Posted on 03/26/2015 6:30:57 AM PDT by COUNTrecount
The German co-pilot who deliberately flew a Germanwings flight into the French Alps has been named as Andreas Lubitz, who was aged 28. Prosecutors said information suggested he was fully conscious as the plane went down.
"The co-pilot is alone at the controls," prosecutor Brice Robin said, drawing on information gathered from the black box recorder. "He voluntarily refused to open the door of the cockpit to the pilot and voluntarily began the descent of the plane."
Details of Lubitz's life are still emerging, with investigators confirming he did not have any known terrorist links. According to the website of the flight club where he was a member, the co-pilot was from Montabaur in Rhineland Palatinate.
German media reports he had 630 flight hours and joined budget airline Germanwings straight out of Lufthansa Flight Training School in Bremen in September 2013. Authorities have not confirmed if he had any experience as a professional pilot prior to that.
In 2013, the Federal Aviation Administration recognized Lubitz for "meeting and exceeding" the "high educational, licensing and medical standards" established by the body, which regulates civil aviation, reports the Aviation Business Gazette.
The FAA said that the certification standards have evolved to "reduce pilot errors that lead to fatal crashes."
"Andreas became a member of the club as a youth to fulfil his dream of flying," the LSC club said in a death notice on its website.
"He fulfilled his dream, the dream he now paid for so dearly with his life," the club said, reports the Wall Street Journal.
Montabaur city mayor Gabriele Wieland, speaking to the DPA press agency, said Lubitz lived with his parents in Montabaur and also had a residence in Dusseldorf, where the Germanwings flight was heading before it crashed.
French authorities said his family had left Marseille, where a press conference was held earlier on 26 March. His Facebook page lists his interests as aviation and music.
Information from the black box recorder of the flight, which crashed on 24 March and killed 150 people, indicated Lubitz was alone in the cockpit, and intentionally started a descent while the other co-pilot was locked out.
The Airbus 320 from Barcelona to Dusseldorf hit a mountain near Barcelonette in the French Alps, after an eight-minute descent.
“It’s also entirely possible that there was a sensor malfunction that caused the flight computer to put the aircraft into a controlled descent.”
Give it a rest dude. The flight recorder says it was pilot commanded decent and the audio shows the other guy was pounding on the door. The way that door is designed the guy inside had to deliberately deny entry to the other pilot. Bu default it would not do it. 600 hours of flight is not ‘low time’ and he had several minutes to either figure it out or let the other guy it. There is no possible way your scenario happened.
homosexuality = mental health issues.
What’s your take on formal accident reports?
Nothing from his facebook page would incate any muslim ties. His “friends” are not arab looking. His “likes” are not out of the ordinary?
Maybe this dude's father didn't approve of his "lifestyle" and this is his way of getting back at him.
Eventually the audio will be released, and you can tell me then that its faked, or that the pilot trying to break down the door was just coincident to the mechanical failure you've invented. Goofball.
I just made a couple of 14 hour flights on an A380 a couple of weeks ago.I was in coach and on the 380 the cockpit is accessed through the lower deck (coach) rather than the upper deck (business/first).On long flights I spend as much time on my feet as possible (doctor's orders) so I spend a lot of time in the spacious front area..right near the cockpit door.A couple of times I saw a stewardess bring meals into the cockpit and then leave...the door was just open for a second or two each time.It looked to me as if they took security seriously...maybe because it was an Arab airline that I was on.
That’s a good point.
Huh? The flight data recorder was recovered, but the memory card was apparently missing. There has been no data gleaned from it. How exactly did the FDR say the pilot commanded the aircraft to descend again? Please be specific. If there is anyone who needs to “give it a rest” it’s all the conspiracy theorists here who clearly want this to be a terrorist act.
Really, and you have been a pilot for how long? I’ve been a commercial pilot for over 36 years, partner. There’s 22,000 hours in my logbook. How about yours?
New term - “Bat Scheiße crazy”
My guess is that this sympathetic statement from his flying cub, as reported by the WSJ, was issued right after news of the crash. The club members are now having very different emotions.
My guess is that this sympathetic statement from his flying cub, as reported by the WSJ, was issued right after news of the crash. The club members are now having very different emotions.
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That would be a twist.
I agree. Or he might not be a talkative terrorist. Or somebody was threatening his family. Or maybe it wasn't even him. Or he had a psychological breakdown (a pretty major one). There are so many possibilities. It's a weird one.
We need to accelerate the switch to self flying planes.
It makes sense. It would have been understandable immediately after it happened. Not now, though. He was not a victim.
Congratulations on your awesome pilotness! I am not one.
However, being a pilot gives you absolutely no ability to determine the cause of a crash in the Alps when you are thousands of miles away and have absolutely no information that everybody else doesn't have.
You're like a cop in Detroit, posting that he knows who murdered some guy in Beijing, even though he knows absolutely none of the people involved. He knows who did it because he's a cop, dammit!
I hosted a number of German foreign exchange students last fall. The guys all came with scarves wrapped around them like that - it lasted maybe a week.
They take months to years to compile. It seems to me that the majority of folks on this thread need to take a deep breath and wait for the data to come in before making such broad assumptions. The first rule of accident investigation is don't draw any conclusions until all the available data is in and we're a damn long way from that right now. Given the lack of flight data in the absence of the FDR memory card, the Prosecutor in France who claims this was a deliberate act is, at best, speculating as to the true cause, particularly in light of other Airbus crashes and their causes. The media, right on time, is sensationalizing what is pure speculation. As many times as this has happened in recent memory you'd think more people would recognize it for what it is, but I guess not.
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