Media reports suggesting that one of the two pilots on board the Germanwings plane that plunged into a mountainside in France was locked out of the cockpit have focused new attention on those at the aircraft’s controls.
The two pilots, who were among six crew members on board Germanwings Flight 9525, have not yet been named, and little has been revealed about them.
The captain had more than 6,000 hours of flight time and had been with Germanwings since May 2014, the airline’s media office told CNN.
He had worked with Lufthansa, the parent company of low-cost airline, and Condor, another German airline, before that.
Germanwings CEO Thomas Winkelmann told a news conference Tuesday that the captain had been working for Lufthansa and Germanwings for more than a decade. He had more than 6,000 flight hours with the same model plane, the Airbus A320, that he was flying Tuesday, Winkelmann said.
The co-pilot had been with Germanwings since September 2013 and had completed 630 hours of flight time, the Germanwings media office said.
The co-pilot had trained at the Lufthansa flight training center in Bremen, Germany.
Lufthansa: We will not participate in speculation
According to reports Thursday, one of the pilots — but it is not clear which — was locked out of the cockpit and was trying to get inside when the plane crashed Tuesday.
This is according to audio recovered from the cockpit voice recorder, found at the crash scene, the reports say.
“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.”
Agence France-Presse also reported that a pilot was locked out, citing a source close to the investigation.
Lufthansa said it was looking into the claim.
“We have no information from the bodies investigating the incident that would corroborate the report in The New York Times,” spokesman Boris Ogursky said. “We will not participate in speculation, but we will follow up on the matter.”
The doomed flight was traveling from Barcelona, Spain, to Dusseldorf, Germany, when it crashed Tuesday. All 150 people from 18 countries on board were killed.
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. This could be critical to understanding what went on inside the Airbus A320 jet.
