The Marseille prosecutor Brice Robin delivered a chilling account of the final 30 minutes of Germanwings flight 9525, concluding that the co-pilot, Andreas Lubitz, deliberately crashed the aircraft into a mountain range in southeastern France, killing himself and 149 other people.
Robin’s shocking revelation was based on analysis of the cockpit voice recorder which was found by a rescue worker six hours after the crash.
For the first 20 minutes of the flight, Robin said at a press conference, Lubitz had conversed normally in German with the pilot, who was identified only as Patrick S. Germanwings is the low-cost subsidiary of Lufthansa.
Lubitz’s mood seemed to shift when the pilot brought up landing at Dusseldorf.
“His responses become very brief,” Mr Robin said. “There is no proper exchange as such.”
Sound of a door closing The aircraft was on automatic pilot. The captain asked Lubitz to take over the controls. “One hears the sound of a seat moving back and the sound of a door closing” as the captain got up to go to the toilet. The door closed and locked automatically, as required by post 9/11 civil aviation regulations.
“At that moment the co-pilot was alone at the controls and it was while he was alone that the co-pilot manipulated the flight-monitoring system to activate the descent of the plane,” Robin said. “The action of selecting the altitude could only have been done voluntarily.
“The flight commander tapped on the door to demand for it to be opened but there was no response,” he recounted. When Lubitz did not answer, “you hear blows, as if to knock the door down”.
Lubitz did not respond to the pilot’s desperate pleas. For the last eight minutes of the flight, “the control tower at Marseille, receiving no response from the aircraft, asked for a distress code and the activation of the transponder for a forced landing. There was no response,” Robin said.
In the last moments, alarms sounded, indicating the aircraft was dangerously close to the ground.
“We heard human breathing in the cabin and we heard this until the final impact, which suggests the co-pilot was alive.” Lubitz’s normal breathing indicated he did not suffer a heart attack and was not panicked. He did not utter a single word after the captain left the cockpit.
Emergency code Since the September 11th, 2001, attacks in New York,
aircraft have been equipped with an emergency code which crew can key in to open the cockpit door. But the German A320 Airbus was 24 years old and did not have such a device, Mr Robin said. “If [the pilot] had had a way to open this door, he would have done it.”
Robin’s interpretation of the flight recorder was that “the co-pilot deliberately refused to open the door of the cockpit to the flight commander, and pushed the button causing a loss of altitude”. Lubitz’s actions constituted “a willingness to destroy the aircraft”.
Psychologists say the two questions always asked by friends and relatives of airline crash victims are “was my loved one afraid?” and “did my loved one suffer physical pain?”
Robin answered both questions. “Only towards the end do you hear screams,” he said, “and bear in mind that death would have been instantaneous . . . The aircraft was literally smashed to bits.”
On Wednesday, Robin opened a formal investigation for involuntary homicide. The investigation is likely to be reclassified as voluntary homicide. The prosecutor said “suicide” was an inappropriate word for Lubitz’s actions. “I don’t call it suicide when you have responsibility for 150 or so lives.”
The second black box or flight data recorder, containing technical data, is still being sought on the crash site. However, following Robin’s revelations, the investigation will focus on an explanation for the co-pilot’s motives. There was “nothing to suggest this was a terrorist act”, Robin said.
Mental health
Speculation centres on Lubitz’s mental health
and on a break of several months in his training at Lufthansa.
Carsten Spohr, chief executive of Lufthansa, said that medical secrecy laws in Germany prevented the company from knowing the reason for the interruption.
On at least two previous occasions – the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 in March 2014, in which 227 died, and an EgyptAir flight that crashed off Massachusetts in 1999 killing 217 – there were suggestions that the pilot or co-pilot died by suicide, taking all his passengers with him.
“We are horrified that something of this nature could have taken place,” Spohr said in Cologne yesterday. “It is the worst nightmare that anyone can have in our company.”
He said the airline had no idea what had motived their pilot. “I think it will need a long time to understand what happened.”
