Readers like you keep news free for everyone.
More than 5,000 readers have already pitched in to keep free access to The Journal.
For the price of one cup of coffee each week you can help keep paywalls away.
# Germanwings
Germanwings: One pilot 'locked out' of cockpit before crash
“You can hear he is trying to smash the door down.”
ONE OF THE pilots of the Airbus A320 which crashed in the French Alps killing all 150 people on board, was locked out of the cockpit, according to reports last night.
Initial analysis of audio taken from the cockpit recorder reportedly indicates that one of the two Germanwings pilots left the cockpit but was unable to return.
The New York Times quotes an unnamed “senior military official involved in the investigation” as saying:
You can hear the guy outside is knocking lightly on the door and there is no answer. And then he hits the door stronger and no answer.
There is never an answer. You can hear he is trying to smash the door down.
We don’t know yet the reason why one of the guys went out. But what is sure is that at the very end of the flight, the other pilot is alone and does not open the door.
Earlier on Wednesday, investigators said they had extracted some “usable data” from the first black box, which contains audio recordings of technical sounds and conversation within the cockpit.
Head of the French air crash investigation agency BEA Remi Jouty cautioned:
At this stage, clearly, we are not in a position to have the slightest explanation or interpretation on the reasons that could have led this plane to descend… or the reasons why it did not respond to attempts to contact it by air traffic controllers.
Investigators are still attempting to locate and recover the second “black box”, which contains technical flight data.
Calls by TheJournal.ie to the BEA and France’s Interior Ministry were not returned last night, and a spokesperson for the BEA earlier declined to comment when questioned by the New York Times.
Originally published 0.06am
Read: Some data recovered – but as yet we don’t have “the slightest explanation” for the crash>
Read: Scale of horror emerges as questions remain over Alps plane crash>
