What went wrong for the crew of Germanwings Flight 9525?
Germanwings Flight 9525 was at its cruising altitude of almost 38,000 feet and steadily descended to 6,550 feet in the eight minutes before it crashed into the French Alps on Tuesday, killing all 150 people on board.
Captain Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger has a great deal of experience with the Airbus A320. He famously landed one in the Hudson River six years ago, saving the lives of everyone on board, and is now an aviation and safety expert for CBS News.
Sullenberger told CBS Evening News anchor and managing editor Scott Pelley that most aviation problems come either at takeoff or landing.
"The cruise portion of the flight is statistically the safest," Sullenberger explained. "It involves the least risk and the least workload for the pilots. It's the calmest phase of flight."
According to Sullenberger, there are a number of things that may have gone wrong for the Germanwings crew.
"Some of them are loss of cabin pressurization, the need to descent to a lower altitude where there's denser air for people to breathe," Sullenberger said. "Possibly fire or smoke, fumes in the cabin might necessitate a descent. There's several other scenarios that might have been the first link in this causal chain of events."
The pilots did not make a distress call before the crash. Sullenberger said two possibilities occur to him that would explain why.
"Either they were so involved in trying to solve, possibly, the many problems they faced, or they simply were unable to," Sullenberger said. "You have to remember that pilots first must fly the airplane and solve the problems, and only then communicate."
