Germanwings A320: Will such a tragedy ever happen again

It's also strange for people to commit suicide without leaving a note and to do so while causing a lot of damage to strangers and to do so while apparently normally conducting a difficult technical job (clearly the captain didn't suspect anything was wrong because he left the co-pilot in control of the aircraft).

The entire incident is strange, I just don't see the reason why to strike terrorism off the list of possible causes. Once it became clear that the crash was deliberate it shot close to the top of the list, if not the top. In the absence of specific evidence pointing at a different cause, I don't see why it doesn't stay there.

Well, according to today's Guardian, he was depressed. Which obviously doesn't prove anything, but again it does suggest something along the lines of mental illness is more likely.

And again... if it was terrorism, why on earth would you crash a plane into a mountain? It just makes no sense...

The two aren't mutually exclusive. Being depressed might explain why he put low value on his own life but not why he put low value on the lives of his passengers. It's almost certain that he had additional motivation to kill those people and quite plausible that that motivation was ideological.


If you are a pilot then crashing a plane is the easiest way to kill a large number of people.

No, his point is why pick a mountainside. If you're a terrorist you go for mass impact, so you crash a plane into a building ( I'm sure you can think of an example there), you don't typically drive it into the middle of nowhere.

And no, that kind of motivation isn't by any means certain. It's quite plausible that an already depressed person, perhaps having a particularly bad episode, who knew he was being watched by his captain, knew that his job was on the line, couldn't see a way out and so decided to use the one opportunity he had for closure. That notion is no less credible than your terrorist angle.

The other part that would work against the terrorism angle is that he had 630 hours. That's a huge number of flights he had already done. Do you really think he wouldn't have had similar opportunities on any of those previous flights? That's what makes me fairly certain that - on the basis of what we know currently - it wasn't terrorism.

It won't get there; it will be shot down. Another 9/11 has a very low probability of success. He crashed it on the scheduled route which did not raise suspicion or allow the authorities time to respond and crashing it into the mountains rather than the Mediterranean greatly reduced the chances of survivors.


I have not argued that terrorism is certain to be the cause. I have argued that it has not been ruled out and even remains probable.


That assumes he was planning a terrorist attack from before he started flight school. In that case, there's no particular reason to expect him to plan to crash an aircraft, which he has no special access to, than to kill people some other way.

No it won't. They'd already flown over Nice. If he had had the intent, that city could easily have been impacted, the FAF wouldn't have stood a chance of stopping it.

No, it hasn't been ruled out, but it's also not high on the list of being likely, given the information they currently have.

If he wanted to maximise ground casualties, economic damage, and disruption with minimum chance of interception, he should have crashed it into Düsseldorf airport. It is perhaps worth asking why he didn't. However, I suggest one reason might be that he did not control the moment when he could remove the Captain from the cockpit with as much precision as he might have liked and you might be assuming.

It won't get there; it will be shot down. Another 9/11 has a very low probability of success. He crashed it on the scheduled route which did not raise suspicion or allow the authorities time to respond and crashing it into the mountains rather than the Mediterranean greatly reduced the chances of survivors.

Perhaps not, but I do know that an aircraft flying at 500+mph and only 55km from a big city could have easily made that distance in not much time. That he didn't even attempt to change direction would go against the terrorism theory.

It's more the case that no information currently available supports the theory that this was an act of terrorism.
Yes, there's not much evidence so far, but what we have so far does lean more one way than the other.

Oh come on, you must know that's silly. Even post 9/11, response times aren't good enough to scramble jets in the 10 minutes between the pilot taking over and crashing the aircraft, not in the US and certainly not in Europe.

Even if the pilot decided that it was too risky to crash the aircraft into a major city, he could easily have gotten away with crashing it into a town or something. It was crashed into a mountain - he couldn't have caused less collateral damage if he tried (apart from the people in the aircraft, obviously). As we know, the descent was completely intentional. The pilot did not miss a target, he intentionally flew it into a remote mountain-side. There is no way that his intention was to cause as many deaths as possible.

And in terms of reducing the number of survivors... if you've got a plane crashing into the ground at several hundred kilometres per hour, you're not going to get survivors whether you're crashing into a mountain or the middle of a massive city.

"No bodies remained intact"
I know the plane was going 720kmh^-1 But how is that possible? did the explosion cause fragmentation of little pieces or what?

Because the human body is small, fragile and squidgy, while 100tonnes of metal and aviation fuel really isn't?

how did bodies and luggage remain intact when the russians shot down the plane in the summer then?

Because the plane was shredded in mid air by a proximity explosion, not pummeled into a mountainside at 420knts.

As per latest report, it's claimed that the co-pilot intentionally locked everyone out from getting into the pit and the set course to crash the flight.

Now some people have dismissed this as a one in a billion tragedy hence shouldn't be dwelt upon excessively. But personally think this is a new frontier for terrorists and precautions should be taken to make sure this doesn't happen in the future...

This kind of scenario may sound absurd but it could be that terrorists have blackmailed him saying if you don't crash the plane we will destroy each everyone you ever loved so better do this... or something like that.

It might also have been that the fairy queen of narnia put a spell on the pilot, forcing him to crash the plane in a bid to destroy the mountain troll who dwelt in that particular mountain.

Your pointless postulating sadly seems to highlight the degree to which we have all been goaded into 'terrorist' paranoia. Theres a lot of bad things that happen that arent done by 'terrorists' and probably many more relevant things you should be concerned with

Place an override on the door and then hijackers have access to the cockpit.

The likelihood of one rogue pilot being able to overpower the other, cabin crew and passengers is next to nil.

Geeze.... why are you in this mood? We are free to theorize what we have in our minds you know. This is the very reason why a forum is set up. Do you even chill out?

Do you even chill out?