SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
A Germanwings (Lufthansa subsidiary) Airbus A-320-200 airliner has crashed in the French Alps. It is reported to have carried 154 people on board (including 6 crew members). Unfortunately, no survivors have been found so far. There were reports about the crew sending out distress calls shortly before the crash. The flight from Barcelona to Dusseldorf was last registered on the radar at 6800 feet.
http://www.laprovence.com/article/actualites/3326948/un-airbus-a320-secrase-dans-les-alpes-de-haute-provence.html
http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/03/24/us-france-crash-airbus-lufthansa-idUSKBN0MK0ZP20150324
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/mar/24/german-a320-airbus-plane-crashes-french-alps
[Edit 16:35 UTC. janrinok. Source: BBC] The 'black box' has been recovered. The aircraft descent took place over a period of approximately 8 minutes, and communication between the crew and the French air traffic controllers was 'broken' when the aircraft was at an altitude of around 6000 feet. The TV pictures being broadcast show a large number of helicopters being deployed to a snow free landing-zone but the surrounding mountains have significant snow cover and there is a low cloudbase. French authorities have said that the recovery of the bodies will take 'several days'.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday March 24 2015, @02:36PM
Embarrassing. I read and thought standard feet per minute like off the VSI gauge and wrote FPS.
5000 is not out of line for an undamaged jetliner. Its serious but not all that steep. Supposedly, all dirtied up with the landing gear open and flaps and spoilers and idled engines an old 747 could perfectly controllably descend at more than 10K/min but the wind noise and descent angle would terrify the passengers.
from distant memory the 172 I flew in had its best glide ratio at 500 fpm at about 60 knots so if your engine fails you slow down to 60 and figure you'll loose half a thousand per minute, or you'll have a glide ratio of about a dozen so if you're cruising about a mile up (5000ft) you'd got about a dozen miles of ground range to find a nice place to land. Which frankly isn't very hard, there seems to be a dinky hole in the wall grass strip general aviation airport about every 5 miles around there.
10000 fpm best glide is like space shuttle territory, I'd guess a jetliner is in between the performance of a 172 and a space shuttle and they didn't even try to slow down to above stall so they're probably not engine failure time.