Germanwings Airbus Crashed in France

[Oberon]

Originally Posted by GoldenRivet

This is at least the third accident that i am aware of wherein an A320 took a plunge of several thousand feet into terrain.

A French airline was conducting a functional check flight of an A320, the AOA vanes had frozen causing a conflict between the pilot and the computer during a check of the stall warning system. despite the best efforts of the pilot to recover, the aircraft plunged several thousand feet into the sea off the coast of France

Air Asia just a couple of months ago... unexplained plunge into the sea

and today, Germanwings, unexplained plunge into mountainous terrain

the question is, could these accidents be related, and more importantly, what is causing the Airbus A320 to pitch down and lawn dart into the earth?

I must confess, one of the first incidents that came to my mind was the Air France A330 crash and the cause of that. It could well be an occurrence of the autopilot receiving garbage and outputting garbage leading to the aircraft entering an unflyable state.
Still, at least in these incident the FDR was recovered swiftly and that should hopefully mean some more firm ideas of what caused this will come to light.