PARIS (AP) — Passengers
with moments to live screamed in terror and the pilot frantically
pounded on the locked cockpit door as a 27-year-old German co-pilot
deliberately and wordlessly smashed an Airbus carrying 150 people into
an Alpine mountainside.
The account
Thursday of the final moments of Germanwings Flight 9525 prompted some
airlines to immediately impose stricter cockpit rules — and raised
haunting questions about the motive of the co-pilot, whose breathing
never wavered as he destroyed the plane and the lives of those aboard.
"We
have no idea of the reason," Marseille Prosecutor Brice Robin said,
revealing the chilling conclusions investigators reached after
reconstructing the final minutes of the flight from the plane's black
box voice recorder. Co-pilot Andreas Lubitz's intention was "to destroy
this plane."
French, German and U.S. officials said there was no
indication of terrorism. The prosecutor did not elaborate on why
investigators do not suspect a political motive; instead they're
focusing on the co-pilot's "personal, family and professional
environment" to try to determine why he did it.
German Chancellor
Angela Merkel, whose nation lost 75 people on the flight, said the
conclusions brought the tragedy to a "new, simply incomprehensible
dimension." Devastated families of victims visited the crash scene
Thursday, looking across a windy mountain meadow toward where their
loved ones died.
The Airbus
A320 was flying from Barcelona to Duesseldorf on Tuesday when it lost
radio contact with air traffic controllers and began plunging from its
cruising altitude. Eight minutes later, it slammed into the
mountainside.
An analysis of
transponder data by Flightradar24, a flight tracking service, showed
that the autopilot was re-set to take the plane from 38,000 to 100 feet.
The prosecutor laid out in horrifying detail the final sounds heard in the cockpit extracted from the mangled voice recorder.
Lubitz, courteous in the first part of the trip, became "curt"
when the captain began the mid-flight briefing on the planned landing,
Robin said.
The pilot, who has not been identified, left the cockpit for an apparent bathroom break, and Lubitz took control of the jet.
He suddenly started a manual descent, and the pilot started knocking on the door.
There
was no response. "It was absolute silence in the cockpit," the
prosecutor said — except for the steady breathing he said indicated
Lubitz was not panicked, and acted in a calm, deliberate manner.
The
A320 is designed with safeguards to allow emergency entry into the
cockpit if a pilot inside is unresponsive. But the override code known
to the crew does not go into effect if the person inside the cockpit
specifically denies entry.
Instrument alarms went off, but no
distress call ever went out from the cockpit, and the control tower's
pleas for a response went unanswered.
Just before the plane hit the mountain, passengers' cries of terror could be heard.
French gendarmes and investigators make their way through debris from wreckage on the mountainside a …
"The victims realized just at the last moment," Robin said. "We can hear them screaming."
Their families "are having a hard time believing it," he said, after briefing some of them in Marseille.
Many
victims' relatives visited an Alpine clearing Thursday where French
authorities set up a viewing tent for family members to look toward the
site of the crash, so steep and treacherous that it can only be reached
by a long journey on foot or rappelling from a helicopter.
Lubitz's
family was in France but was being kept separate from the other
families, Robin said. German investigators searched his apartment and
his parents' home in Montabaur, Germany, where the curtains were drawn.
The prosecutor's account prompted quick moves toward stricter cockpit rules — and calls for more.
Airlines
in Europe are not required to have two people in the cockpit at all
times, unlike the standard U.S. operating procedure, which was changed
after the 9/11 attacks to require a flight attendant to take the spot of
a briefly departing pilot.
Canada and Germany's biggest airlines,
including Lufthansa and Air Berlin, as well as low-cost European
carriers easyJet and Norwegian Air Shuttle announced new rules requiring
two crew members to always be present.
Graphic shows aircraft and victims by country; 2c x 5 inches; 96.3 mm x 127 mm;
Some experts said even two isn't enough, and called for rules to require three.
"The
flight deck is capable of accommodating three pilots and there
shouldn't ever be a situation where there is only one person in the
cockpit," said James Hall, a former chairman of the National
Transportation Safety Board, referring to the "jump seats" all airliners
are equipped with.
Others questioned the wisdom of sealing off the cockpit at all.
"The
kneejerk reaction to the events of 9/11 with the ill-thought reinforced
cockpit door has had catastrophic consequences," said Philip Baum,
London-based editor of the trade magazine Aviation Security
International.
Neither the prosecutor nor Lufthansa — the parent
company of low-cost carrier Germanwings — indicated there was anything
the pilot could have done to avoid the crash.
Robin would not give
details on the co-pilot's religion or his ethnic background. German
authorities were taking charge of the investigation into Lubitz.
Lufthansa
CEO Carsten Spohr said that before Thursday's shocking revelations, the
airline was already "appalled" by what had happened in its low-cost
subsidiary.
Germanwings CEO Thomas Winkelmann, left, and Lufthansa Group CEO Carsten Spohrin arrive for a press …
"I could not have imagined that becoming even worse," he said in Cologne. "We choose our cockpit staff very, very carefully."
Lubitz
joined Germanwings in September 2013, directly out of flight school,
and had flown 630 hours. Spohr said the airline had no indication why he
would have crashed the plane.
He underwent a regular security
check on Jan. 27 and it found nothing untoward, and previous security
checks in 2008 and 2010 also showed no issues, the local government in
Duesseldorf said.
Lufthansa's chief said Lubitz started training
in 2008 and there was a "several-month" gap in his training six years
ago. Spohr said he couldn't say what the reason was, but after the
break, "he not only passed all medical tests but also his flight
training, all flying tests and checks."
Robin avoided describing the crash as a suicide.
"Usually,
when someone commits suicide, he is alone," he said. "When you are
responsible for 150 people at the back, I don't necessarily call that a
suicide."
In the German town of Montabaur, acquaintances told The
Associated Press that Lubitz appeared fine when they saw him last fall
as he renewed his glider pilot's license.
"He was happy he had the
job with Germanwings and he was doing well," said a member of the
glider club, Peter Ruecker, who watched Lubitz learn to fly. "He gave
off a good feeling."
Ruecker said he remembers Lubitz as "rather
quiet but friendly" when he first showed up at the club as a 14- or
15-year-old saying he wanted to learn to fly.
Lubitz was accepted as a Lufthansa pilot trainee after finishing a tough German college preparatory school, Ruecker said.
Lubitz's
Facebook page, deleted Tuesday, showed a smiling man in a dark brown
jacket posing in front of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. It
was restored as an "In Memory" site following the French prosecutor's
news conference.
At the crash
site, helicopters shuttled back and forth Thursday as investigators
continue retrieving remains and pieces of the plane, shattered from the
high-speed impact of the crash.
The
principal of Joseph Koenig High School in Haltern, Germany, which lost
16 students and two teachers in the crash, said the state governor
called him to tell him about the probe's conclusion.
"It is much, much worse than we had thought," principal Ulrich Wessel said.
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