New Articles | Germanwings's Flight 9525

A tragedy in the Alps

All 150 people on board the plane, which went down in southern France, are feared dead

ALL appeared to be routine for Flight 9525, operated by Germanwings, Lufthansa’s low-cost subsidiary, on its journey between Barcelona and Dusseldorf. That was until it crossed the French coast between Marseilles and Toulon at around 10:30am local time. Over the next few minutes the Airbus A320 lost altitude for reasons that are currently unclear, before it crashed in the Alps in a remote spot close to Digne. Rescue helicopters are reported to have spotted wreckage and bodies. However, the inaccessibility of the area's snowy mountains means that it may take hours for rescue teams to reach the crash site. It is feared that all 150 passengers and crew are dead.

The cause of the tragedy is, as yet, unknown. The signal from flight-tracking equipment was lost at 10:41am, just under ten minutes after the plane began its unplanned descent from 38,000 feet to an altitude of 6,800 feet, in a place where some mountains are as high as 10,000 feet. Initial reports claimed that a distress call was radioed from the plane at 10:47am, a strangely long time after the plane disappeared from flight-tracking websites. Other sources insist that no distress call was made. Lufthansa, moreover, says that the plane's sharp descent started at 10:53am and that the plane dropped off radar screens at 10:57am.

Collecting all the information from the authorities, as well as the “black box” flight recorder, will help to clarify the timing of the events. It will also help to identify whether the problem was the loss of altitude itself, or whether the pilots shed height to cope with a separate problem with the plane. Either way, the evidence at the moment seems to point to a malfunction rather than pilot error.



What may have caused the plane to develop a fault is also hard to fathom. The A320 family of narrow bodied jets is, along with the Boeing 737, the workhorse of the global airline industry. Airbus’s short-haul planes have an exceptionally good safety record. And flying is getting

safer still

(see chart). Despite the loss of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370, 2014 was in fact the safest year on record. Unlike MH370, determining the cause of this tragic accident should be straightforward, at least once all the evidence is amassed. But that will be little comfort to the families of those on board.