Alone at Controls, Co-Pilot ‘Intentionally’ Destroyed Plane:update

The co-pilot of the Germanwings jet barricaded himself in the cockpit and intentionally rammed the plane full speed into the French Alps, ignoring the captain’s frantic pounding on the door and the screams of terror from passengers, a prosecutor said Thursday.
In a split second, all 150 people aboard the plane were dead.
Andreas Lubitz’s “intention (was) to destroy this plane,” Marseille prosecutor Brice Robin said, laying out the horrifying conclusions French investigators reached after listening to the last minutes of Tuesday’s Flight 9525 from the plane’s black box voice data recorder.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel said the conclusions brought the tragedy to a “new, simply incomprehensible dimension.”
The prosecutor said there was no indication of terrorism, and did not elaborate on why investigators do not suspect a political motive. He said they are instead focusing on the co-pilot’s “personal, family and professional environment” to try to determine why he did it.
The Airbus A320 was flying from Barcelona to Duesseldorf when it lost radio contact with air traffic controllers and began dropping from its cruising altitude of 38,000 feet. The prosecutor said Lubitz did not say a word as he set the plane on an eight-minute descent into the craggy French mountainside that pulverized the plane.
He said the German co-pilot’s responses, initially 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 when the plane reached cruising altitude, presumably to go to the lavatory. Then the 28-year-old co-pilot took control of the jet as requested.
“When he was alone, the co-pilot manipulated the buttons of the flight monitoring system to initiate the aircraft’s descent,” Robin said.
The pilot knocked several times “without response,” the prosecutor said, adding that the cockpit door could only be blocked manually from the inside.
The co-pilot said nothing from the moment the captain left, Robin said. “It was absolute silence in the cockpit.”
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 — and indeed goes into a lockdown — if the person inside the cockpit specifically denies entry.
During the flight’s final minutes, pounding could be heard on the cockpit door as the plane’s instrument alarms sounded. But the co-pilot’s breathing was calm, Robin said.
“You don’t get the impression that there was any particular panic, because the breathing is always the same. The breathing is not panting. It’s a classic, human breathing,” Brice said.
No distress call ever went out from the cockpit, and the control tower’s pleas for a response went unanswered.
Air traffic control cleared the area to allow the plane to make an emergency landing if needed, and asked other planes to try to make contact. The French air force scrambled a fighter jet to try to head off the crash.
Just before the plane hit the mountain, passengers’ cries of terror could be heard on the voice recorder.
“The victims realized just at the last moment,” Robin said. “We can hear them screaming.”
The victims’ families “are having a hard time believing it,” he said.
Many families visited an Alpine clearing near the scene of the crash Thursday. French authorities set up a viewing tent in the hamlet of Le Vernet 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’ family was in France but was being kept separate from the other families, Robin said.
Helicopters shuttled back and forth form the crash site Thursday, as investigators continue retrieving remains and pieces of the plane, shattered from the high-speed impact of the crash.