Quote:
Originally Posted by Madelaine Amee
There is extensive coverage on what he was doing on both the TV and the internet news sites, but this caught my attention:
Lubitz seemed to be toying with the plane's settings on a March 24 flight from Duesseldorf to Barcelona, programming it for sharp descent multiple times in a 4 1/2-minute period while the pilot was out of the cockpit before resetting the controls, France's BEA investigation agency said in an interim report on the crash.
If they knew he was doing this why wasn't it picked up by the right people before the tradegy.
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Madelaine,
I'll try to be brief and keep it simple:
On a previous flight with the aircraft established in a descent, Lubitz reset the altitude window to 100' or near 100', but later changed it to the correctly assigned altitude. When the captain returned to the cockpit, he would have ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA the incorrect altitude was briefly entered in the altitude window. There is no instrument or display in the cockpit which stores/displays previously entered altitude entries. The aircraft remained in a constant descent (as it's designed to) while Lubitz changed the altitude setting so no one in the cabin, including flight attendants, would have any idea anything was amiss.
The only way any of this was discovered was by analyzing the individual flight data recorders of all tails Lubitz flew recently. The flight data recorders record some (approximately) 1,800 different inputs (nearly all of which are not visible to the pilots - exact control positions, temperatures and pressures of multiple systems).
Even so, there is no specific prohibition that I'm aware of against setting sea level momentarily. Some might argue it would aid in their descent planning to see the newly computed "end of descent" point visually depicted in relation to the airfield.
(Just a gentle caution against prematurely assigning blame where it's not warranted.)