The 28-year-old German co-pilot of Germanwings Flight 9525 apparently deliberately crashed the plane in the French Alps Tuesday, killing 144 passengers and five crew members, as well as himself, officials said Thursday.
It seems that Andreas Lubitz “wanted to destroy the aircraft,” Marseille prosecutor Brice Robin said, but it’s unclear why.
Information gleaned from the aircraft’s mangled cockpit voice recorder showed Lubitz was alone at the controls of the Airbus A320 when it crashed.
The recording revealed that the captain, who has not been identified, left the cockpit, probably to use the restroom, the prosecutor said, and could not get back in the cockpit.
The audio information shows the captain was banging on the door of the cockpit, but the co-pilot did not take any action to let him in, Robin said.
“It was when (Lubitz) was alone that he manipulated the buttons of the flight monitoring system to activate the descent of the aircraft,” Robin said. “The action can only be voluntary.”
The prosecutor said he does not know if the co-pilot planned his actions in advance, saying only that Lubitz “took advantage” of the captain leaving the cockpit and activated the descent of the plane.
Lubitz said nothing as the plane fell, Robin said, but the voice recorder captured the sound of him breathing steadily, and he seemed to be alive until the plane crashed into the mountains.
There’s no indication that the co-pilot became physically ill or suffered a stroke, the prosecutor said.
Horror heard on recording
The recorder captured a horrific soundtrack. The sound of the captain banging on the door continues, Robin said.
Passengers were apparently unaware of what was happening until the last few moments, the prosecutor said, when screams were heard on the recording.
At one point, the captain used a video conference system to talk to the co-pilot, the prosecutor said. That system would have allowed the co-pilot to see and hear the captain demanding to get inside the cockpit, aviation experts say.
Reporters asked Robin if he viewed the co-pilot’s actions as a suicide.
“When you are responsible for 150 people, I don’t call it a suicide,” he answered.
The biggest question: Why?
There’s no reason to believe, at this time, that Lubitz’s motives were terrorism-related, the prosecutor said. His name wasn’t on any terror list.
Lubitz had been with Germanwings since September 2013 and had completed 630 hours of flight time, the Germanwings media office said.
Lufthansa, the owner of Germanwings, does “not have any clues” about why the co-pilot crashed the plane, Lufthansa CEO Carsten Spohr said Thursday.
He addressed the notion that Lubitz’s apparent actions constituted a suicide.
“If a person kills himself and also 149 other people, another word should be used — not suicide,” said Spohr said.
He gave details about Lufthansa pilot training after mentioning that the co-pilot “interrupted” his training in 2008. That interruption lasted several months, he said, but such an interruption isn’t uncommon.
Spohr said he couldn’t give any information about why the co-pilot had stopped and then restarted his training.
If it was for medical reasons, he said, then that information would have been private before the crash, he said, but it will be part of information gathered during the investigation.
Pilots in the Lufthansa group get medical testing, but not psychological testing, Spohr said.
Lubitz had trained at the Lufthansa flight training center in Bremen, Germany.
As for the captain of the flight, he didn’t leave the cockpit to use the restroom until the plane reached cruising altitude, which suggested he acted properly, Spohr explained.
The captain informed the co-pilot that he was stepping out and that the co-pilot had control of the plane, the CEO said.
He added that the flight crew who were outside the cockpit could not have activated a distress signal. A distress signal can be activated only from the cockpit, he said.
‘Instantaneous’ death
Death was “instantaneous” for the 150 people from 18 countries on board, Robin said.
Spohr said that Lufthansa is providing financial assistance to the families of those who perished.
The co-pilot’s family has arrived in France, Robin said.
It’s likely that German authorities will interview them first, the prosecutor said, and then French authorities will talk to them.
German Transportation Minister Alexander Dobrindt spoke briefly at a news conference after Robin’s.
He said that it is “plausible to us” that the plane was deliberately crashed.
Reports about the co-pilot locking the captain out first emerged early Thursday.
“You can hear he is trying to smash the door down,” a senior French military official involved in the crash investigation told The New York Times.
“We don’t know yet the reason why one of the guys went out. But what is sure is that at the very end of the flight, the other pilot is alone and does not open the door.”
The flight was traveling from Barcelona, Spain, to Dusseldorf, Germany, when it crashed Tuesday.
Investigators are combing through the debris — scattered across a steep, icy mountainside — for clues.
They also want to find the plane’s second “black box,” the flight data recorder.