The 2013 Airplane Crash That Is Eerily Similar to the Germanwings Tragedy

[KamaAina]

http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2015/03/26/germanwings_crash_another_incident_in_namibia_in_2013_was_eerily_similar.html

The initial evidence suggests that the first officer of Germanwings Flight 4U 9525, a 27-year-old German named Andreas Lubitz, locked himself in the cockpit and flew the plane into the ground, deliberately killing himself and the 149 others on board. It’s hard to overemphasize how unusual this is—nothing like this has ever happened aboard a European or North American carrier before—but it’s not totally unprecedented. Around the world, a number of pilot-suicides have taken place in recent years, including one that bears uncanny similarities to Tuesday’s crash.

At 11:26 a.m. on Nov. 29, 2013, LAM Mozambique Airlines Flight 470 took off from Maputo, Mozambique bound for Luanda, Angola with 27 passengers and six crewmembers. LAM is not a great airline—it’s been banned from flying in Europe—but the plane, an Embraer E-190 narrowbody, was nearly new, having been delivered to the airline just the year before. About halfway through the flight, shortly after 1 p.m. local time, the plane was passing over Botswana when the co-pilot left his seat to go to the bathroom.

Left alone in the cockpit, the captain, Herminio dos Santos Fernandes, locked the door and changed the autopilot altitude setting from 38,000 feet to 592 feet, which happened to be lower than the elevation of the terrain in that region. He also deployed the plane’s spoilers, which protrude from the wing to reduce lift and make the plane descend more quickly. Over the next eight minutes, the plane descended at about 6,000 feet per minute, somewhat faster than Germanwings 9525 but considerably more slowly than SilkAir Flight 185, whose pilot put the nose down and flew the plane into the surface at tremendous speed.

The Cockpit Voice Recorder picked up sounds of shouts and banging on the cockpit door as the first officer struggled to gain access, to no avail. The plane crashed into a swamp in Namibia’s Bwabwata National Park amid heavy rain in an area so remote that it took recovery teams 24 hours to reach it. Due to dangers posed by roaming lions, the search team was armed with rifles.

Hmmm. No 24/7 news coverage on that one. Wonder why? Oh, right, Mozambique to Angola, not Spain to Germany.

Oddly enough, I found this on the FB page of a conservatroid I knew in college. And he made the news-cycle observation!

[Agschmid]

1. Kick.

[global1]

2. So This Happened Before - Then Why All The Puzzlement By The News Networks & Airline....

as to what happened on this flight. This is really the exact same scenario. They all speculated what actually happened and they really should have known - because of this Lam Mozambique Airline crash.

[regnaD kciN]

5. It has happened other times as well...

...most notably EgyptAir 990 a couple of decades ago. There's also speculation, although no definitive proof, that the infamous missing airliner MH370 from last year may have met a similar fate.

[uppityperson]

3. I was reading about this incident last night. Odd.

[leveymg]

4. Happened at least twice before, article references SilkAir Flight 185 suicide previous. Also,

There was the 1999 EgyptAir Flt. 990 incident: http://www.vox.com/2015/3/26/8294971/pilot-suicide-crash

In 1999, EgyptAir Flight 990 crashed near Nantucket, Massachusetts, killing 217 people. Before the crash, the plane's pilot had apparently excused himself to go to the bathroom. The black box recorder then picked up unintelligible commotion and banging on the door. The co-pilot, Gamil El Batouty, could be heard muttering over and over, "I rely on God. I rely on God. I rely on God. I rely on God." The captain eventually forced his back way in and could be heard saying, "What is this? Did you shut the engine[s]?" As the plane crashed, the captain was heard trying to right the plane, saying, "Pull with me. Pull with me."

In the EgyptAir case, the NTSB concluded that the crash occurred because of the co-pilot's "manipulation of the airplane controls." But they did not explicitly call it suicide, and Egyptian officials have disputed that it was deliberate.

[riderinthestorm]

6. K&R. I wonder if the pilots' mental health was noted in any of these other crashes

Last edited Fri Mar 27, 2015, 04:40 PM - Edit history (1)

really interesting.



And terribly sad....

edited to add that I find it interesting that noone has called these other crashes "terrorist acts".

[Downwinder]

7. Wikipedia page.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LAM_Mozambique_Airlines_Flight_470

Scroll down and look at "Specific incidents."

[Blue_Tires]

8. I knew about the incident

but then again I read all the airliner/pilots forums and crash reports...

It's not just the plane crashes -- Very little of what happens in the African continent makes the western MSM...

[KamaAina]

10. Except for Ebola, of course

and then only when it found its way over here.

[malaise]

9. Rachel talked about this last night n/t