French Alps plane crash: Jet repair day before crash

Family and friends of people involved in the crash arrive in Barcelona; the jet's debris. Photo / AP

Crews’ refusal to fly grounds planes as inquiry continues.

Several Germanwings flights were cancelled yesterday after their crews refused to fly, as it emerged that the aircraft which crashed in the French Alps with 150 people on board had been grounded for an hour for repairs the day before the accident.

Pilots and cabin crew refused to fly over concerns the crash may have been linked to a repair to the nose-wheel landing doors, according to an unconfirmed report in Spiegel magazine. Lufthansa denied that there was any link between the repair and the cancelled flights.

Crews were refusing to fly for "personal reasons", a spokesman for the airline group said.

The airline confirmed that the aircraft which crashed into the Alps had been grounded for an hour on Monday for repairs to the nose-wheel landing doors, but insisted the issue was not "safety related".

Further disruption is expected today after Germanwings flights from Dusseldorf to several destinations were cancelled. Three flights from Stuttgart were also cancelled.

The passengers who boarded Germanwings flight 4U 9525 at Barcelona's El Prat airport on Tuesday were the usual midweek mixture of tourists, business travellers and families.

The ground crew responsible for the Airbus A320 were having a busy morning. The aircraft had landed with 122 passengers on board, and had to be cleaned, refuelled, restocked and checked over in less than 40 minutes.

It took off more than 25 minutes late from Barcelona for reasons which are not yet clear, heading north for what should have been a 90-minute flight.

All was normal for the next 40 minutes. The Airbus, with an experienced crew at the controls, slowly climbed to its cruising altitude of 38,000ft in the skies over southern France. But then something went catastrophically wrong.

Less than a minute after reaching 38,000ft, the aircraft went into a steep and terminal descent. The pilots made no request to air traffic control to begin an unscheduled descent, and for the next eight minutes the aircraft plunged back down to earth at a rate of 4000ft per minute.

No Mayday signal was sent during that eight-minute fall. The aircraft remained intact, automatically relaying its altitude, airspeed and heading, and air traffic controllers implemented an aircraft distress alert, based on its rapid loss of height. Then all contact was lost.

It had dived to an altitude of 6000ft when its last signal was sent.

Without any apparent attempt by the pilot and co-pilot to correct the dive, the aircraft had flown into a mountain in the Alps called Les Trois Eveches north-west of Monaco, where it had "disintegrated", in the words of one local official.

The first of the Black Box flight recorders has been recovered, holding vital information that will hopefully answer the question of why a well-maintained aircraft suddenly dropped out of the sky.

The pilot, as yet unnamed, had 10 years' experience and 6000 hours flying Airbuses for Lufthansa and Germanwings. The aircraft, called Mannheim, was 25 years old but had always been owned by Lufthansa and went through routine maintenance this week and an overhaul in 2013.

Suspicion has fallen on the computer technology used the fly the A320. Last year an Airbus A321 went into a sudden descent at 31,000ft, falling at the same rate before the crew managed to regain control.