PARIS (AP) — The co-pilot of the Germanwings jet barricaded
himself in the cockpit and "intentionally" rammed the plane full
speed into the French Alps, ignoring the captain's frantic pounding on the
cockpit door and the screams of terror from passengers, a prosecutor said
Thursday.
In a split second, he killed all 150 people aboard the
plane.
Andreas Lubitz's "intention (was) to destroy this
plane," Marseille prosecutor Brice Robin said, laying out the horrifying
conclusions French investigators reached after listening to the last minutes of
Tuesday's Flight 9525 from the plane's black box voice data recorder.
The Airbus A320 was flying from Barcelona to Duesseldorf
when it lost radio contact with air traffic controllers and began dropping from
its cruising altitude of 38,000 feet. The prosecutor said Lubitz wordlessly set
the plane on an 8-minute descent into the craggy French mountainside that
pulverized the plane.
He said the German co-pilot's responses, initially courteous
in the first part of the trip, became "curt" when the captain began
the mid-flight briefing on the planned landing.
Robin said the pilot, who has not been identified, left the
cockpit when the plane reached cruising altitude, presumably to go to the
lavatory. Then the 28-year-old co-pilot took control of the jet as requested.
"When he was alone, the co-pilot manipulated the
buttons of the flight monitoring system to initiate the aircraft's
descent," Robin said.
The pilot knocked several times "without
response," the prosecutor said, adding that the cockpit door could only be
blocked manually from the inside.
The co-pilot said nothing from the moment the captain left,
Robin said: "It was absolute silence in the cockpit."
The A320 is designed with safeguards to allow emergency
entry into the cockpit if a pilot inside is unresponsive. The override code
known to the crew does not go into effect, however — and indeed goes into a
lockdown — if the person inside the cockpit specifically denies entry.
During the flight's final minutes, pounding could be heard
on the cockpit door as the plane's instrument alarms sounded but the co-pilot's
breathing was calm and that of a fully conscious man, Robin said.
"You don't get the impression that there was any
particular panic, because the breathing is always the same. The breathing is
not panting. It's a classic, human breathing," Brice said.
No distress call ever went out from the cockpit, and the
control tower's pleas for a response went unanswered.
Air traffic control cleared the area to allow the plane to
make an emergency landing if needed, and asked other planes to try to make
contact. The French air force scrambled a fighter jet to try to head off the
crash.
Just before the plane hit the mountain, passengers' cries of
terror could be heard on the voice recorder.
"The victims realized just at the last moment,"
Robin said. "We can hear them screaming."
Airlines in Europe are not required to have two people in
the cockpit at all times, unlike the standard U.S. operating procedure after
the 9/11 attacks changed to require a flight attendant to take the spot of a
briefly departing pilot.
Graphic shows aircraft and victims by country; 2c x 5
inches; 96.3 mm x 127 mm;
Neither Robin nor Lufthansa indicated there was anything the
pilot could have done to avoid the crash, saying he had acted appropriately.
Robin said Lubitz had never been flagged as a terrorist and
would not give details on his religion or his ethnic background. German
authorities were taking charge of the investigation into him.
Lufthansa CEO Carsten Spohr said the airline was already
"appalled" by what happened in its low-cost subsidiary.
"I could not have imagined that becoming even
worse," Spohr said in Cologne. "We choose our cockpit staff very,
very carefully."
Lubitz had joined Germanwings in September 2013, directly
out of flight school, and had flown 630 hours. Spohr said the airline had no
indication why he would have crashed the plane. He said pilots undergo yearly
medical examination but that doesn't include psychological tests.
Lufthansa's chief said Lubitz started his training in 2008
and there was a "several-month" gap in his training six years ago.
Spohr said he couldn't say what the reason for that was but after the break
"he not only passed all medical tests but also his flight training, all
flying tests and checks."
Robin avoided describing the crash as a suicide.
"Usually, when someone commits suicide, he is
alone," he said. "When you are responsible for 150 people at the
back, I don't necessarily call that a suicide."
In general, people kill for 3 main reasons: money, sex, revenge. We can probably exclude the first two reasons, based on what we know so far. When somebody commits mass murder, s/he does it because s/he wants to take revenge for whatever wrongs s/he believes that the society has done against him or his family or his people. So, we would leave on the table the revenge or terrorist causes until we receive more information about his background.
In the German town of Montabaur, acquaintances told The
Associated Press that Lubitz appeared normal and happy when they saw him last
fall as he renewed his glider pilot's license.
"He was happy he had the job with Germanwings and he
was doing well," said a member of the glider club, Peter Ruecker, who
watched Lubitz learn to fly. "He gave off a good feeling."
Lubitz had obtained his glider pilot's license as a
teenager, and was accepted as a Lufthansa pilot trainee after finishing a tough
German college preparatory school, Ruecker said. He described Lubitz as
"rather quiet" but friendly.
Lubitz's Facebook page, deleted sometime in the past two
days, showed a smiling man in a dark brown jacket posing in front of the Golden
Gate Bridge in San Francisco. The Facebook page was restored after the French
prosecutor's press conference.
Robin said the Germanwings plane's second black box still
had not been found but remains of the victims were being collected and DNA
identification had begun.
In the Alpine hamlet of Le Vernet, French authorities set up
a viewing tent for family members on Thursday to look toward the site of the
crash, which lies on a steep, treacherous site only reachable by a long hike.
Robin said Lubitz's family was in France but was being kept
separate from the other victims' families. The victims' families were briefed
ahead of the press conference.
"The victims deserve explanations from the
prosecutor," Robin said. "(But) they are having a hard time believing
it."
The principal of Joseph Koenig High School in Haltern,
Germany, Ulrich Wessel, which lost 16 students and two teachers in the crash,
said the state governor had called him Thursday afternoon to tell him about the
probe's conclusion.
"It is much, much worse than we had thought,"
Wessel said. "It doesn't make the number of dead any worse, but if it had
been a technical defect then measures could have been taken so that it would
never happen again."
The circumstances of the crash are likely to revive
questions about the possibility of suicidal pilots and the wisdom of sealing
off the cockpit.
"From the moment it became apparent that the
Germanwings flight had made a controlled descent for 8 minutes with no
'Mayday,' one feared that either pilot suicide or hijack was the cause,"
said Philip Baum, London-based editor of trade magazine Aviation Security
International.
"The kneejerk reaction to the events of 9/11 with the
ill-thought reinforced cockpit door has had catastrophic consequences," he
added.
RIP. We will see you
on the other side when our times comes.
