Tag Archives: air tragedy

How does one explain this crash?

When word came out about how the Germanwings jetliner crashed into the French Alps, well, it defies even the most vivid imagination.

One hundred fifty people died because the co-pilot of the jetliner decided to crash it.

http://news.yahoo.com/alone-cockpit-co-pilot-intentionally-destroyed-plane-185441876.html

Andreas Lubitz was the 28-year-old aviator who locked the captain of the bird out of the flight deck. He then set the altitude meter to 100 feet, causing the plane to crash into the rugged French mountains.

As my uncle said today at lunch, “If the guy wanted to kill himself, why didn’t he just do it first … and see what happened after that?”

This one defies one’s understanding of just about anything I can imagine.

Lubitz decided to take 149 victims with him to his death.

The on-board electronics equipment has given investigators a treasure trove of information and data about what happened.

None of that, though, assuages the grief of the family members of the passengers and crew aboard the plane that was en route from Barcelona to Dusseldorf.

A curious world is waiting to learn what on God’s Earth caused the young man to commit such mass murder.

And one international air carrier, Air Canada, has just mandated that two flight officers are to be on the flight deck at all times.

Let’s hope other carriers follow suit with measures that seek to prevent future tragedies.

 

Air tragedy reaches a known conclusion

The families of another air tragedy are coming into my mind this morning as I learn that searchers are recovering victims and debris from a jetliner crash in the Java Sea.

AirAsia Flight 8501 went down over the weekend on a two-hour flight from Indonesia to Singapore. Bad weather was the culprit. It was an Airbus 320 and it crashed into the sea with a depth of just 150 feet.

Closure has arrived for the families of those who were lost. There will be no survivors.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/indonesia-says-debris-is-from-airasia-jet-1419922721?mod=WSJ_hpp_LEFTTopStories

The other flight? It’s that Malaysian Air Flight 370 that vanished on March 8 somewhere over the Indian Ocean.

Searchers have found nothing, not a single piece of debris, not a single artifact from the Boeing 777 that disappeared from view. That flight was en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. It turned suddenly in another direction. Then it was gone. Just like that. Gone!

The speculation about where it went, what happened to it has been alternately desperate and insane.

It has produced some of the wildest theories heard since, oh, Amelia Earhart’s disappearance over the Pacific Ocean in 1937.

One tragedy has reached the conclusion everyone expected.

The other one has yet to be resolved. The pain of many anxious families continues.