Andreas Lubitz, the 28-year-old German co-pilot of flight 4U 9525 that crashed in the French Alps killing all 150 onboard, had deliberately sent the Airbus into its fatal descent. Evidence from a cockpit voice recorder indicates that when the captain went to use the toilet, the co-pilot had locked himself in the cockpit, refused to re-open the door, took sole control of the aircraft, and flew it into the French Alps intending to destroy it.
Details of the final 30 minutes of the Germanwings flight that crashed in France http://t.co/lC3pW3D82u pic.twitter.com/h2qjnNb961
— The New York Times (@nytimes) March 26, 2015
The disaster is believed to be a case of pilot suicide and mass murder by Lubitz, who had joined the airline in 2013 with 630 hours of flying experience. Other possibilities remain, however. Was Lubitz incapacitated by a sudden event like a fire or a drop in cabin pressure? Was it an act of terrorism?
Brice Robin, the chief Marseille prosecutor handling the investigation into the crash of a Germanwings jetliner, said, “At this moment, in light of investigation, the interpretation we can give at this time is that the co-pilot through voluntary abstention refused to open the door of the cockpit to the commander, and activated the button that commands the loss of altitude”.
“There were no grounds to suspect that Lubitz was carrying out a terrorist attack. Suicide was also the wrong word to describe actions which killed so many other people. I don’t necessarily call it suicide when you have responsibility for 100 or so lives,” Robin added.
One of the plane’s black boxes suggests that the descent from 38,000 feet over about 10 minutes was alarming yet gradual. There was absolutely no communication from the cockpit to air traffic controllers, nor any signal of an emergency during the fatal descent.
There was panic in the cabin, but Lubitz was breathing normally; and then he slammed the plane into the mountains. The sound of the captain attempting to smash the door down, as well as screaming from passengers, can be heard on the cockpit flight recorder.
Lufthansa CEO, Carsten Spohr, is ‘stunned’ by the allegation that the co-pilot had intentionally caused the crash. “We choose our staff very, very carefully. The airline had no indication of why the co-pilot would have crashed the plane. Pilots undergo yearly medical examination but that doesn’t include psychological tests,” he told a news conference in Cologne, Germany.
Cockpit doors can be opened from the outside with a code, but the code can be overridden from inside the cockpit. Spohr said that either the pilot had entered the code incorrectly or the co-pilot inside had overridden it.
Germany’s Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere said that German authorities had checked intelligence and police databases on the day of the crash, and Lufthansa told them that regular security checks had also turned up nothing untoward on the co-pilot.
“No system in the world can rule out such an isolated event. I have worked at Lufthansa as an engineer, I have worked as a pilot at Lufthansa, I have carried responsibility as a manager at Lufthansa for many, many years. Always, wherever I was, whoever my boss was, the rule was always safety is No. 1. And that this has happened to us — I can only say we are sorry,” Spohr added.
its the wrong man on your pic.!!!!
Pretty quick in judging that the co-pilot is the guilty one – even though there are questions unanswered like the following.
– Did the Pilot try to access the cockpit with the security code? ( 30 sec long beep tone ) Media didnt cover it so I guess no. If not, why?
– Why didnt the copilot just pull the the plane down and end it quickly? Why did he descend for 10 minutes?
– Reports say there was no mayday call. The cabin crew is able to make one! Why didnt they since they knew that the pilot was locked out? Or even he himself?
Let me address your questions one at the time:
1) the co-pilot overrode the security code cockpit access through a manual switch from inside the cockpit.
2) It is a commercial airliner. You don’t take it down from 38,000 to 6,000 feet in seconds. If you do the math, the descent was about 53 feet/second, which is close to a 10% drop for a plane cruising at around 700 feet/second. You want steeper than that? Get a fighter jet.
3) You can only make a mayday call from within the cockpit, and there was only the co-pilot inside the cockpit for the last ten minutes of life on the plane.
On the Blackbox is only breathing and screams from the cabin in the final time, no knocking from the door or calls into the cockpit. the crew has onboard phones, so they could call the pilot i guess. but all that remains unanswered, is not on the Blackbox. A second blackbox may be found, i didnt even know that there was 2 on a plane.
Leo mate, if you dont even know there are two different flight boxes in an aircraft, then please do not reply to this thread
OH and to answer your question, no this will not shed new light on it, one box contains flight record data, and the other box contains the conversations of the pilots…..
Dont remove my fucking reaction please..
B = You are a fuking moron, and you should hang yourself for being such an idiot.. you’re a disgrace to this world..
What I find strange is that they always tell a a miltary plane that sets off to check such an event is full off camaras so you can get a view of what is happening. Why don’t we hear anything of this? Or was I misinformed?