March 24, 2015
The co-pilot of Flight 9525 Germanwings from Barcelona to Dusseldorf deliberately drops the plane in the French Alps, killing himself and 149 other people.
The plane took off from Barcelona around 10 in the morning and reached 38,000 feet at 10:27. Shortly afterwards, 34-year-old pilot Patrick Sondenheimer asked co-pilot Andreas Lubitz, 27, to take control of the aircraft and left the cockpit, most likely to go to the toilet.
At 10:31 the plane began a rapid descent and 10 minutes later, crashed in the mountains, in southern France. There were no survivors.
It turned out that the young co-pilot, who dreamed of becoming a pilot as a little boy, had been suffering from serious psychological problems for years. Although he had tried to hide the history of his depression from the airline, the company found out, but nevertheless, gave him permission to fly.
After all, Lubitz’s public image referred to the ideal pilot. “He was calm, competitive, determined and attentive,” the Düsseldorf prosecutor’s office would later observe.
But his depression began to recur shortly before Christmas 2014. Initially, he began to show psychosomatic symptoms. He was sure he was blind, which is why he insisted on visiting ophthalmologists and neurologists, even at a rate of 3 or even 4 a week. He told them that he saw stars, flashes of light and flying insects, but the doctors examined his eyes and brain without finding any problem.
His family doctor diagnosed him with “emerging psychosis” and asked him to be treated in a psychiatric clinic. Lubitz ignored her.
He started psychotherapy and following his doctor’s instructions, he recorded his positive thoughts in a diary. These records show that he suffered from insomnia. “I slept for 4 hours in a row,” he writes on one page.
By early March, his thoughts were dark and moving toward death. Lubitz searched the internet for the most effective ways of suicide. “Production of carbon dioxide”, “when you drink gasoline”, “what poison kills without pain?”. On March 18, a Düsseldorf doctor wrote him a four-day sick leave, noting that Lubitz was “suffering from a persistent vision disorder of unknown cause.”
Two days later, while he was at home, a new method of suicide began to take shape in his mind. That afternoon, he searched the internet for information about the mechanisms that lock the cockpit door on an Airbus A320.
On March 22, the day before returning to work, he wrote on a piece of paper that was later found thrown in the trash of his apartment. “Decision Sunday”, codenamed BCN, for Barcelona. Below, Lubitz had written some options: “find the inner strength to work and keep living”, “deal with stress and insomnia”, “let go”.
The next day, on a trip from Düsseldorf to Berlin and back, it seemed normal. In the evening he went to the supermarket with his partner, buying food for the rest of the week.
But he had already done a “rehearsal general”. As it turned out, when he was alone in the cockpit on that return flight from Berlin, he set the autopilot at 100 feet, the lowest possible altitude. And he changed it again, before the control tower could notice it.
On the fateful flight from Barcelona, ​​as soon as he was left alone in the cockpit, Lubitz immediately implemented his plan. He changed the door switch from “normal” to “locked”, disabling Sondenheimer’s emergency password.
And immediately after that he put the autopilot to lower the plane to 100 feet. Just before 10:31 a.m., the plane began to descend at a rate of 3,500 feet per minute. At this point, the passengers probably understood the descent and the change in pressure, but they probably would not be worried. However, the French control tower noticed the unauthorized change and contacted the plane. Lubitz did not answer.
The pilot, Sondenheimer, returned three minutes later at 10:34. He entered his password to open the door, but it did not work. “I am!” He said, knocking on the door. The flight attendants, who were preparing to share snacks and soft drinks, saw the commotion.
A CCTV camera captured the image of the pilot on a small screen inside the cockpit. Lubitz did not react. Worried, Sondenheimer started knocking on the door. But again, Lubitz did not answer.
“For the love of God. “Open the door!” Shouted the pilot. With the plane at 25,000 feet, the passengers began to feel the abrupt descent and now surrendered to the first wave of panic, leaving their seats.
At 10:39 a.m., Sondenheimer asked a flight attendant to bring him a crowbar that was hidden in the back of the plane. He started knocking on the door, trying to open it. The plane crashed below 10,000 feet, with the snow-capped Alps approaching.
Inside the cockpit, Lubitz put the oxygen mask on his face. “Open the damn door!” Sondenheimer screamed as the passengers stared in horror.
Lubitz was breathing calmly. At 10:40 an alarm sounded: “TERRAIN, TERRAIN! “PULL UP, PULL UP!” She told him as the plane fell to 7,000 feet. Sixty seconds later, the right wing of the Airbus hit the slope. Then the only sounds written on the black box were alarms and screams.
Evidence, however, shows that pilot suicide by airplane is extremely rare. Following the Germanwings accident, Germany introduced a new regulation, making the presence of at least two people in the cockpit mandatory at all times. But when he found that this change did not improve security, he abolished the rule.
Money Review
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