles north-northeast of Fernando de Noronha island.

There were no emergency or distress messages sent by the crew, though there were numerous automatically generate maintenance messages that were sent by the aircraft back to Air France. The last contact between the airplane and Brazilian air traffic control happened around 35 minutes before the crash.

Debris from the aircraft was found near the estimated position of its last radio communication. There were 216 passengers and 12 crew members on board, representing 32 nationalities. A total of 5o bodies were recovered from the ocean, and the remaining passengers and crew are missing and presumed dead.
Automated Maintenance Messages
The automated maintenance messages sent by the aircraft back to Air France provided information on the state of the airplane's systems and on the position of the aircraft. Almost all of these messages were linked to faults in the system used to measure the speed of the aircraft. These airspeed measurement issues were discussed in more detail in an earlier AirSafeNews.com article and on AirSafe.com's Flight 447 page.

Condition of the Airplane When it Struck the Ocean
Based on an examination of the recovered debris the BEA reported that the airplane struck the surface of the sea violently, with a slight pitch-up attitude and with a slight bank. The airplane was largely intact at the moment of the impact since the debris found came from all over the airframe. The airplane was pressurized, the oxygen masks had not been released, all of the life jackets that were found were still in their containers, and the airplane’s flaps were retracted at the time of the impact with the water. All of the wreckage that has been located or collected, and bodies that have been recovered had been floating on the surface of the ocean.

The investigators also said that 43 of the 50 bodies, which based on their assigned seats were from all parts of the cabin, showed multiple fractures to their spinal columns, pelvises and chests. These injuries were consistent with an upward shock to passengers seated in an aircraft that struck the water belly first.

Planned Undersea Search Operations
The BEA, with the help of Airbus, Air France, and a host of organizations from the US, Europe, and Brazil, will conduct an undersea search operation scheduled to start in February 2010 and with a planned duration of 60 days.

Initial AirSafe.com Reports on This Event (4:10)
Audio: MP3 | Video: iPod/MP4 | WMV | YouTube

Additional Resources
AirSafe.com Flight 447 page
Synopsis of second BEA interim report (English)
Complete second BEA interim report (English)
Complete second BEA interim report (French)
First BEA Interim Report (English)
First BEA interim report (French)
Other Air France Plane Crashes
Other Airbus A330 Plane Crashes
BEA Flight 447 page
Wikipedia Flight 447 page

Previous AirSafeNews.com Articles
Initial AirSafeNews.com article 3 June 2009
Air France Flight 447 Update 9 June 2009
Air France Flight 447 Update 10 June 2009
Air France Flight 447 Update 15 June 2009
Air France Flight 447 Update 19 June 2009
Air France Flight 447 Update 26 June 2009
Todd Curtis BBC Interview about Air France Flight 447
FAA orders A330 pitot tube replacements

A330 Photo: Garret Lockhart