Germanwings Co-Pilot Deliberately Crashed Plane, Says Prosecutor

Wall Street Journal ^ | March 26, 2015 | Robert Wall and Inti Landauro

[Cincinatus' Wife]

The co-pilot of Germanwings Flight 9525 appears to have deliberately crashed the plane after he was left alone in the cockpit, according to a French prosecutor.

The captain was intentionally locked outside minutes before the A320 crashed into an alpine mountain ridge, French Prosecutor Brice Robin said Thursday. Co-pilot Andreas Lubitz, a 28-year-old German national, was silent throughout the plane’s descent and was alive at the point of impact, according to the prosecutor.

Mr. Robin’s conclusions are drawn from the plane’s cockpit voice recorder, recovered at the crash site in the French Alps late Tuesday and analyzed by French accident investigators on Wednesday.

The recording contains screams believed to be from passengers, once they recognized the plane was crashing.

Investigators are now exploring why Flight 9525 went into its unauthorized descent from its 38,000-foot cruising altitude with one crew member absent. The descent led to the crash about 10 minutes later.

French air accident investigators said on Wednesday they extracted information from the jet’s cockpit voice recorder. The recording contained voices and other sounds, said Rémi Jouty, director of France’s aviation accident investigation office, which is leading the probe. He added that there was no explanation yet for why the plane went down.

Germanwings, the low-fare unit of Deutsche Lufthansa AG, hasn’t disclosed the identity of the pilots....

[DTA]

>>>>>>>>>I’m kind of curious as to how the voice recorder was accessed so soon after being found. This stuff usually takes weeks before being released.”<<<<<

>>>>>>>It was imperative for the future of Lufthansa and Airbus that they publicize the cause. It apparently wasn’t mechanical.<<<<<<

IMHO, the best two posts on this thread so far.

Another brilliant question fellow Freeper asked on another thread: what happened with the jet fuel?

[EliRoom8]

My thoughts as well.

[9422WMR]

So why doesn’t the medical info get automatically forwarded to the airline when the Doc deems him unfit to fly?
That’s like when we got report cards in school and if the grade was bad the card got “lost” on the way home from school.
Right to privacy is BS when it comes to something like pilot fit for duty!!

[daisy12]

another poster posted the link to the alleged girlfriend’s FB page, Kathrin Goldbach. The profile pic was a cute blonde but the larger banner pic was a pretty Arab girl in front of a sunset over water.

If the FB profile is real it is either incredibly tacky and thoughtless or an ‘in your face’ taunt by Muslims.

[Smokin' Joe]

I thought I had read that he and the girlfriend had split up.

[daisy12]

well, you did, but the one constant in all the “news” is change. This tale has daily discrepancies.

[archy]

Andreas Lubitz was the co-pilot of Germanwings flight 9525 who reportedly intentionally crashed the plane into the French Alps and killed all 150 people on board.

Here’s what you need to know:


Those are five good points. And here's one more.