Cause and Effect

"The guy outside is knocking lightly on the door and there is no answer.  And then he hits the door stronger and no answer. There is never an answer."

"You can hear he is trying to smash the door down."

"We don’t know yet the reason why one of the guys went out. But what is sure is that at the very end of the flight, the other pilot is alone and does not open the door."

Senior military official involved in Germanwings Flight 9525 crash investigation

Satellite image by NASA

"I don’t like it. To me, it seems very weird: this very long descent at normal speed without any communications, though the weather was absolutely clear."

"If for any reason they don’t detect the problem [loss of cabin pressure] in time, they would black out."

"So far, we don’t have any evidence that points clearly to a technical explanation. So we have to consider the possibility of deliberate human responsibility."

Senior French Investigation Official

French emergency services resumed work on Wednesday. Credit Alberto Estevez/European Pressphoto Agency

First there was the perplexingly mysterious disappearance of Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 a year ago, whose passengers' fate cannot yet be put to rest without a trace of evidence pointing to what had become of the airliner and its passengers. There are endless hypotheses; almost as many as the various intensive searches undertaken in a desperate determination to discover the whereabouts of the presumed wreckage, to give closure to the grieving family members of the 239 from 14 nations aboard who are assumed to have died.

Now just a tad over a year later, the sudden disintegration of a Lufthansa (Germanwings) flight believed to have killed 150 people aboard on a routine flight from Barcelona to Dusseldorf. The Airbus A320 was cleared for takeoff at ten in the morning on Tuesday for its 90-minute flight. Air traffic control was aware of a normal flight for 40 minutes' duration. Then over southern France after reaching cruise altitude the plane plunged in a precipitous and deadly descent.

That there was no emergency request to air traffic control, and for the next eight minutes the plane simply plunged at a rate of 1,200 metres per minute is beyond rational belief. No signal of impending trouble relayed whatever. But 47 minutes after takeoff air traffic controllers had no further contact with the plane so they initiated an aircraft distress alert. "The plane then crashed", said the managing director of Germanwings, with all aboard believed to have perished.

"It was a deafening noise. I thought it was an avalanche, although it sounded slightly different", president of the Pra Loup tourism office said. The mayor of the town of Haltern Am See, where parents were awaiting the return of a group of 16 fifteen-year-old high school students returning home from a student exchange program in Spain, spoke of students searching online "and then when the plane didn't land and they were unable to make contact with their friends and classmates by cellphone, that's when they assumed the worst had happened."

This was the first crash for the low-cost carrier since it began operations in 2002. French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve ruled out terrorism as a likely "hypothesis at the moment", though not entirely excluded. By all indications, the aircraft hadn't exploded in the air but disintegrated on impact with the side of a mountain. Lufthansa, in characterizing the crash as an accident is engaging in wishful thinking; accidents happen and thankfully relatively infrequently, although when they do the loss of lives is catastrophic.

If, on the other hand, the moving finger of responsibility indicates terroristic involvement imagine the impact on air travel, given the popularity of attacking planes, from the PLO's hijacking of planes in their heyday of fixing world attention on the 'plight of the Palestinians', to the 9/11 hijackers and their spectacular success in destroying New York's landmark financial symbols and the lives of three thousand innocent civilians in one fell swoop.

The captain had worked for Lufthansa for a decade, with over 6,000 hours of experienced flight time with A320 planes. The technical inquiry into the crash is led by the French Bureau of Investigations and Analysis, joined by their German counterparts along with technical advisers from Airbus and CFM International, the plane's engines manufacturers.

And nothing can be ruled out as cause; while pitilessly the effect is well known.