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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: 3, Insightful) by VLM on Tuesday March 24 2015, @05:00PM
In all those examples its interesting that the "computer as a third pilot" hasn't entered existing cockpit procedures.
There's a technical term for the operations/discipline of a pilot team WRT who does what, who says what, keeping each other informed, noise discipline no chatter during critical times, cooperate, checklists, formal discussion of who has control, and the pilots and copilots have been trained to do pretty well as a team but sometimes, some flight instruments and flight computers are almost a parody of the opposite of proper cockpit discipline. Like if the copilot was in a confused panic but refused to inform the pilot, or pilot decided to ignore all input from the copilot, everyone trained in cockpit discipline would be all over them, like what idiot trained that yahoo, how did he ever get past his check flight, who hired this moron, etc, but when computers misbehave as part of a pilot team, "eh, well, computers, you know, they just kinda do what they want".
The first example is a classic dude with one clock knows what time it is even if he's wrong, dude with three clocks can make a scientific estimate of the time, but dude with two clocks doesn't know much about the time other than he owns two clocks.