Co-pilot’s dream of flying turns into air crash nightmare

The death notice from the Westerwald Glider Club – headlined "In Deep Mourning" – relates club members' shock on learning that one of their members was the co-pilot of Germanwings flight 9525.

Andreas Lubitz joined the club as a teenager, the notice said, and pursued his “dream of flying” from simple gliders all the way to the cockpit of an Airbus A320.

“He realised his dream, a dream for which he paid so dearly with his life,” the death notice from Wednesday read.

A day later the shocked club members were left speechless. Their 27 year-old friend and fellow flying enthusiast was not a victim, but apparently perpetrator of the greatest aviation disaster in recent European history.

Peter Rücker, a club member who’d watched Lubitz learn to fly, saw him last in the autumn when he renewed his glider licence. Lubitz was a year into his job at Germanwings, seemed to be doing well and “gave off a good vibe”.

Nice and likeable

“He was very friendly, nice and likeable, perhaps a little quieter than some of the slobs we have around here,” said Rücker. “So when I got the news, it just knocked the feet out from under me.”

By mid-afternoon the town hall in Montabaur, home to 17,000 people an hour northwest of Frankfurt, confirmed “that Andreas Lubitz, the co-pilot of the Germanwings machine, came from Montabaur and had his registered address here. His family live here too”.

By that stage, however, his family were nowhere to be seen. The family dormer bungalow was shuttered and police said his parents were on their way to the crash site as they began their search of the house – and the pilot’s apartment in a two-storey Düsseldorf block.

Smiling

Andreas Lubitz's Facebook profile, now blocked, showed a smiling man with a receding hairline before the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. Besides his passion for gliding and flying, Lubitz liked electronic music, climbing, jogging and bowling.

For locals in Montabaur it was a struggle to reconcile this man they knew with the perpetrator on the television. Edgar Karl Lubitz – no relation of the co-pilot – said he was ashamed to share his surname with the dead man.

“When you see something like this, then it’s all over, even though it has nothing to do with me,” he said. “People here can’t understand but now it’s out there and we have to deal with it.”

In Berlin, Chancellor Angela Merkel went before cameras for the second time in two days to deliver an even more sombre statement than the last.

The idea that the co-pilot had crashed the plane deliberately – killing himself and 149 others – “goes beyond our worst imagination”, she said. Her interior minister, Thomas de Maizière, said Lubitz had “no terrorist background”.

So what is the background?

Germanwings insisted their training was rigorous and in line with European standards with many psychological and physical assessments though, they admitted, no follow-up tests.

"He flew with Germanwings for 1½ years, was dependable and inconspicuous in the best sense of the word," said Thomas Winkelmann, the chief executive of Germanwings.

Lubitz began his training in 2008 in Bremen but interrupted it for several months the following year.

Unconfirmed media reports spoke of depression and burnout, but the airline refused to speculate in public, citing “medical confidentiality”.

Cabin attendant

After completing his training Lubitz worked as a cabin attendant for 11 months until he got his contract with Germanwings in September 2013. Since then he had flown 630 hours.

On January 27th last, Düsseldorf police confirmed he underwent a regular security check for criminal or extremist activity and passed.

Two months later, voice recorders reveal Andreas Lubitz joking with his captain who handed over control of flight 9525 as he left the cockpit, possibly to visit the toilet.

An hour out of Barcelona, audio of the last minutes reveal the captain trying to break his way through the locked, reinforced cockpit door. Andreas Lubitz, silent and reportedly breathing calmly, reduced the plane’s altitude.

At 10.53am his dream of flying ended in a nightmare as the plane under his control hit the French Alps at 700km an hour.