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Germanwings Crash Investigation Hits Snag in Retrieving Data

By DAN BILEFSKY and NICOLA CLARKMARCH 25, 2015

Photo

French military personnel walked up a mountainside on Wednesday near the crash site of a

Germanwings jet. Credit Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images

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PARIS — Rescuers resumed the difficult task of searching for the 150 victims of a deadly plane crash in

the French Alps, as the search for clues was dealt a setback Wednesday afternoon.

Investigators said they had so far been unable to retrieve any data from the plane’s cockpit voice

recorder, and the inquiry has been hampered further, an official said, by the discovery that the second

black box, which was found on Wednesday, was severely damaged, and its memory card dislodged and

missing.

The plane, an Airbus A320 operated by the budget carrier Germanwings, was en route to Düsseldorf,

Germany, from Barcelona, Spain, on Tuesday morning when it lost altitude rapidly and slammed into the

French Alps, killing all 144 passengers and six crew members on board.

Continue reading the main story

RELATED COVERAGE

Clockwise from top left: Oleg Bryjak, a bass baritone at the Düsseldorf opera; Maria Radner, a contralto

in Düsseldorf; Greig Friday, a mechanical engineer from Australia; and his mother, Carol Friday, a

nurse.Details Emerging of Passengers Aboard Crashed Germanwings JetMARCH 25, 2015

Challenges Weigh Heavily on Recovery Efforts in Germanwings CrashMARCH 25, 2015

A few hours after officials recovered one of the black boxes, they called off the search for the

evening.Germanwings Crash in French Alps Kills 150; Cockpit Voice Recorder Is FoundMARCH 24, 2015

Students and teachers from the Joseph-König school in Germany were returning from a language and

culture immersion program in Spain when their plane crashed on Tuesday.In German Town, a School-

Year Highlight That Ended in DisasterMARCH 24, 2015

Footage of the site showed a remote and craggy landscape dominated by imposing mountains. The

French newspaper Le Monde noted that the impact of the crash was so severe that the plane had been

reduced to “confetti,” creating a serious challenge for search teams and investigators.


What We Know

The pilots did not issue a distress call or initiate any communication with air traffic controllers as the

plane began its eight-minute descent.

Investigators have so far been unable to retrieve data from one black box, and the other was badly

damaged and its memory card was missing.

The aircraft, an Airbus A320, was 24 years old but had no history of serious maintenance problems.

What We Don’t Know

Whether the plane was flying on autopilot or under the manual control of crew members.

Why the plane descended after reaching its cruising altitude.

Whether the plane suffered any kind of technical failure.

Lufthansa, the parent company of Germanwings, has characterized the crash as an accident. But as

investigators reviewed one of the plane’s so-called black boxes, questions remained, including why the

aircraft had descended for eight minutes before crashing, and why an aircraft with a good safety record

had crashed in largely clear weather.

Speaking on the French radio station RTL, Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said on Wednesday that

terrorism was “not a privileged hypothesis at the moment,” but that no theories had been definitively

excluded. Mr. Cazeneuve said the size of the area over which debris was scattered suggested that the

aircraft had not exploded in the air but rather had disintegrated on impact.

He said that the plane’s cockpit voice recorder, the first black box that was recovered, was damaged, but

that investigators expected to be able to recover the conversations stored on its memory chip.

But as of early afternoon, a senior official involved in the investigation said analysts had so far been

unsuccessful in retrieving any information from the cockpit voice recorder.

Photo

French emergency services resumed work on Wednesday near the crash site of a Germanwings jet.

Credit Peter Kneffel/European Pressphoto Agency

The official said that workers on the scene had found the casing of the second black box, the flight data

recorder, which investigators had hoped would provide significant information about the flight,

including its speed, altitude and direction. But he said that the crash had severely damaged the box, and

that the vital memory chip inside it had been dislodged.

One of the main questions outstanding is why the pilots did not communicate with air traffic controllers

as the plane began its unusual descent, suggesting that either the pilots or the plane’s automated

systems may have been trying to maintain control of the aircraft as it lost altitude.

Among the theories that have been put forward by air safety analysts not involved in the investigation is

the possibility that the pilots could have been incapacitated by a sudden event such as a fire or a drop in

cabin pressure.

The senior French official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the investigation was

continuing, said that the lack of communication from the pilots during the plane’s descent was

disturbing, and that the possibility that their silence was deliberate could not be ruled out.


MAP

Where the Germanwings Plane Crashed

The Germanwings plane crashed in a remote part of the French Alps.

OPEN MAP

France’s air accident investigation bureau was expected to hold a briefing at its offices in Le Bourget,

near Paris, on Wednesday afternoon. The agency, which is leading the technical inquiry into the crash,

sent seven investigators to the crash site on Tuesday. They have been joined by their counterparts from

Germany, as well as by technical advisers from Airbus and CFM International, the manufacturer of the

plane’s engines.

Speaking on Europe 1 radio, Jean-Paul Troadec, a former director of the French air accident investigation

bureau, said that the analysis of the cockpit voice recorder would “help us to understand what

happened in the final minutes of the flight.”

“Nonetheless,” he added, “just having these recordings is not going to be sufficient” to make any

definitive conclusions about the cause of the crash — a process that could take weeks, if not months.

Mr. Troadec said the voice recordings would need to be synchronized with the contents of the second

black box, the flight data recorder, which tracks roughly 1,300 statistics, including the plane’s position,

speed, altitude and direction. Locating that recorder had remained a priority for search teams.

Photo

French emergency services resumed work on Wednesday. Credit Alberto Estevez/European Pressphoto

Agency

With more than 600 police officers and other emergency workers at the scene, Mr. Troadec said one of

the big challenges for investigators would be to protect the debris at the crash site from any inadvertent

damage.

“We need to ensure that all the evidence is well preserved,” Mr. Troadec said, referring both to the

pieces of the plane littered across the steep slopes as well as to the remains of the victims. The

identification of the victims will most likely require matching DNA from the remains with samples from

relatives.

The recovery effort will be a laborious task, given the state of the wreckage, the difficult terrain and the

fact that the crash site is so remote that it could be reached only by helicopter.

The identities of the victims were expected to be released on Wednesday. The plane’s passengers, most

of whom were German or Spanish, included 16 German high school students and two teachers who

were returning from an exchange program near Barcelona. The Liceu opera house in Barcelona said on

Tuesday that two singers who had been performing in Wagner’s “Siegfried” were also among the

victims: the contralto Maria Radner and the baritone Oleg Bryjak.

Continue reading the main storyVideo

PLAY VIDEO|0:40

French: Terror Attack on Plane Unlikely

French: Terror Attack on Plane Unlikely

Bernard Cazeneuve, the French interior minister, said Wednesday that terrorism was “not a privileged

hypothesis at the moment” in the Airbus A320 crash. Video by AP on Publish Date March 25, 2015.

Éric Sapet, a member of a mountain firefighters’ unit who had been at the crash site, was quoted by Le

Monde as saying that the plane had been “pulverized” and that it was no longer possible to even tell

that the scattered debris had once been an aircraft.

President François Hollande of France and Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany arrived on Wednesday

afternoon by air force helicopter in Seyne-les-Alpes, a village near the crash site, to pay their respects

and meet rescue workers and other officials. They were joined by Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy of

Spain.

Martin Riecken, a spokesman for Lufthansa in Frankfurt, said late Tuesday that a small number of pilots

and flight attendants had given notice that they would not fly on Wednesday.

“Our employees are very distressed,” he said, adding that Lufthansa crew members would be brought in

to replace Germanwings employees as necessary. “People are in a state of shock.”


Timeline of the Crash

10:01 AM

Flight takes off from Barcelona, about 26 minutes late.

While there were many questions about the crash, investigators said they found the silence from the

cockpit deeply disturbing.

“I don’t like it,” said the senior French official, who is involved in the investigation and who cautioned

that his initial analysis was based on the very limited information currently available. “To me, it seems

very weird: this very long descent at normal speed without any communications, though the weather

was absolutely clear.”

This official said that the lack of communication suggested that the pilots might have been incapacitated

as a result of an onboard failure such as a loss of cabin pressure, which could have deprived the crew

members of oxygen.

While all pilots are equipped with emergency oxygen masks, the pilots would first have to be aware that

a depressurization had occurred, the official said.

Continue reading the main storyVideo

PLAY VIDEO|3:16

Leaders on Germanwings Plane Crash

Leaders on Germanwings Plane Crash

The French president, the German chancellor and the Spanish prime minister discussed the next steps

their countries are taking after a Germanwings plane crashed in the French Alps on Tuesday. Publish

Date March 24, 2015. Photo by Ian Langsdon/European Pressphoto Agency.

“If for any reason they don’t detect the problem in time, they would black out,” the official said.

Such a scenario has occurred before, perhaps most famously in the crash of a Cypriot passenger plane in

2005 that killed all 121 people on board as it approached Athens. In that case, Helios Airways Flight 522,

a slow loss of pressure rendered both pilots and all the passengers on the Boeing 737 jet unconscious

for more than three-quarters of an hour before the aircraft ran out of fuel and slammed into a wooded

gorge near the Greek capital.

Investigators eventually determined that the primary cause of that crash was a series of human errors,

including deficient maintenance checks on the ground and a failure by the pilots to heed emergency

warning signals.

Apart from pilot incapacitation, the French official also raised the uncomfortable possibility that the lack

of communication could have been intentional.

“So far, we don’t have any evidence that points clearly to a technical explanation,” the official said. “So

we have to consider the possibility of deliberate human responsibility.”

If that were the case, this person said, then the cockpit voice recordings might not yield many useful

clues.

“I hope that we get some good information,” the official said. “But my fear is that we are going to find

nothing, or very little. That there was nothing to record.”

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