Germanwings Co-Pilot Deliberately Crashed Plane, Says Prosecutor

A French prosecutor said Thursday that the co-pilot of the Germanwings passenger jet that crashed in the French Alps this week made a “deliberate attempt to destroy the aircraft.”
Marseilles prosecutor Brice Robin said the co-pilot, 28-yearold Andreas Lubitz, locked the pilot out of the cockpit, leaving himself alone in control of the Airbus A320. The prosecutor said Lubitz then “accelerated the descent” of the aircraft, flying it at 700 kilometers an hour and crashing it into the remote, snowy mountains in south-eastern France. All 150 people aboard were killed.
“The descent could only have been done deliberately,” Robin said at a news conference. “In all circumstances, it is deliberate.” The prosecutor said “there is nothing to suggest a terrorist attack, but we’ll see the circumstances of that person.”
Robin said investigators, after listening to sounds in the aircraft from the flight’s last moments that were recorded on the plane’s cockpit voice recorder, heard increasingly desperate knocks on the cockpit’s locked door from the captain, whose name has not been disclosed, as he tried to get back into the cockpit.
But Robin said Lubitz refused to open the door and had no audio contact with air traffic controllers in the final minutes of the flight. It was bound from Barcelona, Spain, to the German city of Dusseldorf, with 144 passengers on board and six crew members. Robin said that based on the sounds on the cockpit voice recorder, passengers only realized at the very end that the plane was about to crash.
“We hear some screams only at the last moment,” he said. “Death was instant.” Robin declined to call Lubitz’s actions a suicide. “I don’t call it a suicide when you have 150 people behind you,” he said.
The prosecutor said Lubitz had flown the A320 “a few months,” about 100 hours “on this type of plane,” compared with 10,000 hours of experience for the pilot. Robin said he met with families of the victims before disclosing his conclusions about the flight’s demise.
“The families were in shock,” he said. “They found it difficult to believe.”