Germanwings crash: Focus on co-pilot’s motivation

The investigation into the crash of Germanwings flight 9525 has shifted radically from possible technical or mechanical failure to the psychology of Andreas Lubitz, the 28-year-old German co-pilot whom the Marseille prosecutor Brice Robin yesterday accused of having deliberately taken his own life and that of 149 crew and passengers.

Investigators are now attempting to determine whether Lubitz’s act was suicide or a suicide attack. Mr Robin said there was “nothing to indicate it was a terrorist act” and the German interior minister Thomas de Maiziere said Lubitz did not have a terrorist background.

Chancellor Angela Merkel called Lubitz's action "unimaginable," adding that "we are faced with a mystery".

The aircraft descended from 11,000 metres to 1,700 metres in eight minutes before smashing into a mountainside in the French alps at 700km/h.

“Only towards the end do you hear screams,” Mr Robin said, implying that passengers did not realise what was happening. “Death would have been instantaneous,” he added.

German police yesterday searched the dormer bungalow in the Rhineland town of Montabaur where Lubitz lived most of the time with his parents, as well as an apartment he occupied in Düsseldorf.

The co-pilot’s family were in Seyne-les-Alpes and Le Vernet, the villages closest to the crash site, when authorities separated them from hundreds of other grieving families of victims. Investigators are giving them time to recover from the shock, but are eager to question them regarding Lubitz’s mental condition.

Calm and helpful

A photograph posted on Lubitz’s now blocked Facebook profile showed a clean-cut young man in casual clothing smiling in front of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. Former neighbours said he was calm and helpful.

Lufthansa's chief executive Carsten Spohr said Lubitz had dropped out of pilot training for several months six years ago, but was irreproachable on his return. The Frankfurter Allgemeine quoted the mother of a former classmate saying he was "apparently suffering from burnout or depression".

“In our worst nightmare, we couldn’t have imagined that such a tragedy could happen in our company,” Mr Spohr told a press conference in Cologne. “When a person takes 149 other people to death, then this is for me something other than ‘suicide’.”

The prosecutor based his allegation on the cockpit voice recorder of the last half hour of the flight. For 20 minutes, pilot and co-pilot conversed normally. But when the pilot left the cockpit to go to the toilet, the armoured door locked.

US authorities demanded that the cockpits of all civilian aircraft be protected by armoured doors and automatic locks following the 9/11 attacks.

The revelation that Lubitz took advantage of the pilot’s absence to commit mass murder has sparked a debate regarding airline security. Irish airlines have a requirement that two people be in the cockpit at all times, so if a pilot leaves, a cabin crew member must sit in until he or she returns.

Norwegian and Finnish airlines have the same requirement, which was adopted by the Canadian company Air Transat yesterday. But Mr Spohr said that “No security system in the world . . . can prevent such individual acts, such tragedies, from happening.”