Germanwings flight 4U9525 deliberately flown into mountain, says prosecutor

The co-pilot of the Germanwings plane that crashed in the French Alps on Tuesday, killing 150 people, appears to have deliberately flown it into a mountain after locking the flight captain out of the cockpit.

During the last eight minutes of the flight, the co-pilot “voluntarily” carried out actions that led to the destruction of the aircraft, Brice Robin, a French public prosecutor, said at a press conference in Marseille.

Citing evidence from a cockpit voice recorder recovered from the Airbus A320, Robin outlined the last moments of the doomed plane in a chilling account of the actions of the co-pilot, whom he named as 28-year-old Andreas Lubitz

 Robin said Lubitz could be heard breathing right up until the point of impact, suggesting he had not lost consciousness. However, he failed to respond to increasingly desperate calls from the captain trying to break down the cockpit door, or to air traffic controllers. Passengers could be heard screaming just before the crash, Robin said.

Lufthansa, the parent airline of Germanwings, said Lubitz’s actions had left the company “absolutely speechless”.

Lubitz had been flying for Germanwings since September 2013 after being trained with Lufthansa at its facility in Bremen. He had clocked up a total of 630 hours in the air.

Robin said Lubitz had “no reason to do it” and no links to terrorist groups. “There is nothing to suggest this was a terrorist act,” he said.

The CEO of Lufthansa said its air crew were picked carefully and subjected to psychological vetting.

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“No matter your safety regulations, no matter how high you set the bar, and we have incredibly high standards, there is no way to rule out such an event,” CEO Carsten Spohr said.

Robin said that for the first 20 minutes of the flight, the pilots spoke in a normal way, “you could say cheerful and courteous”.

“We heard the flight commander prepare the briefing for landing at Düsseldorf and the response of the co-pilot seemed laconic. Then we heard the commander ask the co-pilot to take the controls.

“We heard at the same time the sound of a seat being pushed back and the sound of a door closing.”

Robin said it was assumed that the captain needed to go to “satisfy natural needs”.

“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 action the descent of the plane. The action of selecting the altitude could only have been done voluntarily,” Robin said.

 “We heard several calls from the flight commander asking for access to the cockpit. There was a visual and audio interphone and he identified himself. There was no response from the co-pilot.

“The flight commander tapped on the door to demand for it to be opened but there was no response. We heard human breathing in the cabin and we heard this until the final impact, which suggests the co-pilot was alive.”

Robin added: “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. Air traffic control asked other aircraft in the area for a radio relay to try to contact the Airbus. No response came.

“Alarms went off signalling the aircraft’s proximity to the ground, and we heard the sound of violent blows as if someone is trying to force the door. Just before the final impact we hear the sound of an impact on the [rock] embankment. There was no distress signal, no ‘mayday, mayday, mayday’ received by air traffic control.

“Forty-eight hours after the crash … the interpretation for us is 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 did this, said Robin, “for a reason we do not know, but [it] can be seen as a willingness to destroy the aircraft”.

“He had no reason to do this,” said Robin. “He had no reason to turn the button making the plane go down, he had no reason not to allow his captain to return to the cockpit, he had no reason to refuse to reply to air traffic controllers, he had no reason to refuse to tap a code to alert other aircraft in the zone … already that’s a lot.”

Robin added: “I don’t think the passengers realised what was happening until the last moments because on the recording we can only hear cries in the final seconds.”

 Spohr confirmed that Lubitz appeared to have prevented the captain from re-entering the cabin after a toilet break. He said the company was in complete shock.

The tragedy was “beyond our worst nightmare”, he told reporters in Cologne, and had left the company “absolutely speechless”.

Spohr said that despite the disaster, Lufthansa had full confidence in its training and pilot screening procedures, which would nevertheless be reviewed.

Lubitz’s training had been interrupted briefly six years ago, Sphor said, but was resumed after “his suitability as a candidate was re-established”.

Unlike in the US, European regulations do not provide for two people to be in the cockpit at all times, Spohr said. Lufthansa does not voluntarily implement such a protocol, and Spohr said that he is not aware of any of the company’s competitors that have such a procedure.

Spohr said that it appears the captain punched in the emergency number into the cockpit door to gain entry, but the co-pilot deployed the five-minute override. He said that, irrespective of all the sophisticated safety devices, “you can never exclude such an individual event”, adding “no system in the world could manage to do that”.

Asked about what might have motivated the co-pilot, Sphor said: “We can only speculate … In a company that prides itself on its safety record, this is a shock. We select cockpit personnel carefully.”

The Germanwings flight from Barcelona to Düsseldorf crashed just before 11am on Tuesday. The last contact with the plane was at about 10.30am, almost halfway through its intended flight.

At 10.31am the aircraft began a rapid but controlled descent, without altering its speed or trajectory. It ploughed into the mountain in the southern Alps between the villages of Digne-les-Bains and Barcelonette at a speed of about 435mph, leaving only small pieces of debris and bodies scattered over two hectares.

The 144 passengers and six crew on board were killed instantly. The majority of the victims were German and Spanish. 

In the hamlet of Le Vernet, the nearest inhabited point to the crash site, the 130 residents were preparing homes and hotel rooms on Thursday for any families who might arrive to contemplate the landscape where their loved ones died.

The sub-prefect of Aix-en-Provence, Serge Gouteyron, has been working on the logistics of the recovery operation at the site as well as on the arrival of families. “Families will want to come and gather their thoughts here in front of the mountain,” he said. “They will need calm and privacy.”

Gouteyron said there would be no possibility of families either approaching the site on foot or flying over it by helicopter, because all routes were closed except to the security services, to preserve the crash scene and investigation.