Page 4 - Automatic Pilot News Today

Going back to that navigate bit of the mantra, pilot looks up, looks at his equipment and says wheres the nearest airfield. . the chances are the airfield is going to be concealed by cloud. you can see if the pilot is trying to land this aircraft the airstrip if its within the proximity of the region will be covered by cloud up until whatever the cloud base is. the cloud base is on the peaks of the mountain. its going to be an incredible difficult situation because the pilots are not going to ge...

Things like wind. if theres a southerly wind flow, does the pilot want to turn the aircraft into wind. thats going against the aircraft. or is it like toulouse or somewhere to the north. next is the communication. it happens in two areas. the first is a radio transmission call that can be form in the may day and pan. >> 7700 was the one punched in. >> you have a radio call and then a transponder communication message, which is the 7700. that forms part of the third aspect of this emergency mantr...

Tragedy. its one of those things where you have shown probably footage of people waiting in the airport. >> and in barcelona as well. >> i have done a lot of flying up in the north of norway, a lot of flying in this particular region of the alps and as a pilot and as a crew, when you talk about surviving, actually surviving the tragedy or the crash, the major aspect is how do you survive the conditions? youre talking about on the tops here, highly unlikely that anyone would have survived given t...

Pilot or co-pilot and anybody on ground control either in germany or france or spain. this is the press conference that is just beginning. we are going to get our translator on board on this so that we can bring you this. it is a press conference by officials germanwings speaking. and the french president, francois hollande says probably no french citizens on board this flight. >> reporter: well thats right. but we know the majority of people aboard the flight were german as well as spanish. ger...

Marseilles or nice or in italy or switzerland and they didnt do that. >> exactly. thats whats lending to the theory that tom put out there that they were probably somehow incapacitated, but maybe they were confused. maybe there was some sort of toxin in the air that would confuse them because why would you not make attempt to make a quick radio call over 8 minutes and eventually put in a 7700 emergency code. so they were somewhat conscious, yet theres no evidence to point to them looking for ano...

Out of a safe place to be. with terrain like that this could be a very very large debris field indeed. its not like thinking back to the crash where it crashes in a a tight area and the debris can be recovered quickly. this can be a long drawn out process. >> it was close to nice, which can and does receive a320s all the time. they couldnt do it. bill, thank you for that report. stay with me were going to be updating this news. i want to go to former commercial pilot jay rollands. hes with us th...

In a fully computerized setup like what you see in the airbus and also the boeing 787, these are are aircraft that are controlled by computers. so when the pilot puts in any sort of change for the aircraft flight controls, it first goes through the computer that mediates it and then tells the controls what to do. i find it problematic, actually. >> to distill this theres no real manual override on the a320? >> i cannot absolutely confirm that at this point, but i know that it is an electrically ...

Pilot, anybody on board and ground control. if during those 13 minutes they go from 35,000 feet to 5,000 feet, it wasnt dramatic but clearly they are dealing with it. is it unusual that at no time between 9:33 and when this happened 13 minutes later, theres no communication with ground control? >> if the pilots manage or the crew manage to get the aircraft into a stable configuration, what i mean by stable configuration is they brought the speed under control, they are pointing towards the desti...

Being man handled by the pilots in certain circumstances. however, a debris field of five miles suggests and i say suggests because it is so early in terms of developing the facts, suggests that there may have been an in flight air frame failure. when we have impact of an aircraft that is in a state of flying into the ground it just does not leave a debris field that wide and that diffuse. i think perhaps the pilots attempted to save the aircraft and overstressed it or perhaps there was an explo...

One part of a mountain range, it could have been -- >> lets look at the factors. the factors are did the aircraft break up if it did break, what speed was it going, if it did break, what altitude was it at. usually it would hit a flat area you have components and undercarriage traveling miles and miles, and you have the carbon components fairly close to the impact points. there are a huge amount of factors. >> crevasses on the sides of mountains. >> topography is key, and flight data recorder an...