With yet another mysterious tragedy surrounding a downed airliner making headlines on Tuesday, one MSNBC guest recognized an opportunity to break out an on-air theory.
Jay Rollins, a former commercial pilot, speculated that the passenger jet that crashed in a remote area of the French Alps on a flight from Barcelona to Duesseldorf may have been victim of “hacking.”
On “The Rundown” with host Jose Diaz-Balart, Rollins began by saying that in breaking news situations, analysts often lack the necessary information to determine exactly what happened in a given crash.
With that preface in mind, he proceeded to spin out a theory.
“Something else comes to my mind that no one else has mentioned,” Rollins said. “This aircraft is highly computerized. This is the same aircraft that was involved with the Air Asia situation.”
“There’s one possibility that no one has brought up, and I wonder, could this be a hacking incident?” he said.
“This is very similar, in my mind, to what happened when the U.S. lost that drone over Iran,” Rollins said. “The same thing — suddenly the aircraft was responding to outside forces. And if something like that were going on, it would be very distracting for the pilots.”
With little information available about the circumstances of the crash, Rollins’ riff didn’t quite match CNN’s seemingly endless string of theories during the disappearance of Malaysian Flight 370 last March, but it was a start.
Watch the clip:
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Should we trust the info on the alleged “Black Box”?
The outside casing of the crashed plane’s flight data recorder—one of the “black boxes” investigators search for after air tragedies—has been recorded, but its memory card has not been located. Investigators found the plane’s cockpit voice recorder earlier and have reportedly gathered “usable data” from it, but there’s no word on whether said data has provided any hint why the plane crashed.
The voice recorder takes audio feeds from four microphones within the cockpit and records all the conversations between the pilots and air traffic controllers as well as any noises in the cockpit.
The latest (Allegedly)
The black box voice recorder indicates that Andreas Lubitz, 27, locked his captain out of the cockpit on Tuesday and deliberately sent Flight 4U 9525 crashing into a mountainside, French officials say, in what appears to have been a case of suicide and mass murder.
French Prime Minister Manuel Valls said that “everything is pointing towards an act that we can’t describe: criminal, crazy, suicidal.”
Lubitz lived with his parents in his small home town of Montabaur in the Rhineland and kept an apartment in Duesseldorf, the city where his doomed plane was bound on Tuesday.
Duesseldorf prosecutors said the evidence found in the two homes “backs up the suspicion” that Lubitz “hid his illness from his employer and his colleagues”.
They said they had not found a suicide note, confession or anything pointing to a “political or religious” motive but added it would take “several days” to evaluate the rest of what was collected.
Lubitz locked himself into the cockpit when the captain went out to use the toilet, then refused his colleague’s increasingly desperate attempts to get him to reopen the door, French prosecutor Brice Robin said.
According to Bild, the captain even tried using an axe to break through the armoured door as the plane was sent into its fatal descent by Lubitz.
This could not be immediately confirmed, but a spokesman for Germanwings told Bild that an axe was standard emergency equipment on board the aircraft.
The tragedy has already prompted a shake-up of safety rules, with several airlines, including German companies, announcing a new policy requiring there always be two people in the cockpit.
Meanwhile, the UN world aviation body stressed that all pilots must have regular mental and physical check-ups.
Meanwhile in Montabaur, Mayor Edmund Schaaf urged reporters encamped in the community to show restraint with Lubitz’s parents, a banker and a church organist, who live in a handsome home on a leafy, normally quiet street.
“Regardless of whether the accusations against the co-pilot are true, we sympathise with his family and ask the media to be considerate,” he said.
© Provided by AFP French gendarmes and investigators sift on March 26, 2015 through the scattered debris on the crash site of the Germanwings Airbus A320 in the French Alps above the southeastern town of Seyne
– Descent button –
Investigators say Lubitz’s intention was clear because he operated a button sending the plane into a plunge.
The French prosecutor played down the likelihood of Lubitz accidentally taking the plane down with an involuntary turn of the descent button.
“If you passed out and leaned over on it, it would only go a quarter-way and do nothing,” Robin said, adding Lubitz, who had worked for the Lufthansa group since 2013, had set the controls to “accelerate the plane’s descent”.
For the next eight minutes, Lubitz was apparently calm and breathing normally.
“He does not say a single word. Total silence,” Robin said.
The second-in-command had all psychological tests required for training, Lufthansa’s Spohr told reporters Thursday, insisting: “He was 100-percent airworthy.”
Recovery operations at the crash site were ongoing, with French officials trying to find body parts and evidence. A second black box, which records flight data, has not yet been recovered.
“There’s not much plane debris left. There’s mainly a lot of body parts to pick up. The operation could last another two weeks,” said police spokesman Xavier Vialenc.