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French prosecutor: Co-pilot took doomed flight on ‘deliberate’ dive French prosecutor: Co-pilot took doomed flight on deliberate dive
(about 7 hours later)
DÜSSELDORF, Germany — The co-pilot of the doomed Germanwings flight locked himself in the cockpit and, with apparent cool precision, deliberately slammed into snow-capped mountains, a French prosecutor said Thursday, in a stunning twist to a tragedy that killed all 150 people aboard. MONTABAUR, Germany — Almost 10 minutes before panicked screams echoed through the aisles as Flight 9525 plunged toward the French Alps, Andreas Lubitz — a 27-year-old electronic-music buff who had clawed his way up from flight steward to co-pilot — was silent and alone in the cockpit.
The conclusions, based on cockpit flight recordings recovered from the wreckage, abruptly shifted the probe into a realm that Germany’s chancellor called “incomprehensible”: an intentional, eight-minute descent Tuesday that ended with the A320 jet disintegrating in the rocks and ravines of the French Alps. The Airbus A320 had cruised to 38,000 feet amid cheerful banter between Lubitz and his far more experienced pilot. But as the pilot shifted his attention to paperwork for landing the short-haul Germanwings flight from Barcelona to Düsseldorf, Lubitz grew less animated, offering brief responses. At 10:31 a.m. Tuesday, the pilot — named in the German media only as “Patrick S” — apparently heeded nature’s call, rustling out of his seat and exiting the cockpit, never to get back in.
“This action can only be done deliberately,” the Marseille-based prosecutor, Brice Robin, told reporters. Moments later, Lubitz, according to a French review of recovered flight data, took the A320, which was carrying 150 passengers and crew members, off autopilot and began a controlled descent that initially would not have seemed unusual to those aboard. Then came the knocking — increasingly frantic — by the pilot as he sought to reenter the locked and reinforced cockpit door. In the final moments, the sounds of terrified passengers filled the plane even as Lubitz — audibly breathing as a bleeping alarm warned of imminent collision — kept quiet through the end.
His account offered a chilling and calculating scenario: the plane dropping in a steep, but steady, rate that did not appear to startle most passengers until it was clear it was on a collision course with the snow-bound peaks in southern France. On Thursday, the tragedy turned from air disaster to criminal investigation as authorities in multiple nations scoured for clues of what could have compelled a man to hurl a packed commercial airliner into a mountain. Germanwings parent company Lufthansa on Thursday expressed stunned shock, describing Lubitz as “100 percent fit to fly.”
But as officials carted out boxes of belongings, including a laptop, from his family’s home in a middle-class neighborhood of this southwestern German town, questions centered on several months in 2009 when Lubitz took a leave from his pilot training. Those who knew him, however, could not reconcile the reserved young pilot and avid runner who lived with his parents with the accounts of French prosecutor Brice Robin, who said Thursday that Lubitz’s actions appeared to be a deliberate attempt “to destroy the plane.”
The dramatic revelations from the black-box recordings, meanwhile, seemed to challenge a fundamental faith of flying — the sanity of the people at the controls. In the wake of Sept. 11, 2001, cockpit doors have been redesigned for strength to keep people out, but leaving planes vulnerable to a danger that instead lies within.
The possible scenario of a lone pilot willfully crashing a jetliner additionally highlighted the differences between airlines in the United States — which do not allow one person to remain alone in a cockpit — and European airlines, which do.
On Thursday, some of the biggest German airline companies — among them Lufthansa and Air Berlin — agreed to new regulations that would prohibit pilots from being left alone in the cockpit. The new regulation was set to be discussed Friday with Germany’s Federal Aviation Office.
[A look inside an Airbus A320]
Saying that the French and the German investigations were suggesting that the airplane’s co-pilot deliberately crashed the plane, German Chancellor Angela Merkel told reporters in Berlin, “It goes beyond the imagination.”
Lufthansa said it could not disclose any details about the hiatus Lubitz took in 2009, citing German privacy laws protecting medical confidentiality. But if the company had been informed of any serious mental health issue, safety regulations should not have allowed him to continue training or remain in the air.
In Montabaur, a town of 13,000, police stood outside Lubitz’s house — a two-story home with eyelid windows — as a German prosecutor and other officials searched the inside. Later in the evening, they carted off large blue plastic bags filled with evidence without speaking to reporters. One official familiar with the investigation said authorities had not yet found anything like a suicide note, but the official cautioned that the search had just begun. German and French officials said there were no indications Lubitz belonged to a terrorist organization.
At the same time, details of Lubitz’s life were gradually coming to light. A longtime aficionado who dreamed of flying planes as a youth, he belonged to his local flight club and, after a stint as a cabin attendant, landed a coveted spot in Lufthansa’s pilot training program in 2008. He did his training, which can take 33 months, at company facilities in Bremen, Germany, and Phoenix.
“Andreas became a member of the association and wanted his dream of flying to be realized. He began in the gliding school and made it to become a pilot,” read a statement on the Web site of his club, Luftsportclub Westerwald, that was posted before authorities outlined the contents of the data recordings.
[The co-pilot’s path from a young aspiring aviator]
Lubitz was relatively new to the post of co-pilot at Germanwings, the budget arm of Lufthansa. He had been in the job for 18 months, logging 630 hours of flight experience — enough, authorities said, to safely manage the plane on his own. Lufthansa chief executive Carsten Spohr said Lubitz passed the company’s stringent physical and psychological tests.
“We at Lufthansa are speechless,” Spohr told reporters.
Neighbors here in Lubitz’s home town described him as a reserved but “sweet” man who enjoyed long runs through the local woods and had a winning smile. One neighbor who would not give his name and said he had known Lubitz since he was a child and did not believe that the 27-year-old had been on a suicide mission. “I have my theories about what happened, but someone who would do something like that would not run through the woods to keep fit,” the neighbor said.
[The plane’s final moments, minute by minute]
But Robin, the prosecutor, offered a chilling account of Flight 9525, saying the plane made a steep but steady descent that did not appear to startle most passengers until it was clear it was on a collision course with the snowy peaks in southern France.
“The screams are not heard until the very last moments,” Robin said.“The screams are not heard until the very last moments,” Robin said.
Robin also said the flight recorder showed the co-pilot — identified as Andreas Lubitz — did not say a word once the captain left the cockpit. All that was heard was his breathing until the crash. The jetliner made a late takeoff just after 10 a.m. local time from Barcelona and the last contact with air-traffic controllers came at 10:30 a.m., Brice said. “Direct IRMAR merci 18G,” one of the pilots says, referring to a passage point south of Barcelonnette, in the French Alps, and giving the call sign of the plane in an indication that everything is going well.
“It was absolute silence in the cockpit,” Robin said, despite reports that the audio had the sounds of someone — apparently the pilot — banging on the door. At 10.31 a.m., after the pilot is heard to exit and while the plane is at its cruising altitude of 38,000 feet, data recordings show that the autopilot is turned off and the co-pilot activates the flight monitoring system to start the descent of the plane. An analysis of transponder data by air tracker Flightradar24 showed that the plane’s autopilot had been manually reset from 38,000 to below 100 feet.
Robin said the co-pilot had no known links to suspected terrorist groups but noted the investigation remained wide open. “This action can only be done deliberately,” Robin said.
[The co-pilot’s path from an aspiring aviator] When the pilot tries to reenter, the recordings show, he becomes increasingly frantic, banging on the door when the co-pilot does not let him in. Although a code exists for entering the cockpit, door-locking overrides can be applied from inside of the cockpit — a post-9/11 modification.
“People who commit suicide usually do so alone . . . I don’t call it a suicide,” he said. Despite repeated attempts by air traffic control to contact Lubitz, Robin said there were no more replies from the plane’s cockpit, which remained eerily quiet as panic ensued.
A “new, simply incomprehensible, dimension,” German Chancellor Angela Merkel said after learning of the French claims.
“Something like this goes beyond anything we can imagine,” she added.
Lubitz, 28, had been flying with Germanwings since September 2013 and had flown 630 hours, said Lufthansa, the parent company of the budget carrier.
In his native village of Montabaur, about 50 miles northwest of Frankfurt, Lubitz had been a member of a local aviation club since he was a teenager.
“Andreas became a member of the association and wanted his dream of flying to be realized. He began in the gliding school and made it to become a pilot,” read a statement on the Web site of the club, Luftsportclub Westerwald.
A club member, Peter Ruecker, described Lubitz as outwardly happy with his life and career — further deepening the mystery over his apparent motive on the flight from Barcelona to Düsseldorf.
“He was happy he had the job with Germanwings, and he was doing well,” Ruecker told the Associated Press. “He was very happy. He gave off a good feeling.”
Germany’s interior minister, Thomas de Maiziere, said checks on domestic police and intelligence databases on the day of the crash turned up no red flags concerning Lubitz.
Like nearly all pilots in the Lufthansa airline group, he did part of his training at the carrier’s facility outside Phoenix — selected by many aviation schools for the area’s arid and clear weather.
Lubitz’s Facebook page included a photo of him smiling in a relaxed pose with the Golden Gate Bridge in the background.
Lubitz once interrupted his training. Lufthansa could not make public the reasons for the break, but considered Lubitz “fit to fly” on Tuesday, said the carrier’s chief executive, Carsten Spohr.
“We at Lufthansa are speechless,” he told reporters in Cologne, Germany.
In response to questions about his views of the possible motives, Spohr added: “When someone kills himself and 149 others . . . it is not a suicide.”
Spohr said all normal procedures were followed when the pilot left the cockpit — waiting until the flight was at cruising altitude and with no weather problems foreseen.
U.S. carriers require two people in the cockpit, bringing in a member of the flight crew if a pilot needs to leave, but it is not required by Lufthansa and many other airlines. Normally, crew members step out for a bathroom break.
Spohr described the cockpit exchanges between the pilot and Lubitz as normal, even “cheerful” at times.
“You are in control,” the pilot said to Lubitz as he left, Spohr recounted.
The audio recording later carries the increasingly frantic sounds of someone banging at the cockpit door.
[A look inside the A320]
The captain of the plane had more than 6,000 hours of flying time and had been a Germanwings pilot since May 2014, having previously flown for Lufthansa and Condor, Lufthansa said, according to news reports.
An Airbus training video shows that the cockpit door of the A320 has safeguards in case one pilot becomes incapacitated inside while the other remains outside, or if both pilots inside were to lose consciousness.
If there is no response, a member of the flight crew can tap in an emergency code. If there is still no response, the door opens automatically. If a person has been denied access, the door remains locked for five minutes, according to the training video.
But the Lufthansa CEO said there are ways to override the system and fully lock the cockpit.
“No messages of distress or emergency were sent from the cockpit and no answers were given to the calls of the air traffic controllers,” Robin said.
“The co-pilot deliberately refrained from opening to the pilot, and activated the device leading to the loss of altitude of the plane,” he added. “The reason why the co-pilot chose to do this is unknown so far. His act can be seen as a will to destroy the plane.”
Among the dead — 144 passengers and six crew — were three Americans, the State Department said. The other victims of the crash were mainly from Germany and Spain on the flight between the two countries.
[The plane’s final moments, minute by minute ]
“The site is a picture of horror. The grief of the families and friends is immeasurable,” German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said after being flown over the crash scene Wednesday along a frozen ridge in southern France. “We must now stand together. We are united in our grief.”
“The plane was cruising at 38,000 feet — planes don’t crash in cruise,” said Anthony Davis, a ­London-based aviation specialist. “They crash in takeoff or landing or they have engine failure, but it’s very unusual anything should happen at that altitude.”
The French prosecutor’s statement raised parallels with the rare cases of apparently intentional crashes of passenger planes.The French prosecutor’s statement raised parallels with the rare cases of apparently intentional crashes of passenger planes.
In 1999, an Egypt Air plane went into a steep plunge after taking off from New York bound for Cairo, crashing into the Atlantic and killing all 217 people aboard. Investigators concluded that a mechanical malfunction was highly unlikely.In 1999, an Egypt Air plane went into a steep plunge after taking off from New York bound for Cairo, crashing into the Atlantic and killing all 217 people aboard. Investigators concluded that a mechanical malfunction was highly unlikely.
In 1994, the pilot on a Royal Air Maroc flight appeared to intentionally slam the plane into a Moroccan mountainside. All 44 people on board were killed. In 1994, the pilot on a Royal Air Maroc flight appeared to intentionally slam the plane into a Moroccan mountainside. All 44 people aboard were killed.
Murphy reported from Washington. Anthony Faiola in Antwerp, Belgium, contributed to this report. Faiola reported from Antwerp, Belgium. Souad Mekhennet in Antwerp and Virgile Demoustier in Paris contributed to this report.
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