Me too:I had a quick check of the fleet of Germanwings, I'm surprised that there are quit a few 25 years old airplane, it's not very common for a European Airlines
If the other pilots reacted like that, it is a sign of lack of confidence in their maintenance operations.I'm surprised to read that the Germanwings A320 fleet is so old at 23.7 years average.
It wouldn't surprise me too. If you look at the long lists of deferred item lists (DIL) at many of the European airlines, it makes you wonder why the manufacturers even bother having all those intermediary checks.
Personally I think that the aircraft architecture/structure/design redundancies have to absorb too much of the slack, and it's coming close to how African operators stretch the wider limits of old Russian aircraft.
I'm going to float a few additional theories:
-The nose landing door or other problem in the nose section caused a local decompression in the cockpit area. The closed cockpit door caused a local decompression / high cabin altitude in the cockpit alone, which went undetected by the aircraft systems for lack of cabin altitude sensors in the cockpit. Without warnings, the flight crew was hit by hypoxia. By the time they realised that they were losing consciousness, the last ditch resort was to make an emergency descent by turning the A/P knobs, as they didn't even have the energy to grab their masks anymore, or the masks failed to operate due to lack of oxygen pressure, itself owed to a lack of servicing of the 02 bottles.