Germanwings Suicide Crash—Unusual For The First World
03/27/2015
A+
|
a-
Print Friendly and PDF
The apparently suicidal crash of Germanwings Flight 9525 was unusual in that it's the first time this has happened in a first world airline, as Mark Steyn points out.
On Germanwings Flight 9525 the mandatory locked doors kept the bad guy in - and the good guys out:

The audio indicated that one of the pilots left the cockpit and could not re-enter.

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

He said, "You can hear he is trying to smash the door down."1230[1]

The French prosecutor put it bluntly: The co-pilot wanted "to destroy this plane". His name is Andreas Lubitz - that's him in the photo above, and we will learn more about him in the days ahead. The mass murder of his passengers by a pilot is not unknown, but this is the first time someone has done it to a First World airline. [Pilot Terror, March 26, 2015]
Pilot/mass murderer Andreas Lubitz turns out not to have been a Muslim, which was the first thing everyone suspected. He probably had some kind of medical condition. [Co-Pilot in Germanwings Crash Hid Medical Condition From Employer, Prosecutors Say, NYT, March  27, 2015]

Previous planecrashers tended to be from the Third World, including the pilot of EgyptAir 990, which crashed in 60 miles south of Nantucket. An NPR story called Pilots Downing Their Planes Is Unusual, But Not Unprecedented, By Scott Neuman, March 26, 2015 has links to many of the cases.

 

Although uncommon, such incidents are not unheard of. Since the mid-1970s, air-crash investigations have brought to light eight others in which intentional actions by a pilot or co-pilot to bring down an aircraft were either confirmed or suspected.

The loss of Germanwings Flight 4U 9525 could take its place next to two others as the deadliest crashes in this category:

Dec. 19, 1997: SilkAir Flight 185, a Boeing 737 en route from Jakarta to Singapore crashes in Indonesia, killing all 104 passengers and crew.

Of course, that had a Muslim pilot. In fact, you can read here that not only was their Muslim pilot, but the crash investigator was a Muslim too.Two of the mid-level Third World murder/suicides are from Morocco and Mozambique:
21 August 1994 – 44 fatalities

A Royal Air Maroc ATR-42 airplane crashed in the Atlas Mountains shortly after takeoff from Agadir, Morocco.

29 November 2013 – 33 fatalities

LAM Flight 470 entered a rapid descent while en route between Maputo and Luanda and crashed in Namibia. Preliminary investigation results indicate that the accident was intentional.

And EgyptAir 990, a flight from Los Angeles to Cairo, stopping in New York, which could have crashed anywhere in America:
In a chilling transcript of the flight's final moments, el Batouty can be heard saying to himself, "I rely on God." According to ASN, "the throttle levers were moved from their cruise power setting to idle, and, one second later, the FDR [flight data recorder] recorded an abrupt nose-down elevator movement and a very slight movement of the inboard ailerons."

The captain, from the flight deck, can be heard asking loudly, "What's happening? What's happening?" El Batouty is heard saying, "I rely on God," a dozen more time before the plane crashes.

If you want to know what's chilling, it's when a Muslim pilot kamikazes a plane with American passengers and chants, over a dozen times "I rely on Allah", and NPR insists on translating it as "I rely on God."

NPR is the organization that fired Juan Williams for admitting to normal concerns about Muslims on planes. But when I said that everybody suspected—wrongly—that Andreas Lubitz was a Muslim, we also suspected—rightly—that if he were, the MSM would go out ot its way not to tell us, as they continue to do with EgyptAir 990.

Print Friendly and PDF