By now you’re getting a pretty good understanding of the latest news on the Germanwings crash in the French Alps. Yes, we’re banging on about it quite a bit but (thankfully) it’s not every day a man decides to take a plane down with 149 other people on board.

So for the less informed out there with regards to aviation (myself included), you would think that when a plane descends from a cruising altitude of 38 000 feet and ploughs into a mountain the plane would have some safety mechanisms in place. How did Lubitz avoid this happening? Here’s the Daily Beast:

There is one salient feature of Lubitz’s behavior that suggests that he had carefully planned his actions.

The prosecutor said that while the copilot was alone with the captain locked out of the cockpit “he manipulated the flight management system to manage the descent.” The highly sophisticated computerized system of the A320 would not have detected any anomaly from these actions.

And here is the key clue to Lubitz’s preparations. Although the system uses a “flight protection envelope” to prevent pilots from what is called “over-corrrecting”—forcing the airplane into a maneuver that could destabilize it—the Germanwings A320 did not breach this envelope in its descent.

Now history suggests that pilots taking a plane down intentionally normally plunge the plane into a vertical nosedive but Lubitz knew that the plane’s Airbus’s flight protection envelope would have stopped this from happening. Sure he could have disconnected the computerised flight management system but he went one better:

Instead, he simply input a descent using the same steps as would a pilot who needed to lose altitude for navigational purposes — except that he kept on descending until the proximity warning alarm went off shortly before impact.

Maybe not such a rash and spur of the moment decision then hey?

[source:dailybeast]