Following are some reports released about this crash. Will the officials really tell the public on why this co-pilot crashed this plane?
Report: Co-pilot practiced deadly descent before French Alps crash
The Germanwings co-pilot suspected of deliberately crashing a jet in the Alps in March practiced entering the fatal descent settings on the previous, outbound flight, investigators said.
BERLIN — The co-pilot suspected of intentionally crashing a passenger jet into the French Alps had practiced setting the plane’s autopilot into a deadly descent before the fatal plunge in March that killed all 150 people aboard, a report said Wednesday.
The interim investigation by French aviation experts offered new details on how co-pilot Andreas Lubitz apparently plotted the dive of the Germanwings plane on March 24 on a flight between Barcelona and Düsseldorf.
The report found that Lubitz used the previous flight to Barcelona on the morning of the crash to test setting the autopilot controls of the Airbus A320 to descend as low as 100 feet while alone in the cockpit for less than five minutes.
He then pulled the plane out of the descent before it was detected, investigators concluded in the 30-page report by France’s civil aviation agency BEA.
During the doomed flight, Lubitz managed to lock the cockpit door while the pilot was out and refused to acknowledge calls from air traffic controllers as Flight 9525 headed toward the peaks in southern France.
“The man planned this. It was no spontaneous action,” said Peter Pletschacher, president of the German Aviation Writers Association.
Various reports about the psychological state of the 27-year-old Lubitz emerged after the crash, including German officials saying he scanning Web sites the week before the disaster to research information on various methods of suicide.
Lufthansa — the parent company of Germanwings — said it had been informed in 2009, when he returned from a months-long break in his training, that Lubitz had suffered an “episode of severe depression.” The admission came several days after Lufthansa said it had received no prior information about his medical condition.
Lufthansa spokesman Helmut Tolksdorf said the carrier had no immediate comment on the report.
The BEA noted its report includes only preliminary findings, and investigators were still studying possible “systemic failings” exposed by the crash.
They include medical confidentiality that sharply limits wider scrutiny of treatments sought by flight crews, and potential “compromises” to boost airline security after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks such as reinforced cockpit doors and locking systems.
The Germanwings plane had been at a cruising altitude of 38,000 feet when it began its gradual descent toward the ice-covered Alps. Flight recorders recovered from the crash site included the screams of terrified passengers and the sound of Lubitz breathing in the cockpit as an alarm sounded warning of an imminent collision.
**************
French prosecutor: Co-pilot took doomed flight on deliberate dive
MONTABAUR, Germany — Almost 10 minutes before panicked screams echoed through the aisles as Flight 9525 plunged toward the French Alps, Andreas Lubitz — a 27-year-old electronic-music buff who had clawed his way up from flight steward to co-pilot — was silent and alone in the cockpit.
The Airbus A320 had cruised to 38,000 feet amid cheerful banter between Lubitz and his far more experienced pilot. But as the pilot shifted his attention to paperwork for landing the short-haul Germanwings flight from Barcelona to Düsseldorf, Lubitz grew less animated, offering brief responses. At 10:31 a.m. Tuesday, the pilot — named in the German media only as “Patrick S” — apparently heeded nature’s call, rustling out of his seat and exiting the cockpit, never to get back in.
Moments later, Lubitz, according to a French review of recovered flight data, took the A320, which was carrying 150 passengers and crew members, off autopilot and began a controlled descent that initially would not have seemed unusual to those aboard. Then came the knocking — increasingly frantic — by the pilot as he sought to reenter the locked and reinforced cockpit door. In the final moments, the sounds of terrified passengers filled the plane even as Lubitz — audibly breathing as a bleeping alarm warned of imminent collision — kept quiet through the end.
On Thursday, the tragedy turned from air disaster to criminal investigation as authorities in multiple nations scoured for clues to what could have compelled a man to hurl a packed commercial airliner into a mountain. Germanwings parent company Lufthansa on Thursday expressed stunned shock, describing Lubitz as “100 percent fit to fly.”
As officials carted out boxes of belongings, including a laptop, from his family’s home in a middle-class neighborhood of this southwestern German town, questions centered on several months in 2009 when Lubitz took a leave from his pilot training. Those who knew him, however, could not reconcile the reserved young pilot and avid runner who lived with his parents with the accounts of French prosecutor Brice Robin, who said Thursday that Lubitz’s actions appeared to be a deliberate attempt “to destroy the plane.”
The dramatic revelations from the black-box recordings, meanwhile, seemed to challenge a fundamental faith of flying — the sanity of the people at the controls. In the wake of Sept. 11, 2001, cockpit doors have been redesigned for strength to keep people out, but leaving planes vulnerable to a danger that instead lies within.
The possible scenario of a lone pilot willfully crashing a jetliner additionally highlighted the differences between airlines in the United States — which do not allow one person to remain alone in a cockpit — and European airlines, which do.
On Thursday, some of the biggest German airline companies — among them Lufthansa and Air Berlin — agreed to new regulations that would prohibit pilots from being left alone in the cockpit. The new regulation was set to be discussed Friday with Germany’s Federal Aviation Office.
Saying that the French and the German investigations were suggesting that the airplane’s co-pilot deliberately crashed the plane, German Chancellor Angela Merkel told reporters in Berlin, “It goes beyond the imagination.”
Lufthansa said it could not disclose any details about the hiatus Lubitz took in 2009, citing German privacy laws protecting medical confidentiality. But if the company had been informed of any serious mental health issue, safety regulations should not have allowed him to continue training or remain in the air. (There were statements made by independent news report that he converted to Islam,)
In Montabaur, a town of 13,000, police stood outside Lubitz’s house — a two-story home with eyelid windows — as a German prosecutor and other officials searched the inside. Later in the evening, they carted off large blue plastic bags filled with evidence without speaking to reporters. One official familiar with the investigation said authorities had not yet found anything like a suicide note, but the official cautioned that the search had just begun. German and French officials said there were no indications Lubitz belonged to a terrorist organization.
At the same time, details of Lubitz’s life were gradually coming to light. A longtime aficionado who dreamed of flying planes as a youth, he belonged to his local flight club and, after a stint as a cabin attendant, landed a coveted spot in Lufthansa’s pilot training program in 2008. He did his training, which can take 33 months, at company facilities in Bremen, Germany, and Phoenix.
“Andreas became a member of the association and wanted his dream of flying to be realized. He began in the gliding school and made it to become a pilot,” read a statement on the Web site of his club, Luftsportclub Westerwald, that was posted before authorities outlined the contents of the data recordings.
Lubitz was relatively new to the post of co-pilot at Germanwings, the budget arm of Lufthansa. He had been in the job for 18 months, logging 630 hours of flight experience — enough, authorities said, to safely manage the plane on his own. Lufthansa chief executive Carsten Spohr said Lubitz passed the company’s stringent physical and psychological tests.
“We at Lufthansa are speechless,” Spohr told reporters.
Neighbors here in Lubitz’s home town described him as a reserved but “sweet” man who enjoyed long runs through the local woods and had a winning smile. One neighbor who would not give his name said he had known Lubitz since he was a child and did not believe that the 27-year-old had been on a suicide mission. “I have my theories about what happened, but someone who would do something like that would not run through the woods to keep fit,” the neighbor said.
But Robin, the prosecutor, offered a chilling account of Flight 9525, saying the plane made a steep but steady descent that did not appear to startle most passengers until it was clear it was on a collision course with the snowy peaks in southern France.
“The screams are not heard until the very last moments,” Robin said.
The jetliner made a late takeoff just after 10 a.m. local time from Barcelona and the last contact with air-traffic controllers came at 10:30 a.m., Robin said. “Direct IRMAR merci 18G,” one of the pilots says, referring to a passage point south of Barcelonnette, in the French Alps, and giving the call sign of the plane in an indication that everything is going well.
At 10.31 a.m., after the pilot is heard to exit and while the plane is at its cruising altitude of 38,000 feet, data recordings show that the autopilot is turned off and the co-pilot activates the flight monitoring system to start the descent of the plane. An analysis of transponder data by air tracker Flightradar24 showed that the plane’s autopilot had been manually reset from 38,000 to below 100 feet.
“This action can only be done deliberately,” Robin said.
When the pilot tries to reenter, the recordings show, he becomes increasingly frantic, banging on the door when the co-pilot does not let him in. Although a code exists for entering the cockpit, door-locking overrides can be applied from inside of the cockpit — a post-9/11 modification.
Despite repeated attempts by air traffic control to contact Lubitz, Robin said there were no more replies from the plane’s cockpit, which remained eerily quiet as panic ensued.
The French prosecutor’s statement raised parallels with the rare cases of apparently intentional crashes of passenger planes.
In 1999, an Egypt Air plane went into a steep plunge after taking off from New York bound for Cairo, crashing into the Atlantic and killing all 217 people aboard. Investigators concluded that a mechanical malfunction was highly unlikely.
In 1994, the pilot on a Royal Air Maroc flight appeared to intentionally slam the plane into a Moroccan mountainside. All 44 people aboard were killed.
***********
3 Americans on jet that crashed in Alps, Germanwings CEO says
DÜSSELDORF, Germany — France’s president was joined Wednesday by the leaders of Germany and Spain in an Alpine pasture now used as a base for experts seeking to unravel why an Airbus jet abruptly dropped from its flight path with 150 people aboard.
The three, walking side by side, were briefed on the grim recovery efforts in the snow-bound French mountains and the struggle to learn what went wrong in Tuesday’s disaster. The flight, en route from Spain to Germany, was carrying 144 passengers and six crew members.
The State Department said three Americans were presumed dead, including Yvonne Selke and daughter Emily Selke, both from Nokesville, Va. The third American was not identified. The other victims of the crash were mainly from Germany and Spain.
Hours earlier, one of the flight recorders — or black boxes — was recovered in a damaged state amid the wide debris field. The A320, operated by the budget carrier Germanwings, slammed into a frozen ridge near the southern French town of Seynes-les-Alpes.
The Associated Press reported that French investigators cracked open the black box and retrieved some audio from its cockpit voice recorder by Wednesday afternoon, hoping to gain their first insights into the possible causes of the crash.
MAP: How Germanwings Flight 9525 fell to earth View Graphic
Remi Jouty, director of the French aviation investigative agency, said the audio included sounds and voices. He said it was too early to draw any conclusions from the recorder.
French President François Hollande, meanwhile, said the case for the second black box, the flight data recorder, had been found but not its contents, according to the AP.
French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve told France’s RTL radio that all theories about what might have caused the crash must be explored but that a terrorist attack was not the most likely scenario.
Bundled against strong winds, Hollande thanked the teams leading the efforts to reach the crash site by helicopter and by foot. Hollande was accompanied by German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy.
Meanwhile, the human toll from the crash came clearer. Those lost included two babies, two opera singers, a pair of Iranian journalists, an Australian mother and her adult son vacationing together, and 16 German 10th-graders and their teachers returning from an exchange trip.
In Washington, State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki confirmed that two U.S. citizens were aboard the flight, but she did not give their names or other details. Raymond Selke confirmed to The Washington Post that his wife and daughter were killed in the crash.
“We are in contact with family members and we extend our deepest condolences to the families and loved ones of the 150 people on board,” Psaki said in a statement.
She said U.S. officials were reviewing records to check whether other Americans were on the flight as the recovery for bodies began.
“The site is a picture of horror. The grief of the families and friends is immeasurable,” German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said after being flown over the crash scene. “We must now stand together. We are united in our grief.”
The flight by Germanwings, an arm of the German carrier Lufthansa, had left Barcelona en route to Düsseldorf nearly 30 minutes late for reasons that remained unexplained. It traveled on a normal flight path before suddenly shifting into a steep descent moments after reaching its cruising altitude of 38,000 feet.
Within eight minutes, the plane had lurched down to 6,000 feet before falling off French radar screens at 10:53 a.m. local time.
The pilots, French officials said, had not signaled air traffic control immediately before or during their sudden descent. The plane then crashed into rugged mountain terrain near the French ski resort of Prads-Haute-Bleon, where rescue workers and officials described a tableau of pulverized devastation.
Debris seemed “so small and shiny they appear like patches of snow on the mountainside,” said Pierre-Henry Brandet, a spokesman for France’s Interior Ministry, after flying over the site.
Lufthansa CEO Carsten Spohr told the German public TV network ARD that Tuesday was the “blackest day in our company’s history.”
German Foreign Ministry spokesman Martin Schäfer said the full breakdown on the passengers’ nationalities was still being compiled, but it was estimated that half were German citizens. Passengers from Spain accounted for dozens of others.
The disaster put a new focus on the A320, a workhorse of the skies that has now been at the center of a dozen fatal accidents since 1988.
Aerial photos showed debris scattered across a five-acre expanse of frigid outcroppings. At least 10 coroners from Marseille traveled to the town of Seyne-les-Alpes to receive the bodies of victims.
The Airbus A320 enjoys a track record as one of the safest jets in the skies. For every 1 million takeoffs, the A320 fleet has about 0.14 fatal accidents, according to a Boeing study that analyzed five decades of air disasters. That puts the A320 on par with the Boeing 777 as one of the most reliable commercial planes.
Yet the crash Tuesday follows a number of high-profile A320 crashes, including the loss in December of an AirAsia jet in the Java Sea that killed 162 passengers and crew members during severe thunderstorms. Weather, however, was reported to have been clear and calm in the vicinity of the flight Tuesday.
Responding to German media speculation that a computer glitch could have forced the plane into a steep dive, airline officials said they thought that had not caused the crash and that the A320’s computer systems were fully updated.
Asked whether the airline would ground its A320s, Winkelmann said the planes have a “fabulous service record.”
He said the aircraft lost Tuesday flew its first flight in 1990 and was purchased by Lufthansa in 1991. It was transferred to Germanwings last year and had flown 583,000 hours across 46,700 flights.
That makes it one of the older A320s but still within the average age of planes in service. Its most recent routine maintenance check, the company said, took place Monday in Düsseldorf, with the last full inspection of the aircraft being performed in the summer of 2013.
The flight’s captain had more than 10 years of experience with Lufthansa and Germanwings and had logged more than 6,000 flight hours, said the CEO of Germanwings, Thomas Winkelmann.
Yet aspects of the crash baffled experts.
The plane’s descent was sudden, but it still took eight minutes. Some experts wondered why no distress signal was sent during that period. Others countered that no mayday signal would have been likely if the pilots were busy managing a catastrophic error.
More surprising for some was that the plane ran into trouble midflight.
“The plane was cruising at 38,000 feet — planes don’t crash in cruise,” said Anthony Davis, a London-based aviation specialist. “They crash in takeoff or landing or they have engine failure, but it’s very unusual anything should happen at that altitude.
A full passenger list had yet to be released, but Winkelmann said 67 of the passengers appeared to be German nationals. The German Opera on the Rhine said one of its baritones, Oleg Bryjak, was on the flight. Germany, though, was gripped with the story of a group of 16 10th-graders and two teachers from Joseph König High School in Haltern, Germany, who were on the plane. Britain announced Wednesday three of its nationals were aboard the aircraft.
The German students had been on a one-week language exchange trip in Spain. A news broadcast by ARD showed groups of students standing in the schoolyard, looking distraught and lighting candles.
“These events are so terrible that we haven’t processed them yet,” the school’s principal, Ulrich Wessel, told journalists in Haltern, urging them to respect the students’ privacy.
European officials said that at least 45 passengers were Spanish nationals, one was Belgian and an unknown number were Turkish.
kommonsentsjane
kommonsentsjane 