Two missing minutes hold key to Germanwings disaster
Aviation experts have given some credence to claims that one of the pilots in the French Alps plane disaster was locked out of the cockpit before the crash.
The New York Times quoted a senior military source involved in the investigation into the Airbus A320 crash as saying black box evidence reveals a pilot can be heard leaving the cockpit before trying to get back in.
The source said: "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."
Locked cockpit doors were introduced worldwide after the 9/11 attacks in the US.
The Sydney Morning Herald quoted an unnamed Australian Airbus A320 pilot who said that if the pilot flying the aircraft does not want the other pilot to enter the flight deck, the one in the cockpit can block entry if he reacts before the door opens automatically.
The A320 pilot said: "If the person on the other side of the door says 'no', you can't get in."
He added that the doors are bolted and heavily protected and it would probably be impossible to break one down quickly.
All that investigators of the Germanwings crash have said so far is that the black box cockpit voice recorder contains "usable" data.
A spokesman for the French air investigation bureau, the BEA, said the second black box, the flight data recorder, has yet to be found despite reports it had been recovered and was too badly damaged to be useful.
The investigation is likely to centre on why there was no distress call from the plane, which went into a slow descent even though it was in a mountainous area, and theories include the complete incapacity of the cockpit crew, possibly after a windscreen blow-out.
Earlier, Germanwings' parent company Lufthansa said the plane, piloted by two experienced captains, was "technically flawless", while the firm's chief executive Carsten Spohr, himself a pilot, described the crash as "inexplicable".
Lufthansa said: "We cannot comprehend how a technically flawless airplane steered by two experienced pilots could encounter such a situation at cruising altitude.
"All of us at Lufthansa are working to ensure that such an incident will never occur again. We cannot believe that this has happened. We are doing everything to support the families.
Key to the investigation is what happened during the minutes 10.30am and 10.31am, said Segolene Royal, a top government minister whose portfolio includes transport.
From then, controllers were unable to make contact with the plane.
The voice recorder takes audio feeds from four microphones within the cockpit and records all the conversations between the pilots and air traffic controllers, as well as any noises heard in the cockpit.
The flight data recorder captures 25 hours' worth of information on the position and condition of almost every major part in a plane.
Ms Royal and Bernard Cazeneuve, the French Interior Minister, both emphasised that terrorism is considered unlikely.
Investigators retrieving data from the recorder will focus first 'on the human voices, the conversations', followed by the cockpit sounds, Transport Secretary Alain Vidalies said.
He said the government planned to release information gleaned from the black box as soon as it can be verified.
French president Francois Hollande and German chancellor Angela Merkel arrived by helicopter on a mountain meadow close to the crash site yesterday afternoon.
Spanish prime minister Mariano Rajoy also joined them at the scene, in the town of Seynes-les-Alpes.
Mr Hollande praised rescue workers who have been trying to retrieve debris and bodies from the hard-to-reach site.
Earlier in the day, emergency crews were making their way slowly to the remote crash site through fresh snow and rain, threading their way to the craggy ravine.
Victims included two babies, two opera singers, an Australian mother and her adult son holidaying together and 16 German high school students and their teachers returning home from an exchange trip to Spain.
In Seyne-les-Alpes, locals had offered to host bereaved families because of a shortage of rooms to rent, said the town's mayor, Francis Hermitte.
The plane, operated by Germanwings, a budget subsidiary of Lufthansa, was less than an hour from landing in Dusseldorf on a flight from Barcelona when it unexpectedly went into a rapid eight-minute descent.
The pilots sent out no distress call and had lost radio contact with their control centre, France's aviation authority said of the incident.
Germanwings said 144 passengers and six crew members were on board.
An Air France flight from Paris to Saigon crashed just a few miles from the same spot in 1953, killing all 42 people on board.
Germanwings' chief executive said the airline's current information is that 72 Germans, 35 Spanish citizens and two Americans were on board the flight. Thomas Winkelmann told reporters in Cologne that the list is not complete because the company is still trying to contact the relatives of the remaining victims of the disaster.
Mr Winkelmann said in some cases, victims' nationality is not entirely clear, in part because of dual citizenship.
