A Germanwings Thing: The missing Flight Data Recorder Card and the Ax Man of Flight 9525

Let's start with this story: Germanwings co-pilot had dreams about plane crashing, report says »

The co-pilot Andreas Lubitz who steered an airline with 150 people on board into a French mountainside had been dumped by his girlfriend the day prior to the crash and was undergoing treatment for depression from a doctor, according to reports Saturday.

But we are just finding out so much about Lubitz so quickly, aren’t we?  The problem I have with all of these stories is that unnamed people are being quoted and we are not finding the true source of the information. Where does it come from? Family? Friends? The EX?  I am not trying to cast too big a shadow of doubt—I believe in conspiracy but also know that not everything is one, so i am trying to be cautious but sensible.  But here is a quote from the FOX NEWS story that gets me into the caution zone:

The New York Post reported that the German newspaper Bild quoted an ex-girlfriend saying that Lubitz “would wake up in the middle of the night screaming, “We’re crashing!”
“When I heard about the crash, one thing that he said kept going through my head: ‘One day I’m going to do something that will change the whole system, and everyone will know my name and remember it.’ ” the woman told the paper, according to the Post.
“I didn’t know what he meant, but now it makes sense,” the woman added.
The Post also reported that French TV channel iTELE reported Lubitz and another girlfriend of seven years shared an apartment in Dusseldorf and planned to get married next year. However, the channel had said Lubtiz’s fiancée ended the relationship the day before the crash.

So how convenient. Suddenly when a big crime is committed, we are told by this EX that she broke up with him a day prior.. And we also have been told as a child he loved this area of the ALPS. And we also know that he was DREAMING about crashing a plane now.. All of this added up together sure sounds like the perfect story book beginning and ending …

I think this girlfriend story is a little sketchy. Don’t get me wrong, again, I am not trying to create rumors where there are none.. but I would think investigators should be asking more about this EX.. asking why the breakup happened. If it did. Asking more about those dreams. If they did..

And if someone is speaking about ‘doing something everyone will remember,’ or something of the like, the partner usually queries a lot more about that than this girlfriend apparently did.

And now pilots are going to have to sign away their medical information on a regular basis to a corporation to ensure something of this nature will never happen again.. I guess Andreas Lubitz will be remembered for that…

….but I keep pondering the ‘we’re crashing!!’ dreams, and they are peculiar.  I have reservations about buying into the storyline at this point—at least as it is being presented by the supposed ex-girlfriend of 24 hours.

And let me ask something more.. in our information age where everyone tweets and tumbles and Facebooks into the night, where is the social media presence of Lubitz? Or this girlfriend?

x x x 

I am not offering up any theories of my own, I am simply adding a mixture of doubt and logic to this whole thing..

From a distance, we have a perfect story.  A mentally unstable pilot breaks up with his girlfriend a day before—the same girlfriend who now says he had dreams about planes crashing. Then he locks out his fellow pilot and he crashes a plane, murdering 150 people, into a location in the Alps he supposedly enjoyed visiting as a child.

There is no letter, though. No motive. But we do have a great set of audio files of people screaming and a pilot using an ax, we are told, to chop away at the door while screaming “My God” … The crash takes 8 minutes. Scratch that. Eighteen. Wait. No. Seven. . Well, pick your own on that.

It glides into the hell on earth, leaving behind a dead metal cylinder of humanity. A tragic story. But we have a villain.. An evil pilot who was hellbent on killing all the innocent souls that day.

This flight recording from the moment of impact is the latest bit that has me a little perplexed.. We seem to know the full extent of the horror that day.  A German newspaper BILD is releasing a transcript of the ‘recording’ though admitting the recording hasn’t been released and they haven’t heard it.  Andreas Lubitz, though, is busy crashing the plane while co-pilot Patrick Sondenheimer, now relieved from his bathroom trip, is busy trying to crash through the door.

This is the flight audio recording, we are told, that finishes this story and gives us the inside view of what occurred.

There is another piece of the puzzle, however, missing. And it’s a big piece that provides the scientific and industrial evidence as to how the plane crashed: The flight DATA recorder was found. But it was missing a memory card. AS The AP reported last week:

Confusion surrounded the fate of the second black box. French President Francois Hollande said the casing of the flight data recorder had been found in the scattered debris, but was missing the memory card that captures 25 hours’ worth of information on the position and condition of almost every major part in a plane. Jouty refused to confirm the discovery.

Confusion, indeed.

A few days later, an aviation website reported this:

The BEA has yet to hold a follow-up briefing on the investigation and it fell to the European Cockpit Association to remind the world that investigators have yet to find the aircraft’s flight data recorder, analysis of which could prove vital to confirming the facts.

Was the memory card taken? How was it missing? We haven’t gotten much more word on this.. Instead we have seen the public trial and verdict on the pilot..

I am not arguing that he did not do it. I am not saying he is an innocent patsy.. I am not pretending that people didn’t die.. I am not attempting to begin a conspiracy theory. I am adding a little bit of cold water to a burning hot public feeding frenzy.. that is it.

And I will also add this:

If a pilot was going to intentionally crash a plane, there are two things that don’t make sense. 1) He would have had to crashed the plane while being alone.. the notion that he was alone only occurred since the co-pilot had to urinate. Are we to believe that if both pilots would have stayed put that day, this crash would not have happened? And 2) If a suicidal pilot was going to crash a plane, would have truly have done it by doing a steady descent into the alps for over ten minutes? Or wouldn’t he have just ..well..crashed the plane?

To me, these are perplexing questions that, in the heat of the moment, few are asking and none are addressing.

Instead, we have the tale of Germanwings Flight 9525.

History.