A French prosecutor has issued a statement that the co-pilot of Germanwings 9525, Andreas Lubitz, 28, locked out the pilot of the plane and then intentionally crashed the plane in the French Alps. The conclusion adds a new horrific detail to an already horrific crash. It was not an accident according to a review of the record from the black box found at the crash site.
The cockpit voice recorder revealed the pilot politely knocking to be allowed back into the cockpit and then frantically banging on the door as Lubitz directed the plane into the ground. Marseille prosecutor Brice Robin said that Lubitz “wanted to destroy this plane.” He killed 150 passengers and crew, who can be heard in the background screaming in terror. New reports indicate that there may have been issues in the past with regard to depression.
Germanwings, a low-budget carrier operated by Lufthansa, will likely face litigation over the crash and this adds a new issue. Companies will often offer a “rogue employee” defense of an employee acting outside the scope of their employment or clearly against the rules and wishes of the employer. This would clearly appear to fit since this is a senseless criminal act. However, there will remain the question of whether the airline had any indication or should have uncovered the type of mental imbalance that would lead to such an suicidal and murderous act.
Source: WSJ
Hey this thread turned into Argentina! Poor po.
Trooper, I have no idea where you come up w/ these photos. Quite a stash!
Why would Lufthansa determine that the “co-pilot deliberately crashed the plane”? (1) Maybe they have definitive evidence it is so or (2) Maybe—more likely—they would prefer the flying public be convinced that it was not stupid pilot error or a mechanical problem with their plane, both of which would could be bad PR. “Human error” is frequently the label applied to plane crashes irrespective of what the real cause was, if they ever determine the actual cause.
Po
Put your money where your mouth is, so to speak.
Let’s see you publish a transcript of one of your imam’s speeches on love, tolerance and acceptance on non–Muslims. Not interested in his views on the treatment of other Muslims, just interested in him denouncing terror against infidels and the condemnation of the murder of innocents.
You publish everything else, why not this? This bigot and illogical person patiently awaits.
Your imam will not permit you to speak before the worshipers? Interesting. I suppose that even he sees you as deluded and irrational as the rest of us. That, indeed, says a lot.
@randyjet
Interesting, I agree.
Low tech humans cost money, however, hence the resistance.
Po
Once again, you state things based upon vague assumptions. Par for the course. I never mentioned whether I was male or female. You assumed that I was male. Could be correct. Could be incorrect.
You would have never made it through law school. You assume too many things not in evidence.
Bugsy – in po’s defense I tend to think everyone without a defined female moniker is male. I have made the same mistake he has. 😉
Yeah, I remember you doing that with me lololol and admitting it!
Two U.S. men arrested in plot to attack Illinois military base: Justice Dept
As I stated before,
For those keeping score at home, the Logical Fallacy score is even:
Ken Rogers: (a): deride the speaker personally) and (b): ‘Your hatred is a dangerous state of mind’.
po: (a) ‘known hereon Lord P HaW’ and (b): ‘our favorite Islamophobe’
Posture of an Islamophobe. Eating a Ham Sandwich looking at women on the beach and drinking a beer.
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-8Rl3nvN6J2U/T70Y3R7Sj9I/AAAAAAAAEgY/IHhct29c9-Y/s1600/fat-man-eats-meal.jpg
We need a Voight-Kampff test for pilots.
“You’re in a desert, walking along in the sand when all of a sudden you look down and see a tortoise.
It’s crawling toward you.
You reach down and flip the tortoise over on its back.
The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over. But it can’t. Not with out your help.
But you’re not helping.
I mean you’re not helping! Why is that?“
http://time.com/3760381/germanwings-cockpit-security-pilot-suicide/
Robert Goyer is the editor-in-chief of Flying magazine.
“We pilots are passionate about our most important duty: to deliver our precious cargo safely home to their loved ones. That a pilot would instead use the airplane he is flying as a weapon of mass murder defies understanding. Sadly, though, this is not the first time it has happened.
After the terrorist attacks of 9/11, regulators in the United States quickly mandated more secure cockpits. At the time I was critical of the move for one reason only: I feared that it would allow pilots to more easily take over flights and use the airplane to kill all aboard, as famously happened with EgyptAir Flight 990 from New York to Cairo in 1999.
In the last two decades, there have been a handful of airliner catastrophes that are known or suspected to be the result of pilot suicide. Just last year there was a close call. On Feb. 17, 2014, an Ethiopian Airlines copilot, Hailemedhin Abera Tegegn, locked the pilot out of the cockpit after he went to use the restroom — just as apparently happened on Germanwings 9525. The copilot in the Ethiopian Airlines incident kept flying the airplane. It had been on its way from Ethiopia’s capital, Addis Ababa, to Rome. The copilot eventually made a safe landing in Geneva (though the 767 was very low on fuel by then), asking for political asylum. All 202 people aboard, the co-pilot included, survived the terrifying ordeal. Tegegn was convicted in absentia just last week by the high court in Addis Ababa for hijacking his own plane.
Secure cockpit doors are here to stay. And since 9/11, there has not been a known successful breach of the cockpit of an airliner. Now that we have the terrorists at bay, we need to figure out how to prevent rogue pilots from taking over airliners.
One tactic that overseas airlines can employ beginning right now, which would bring them into line with U.S. practices, is to require two crewmembers to be in the cockpit at all times — which usually means a flight attendant entering the cockpit when a pilot uses the restroom. Norwegian Air Shuttle, easyJet, Air Canada, and Air Transat today announced such policies. It won’t be the sure answer to the hazard of a rogue pilot, but it’s a great start.
Another measure would be instituting psychological screening of pilots to try to find ones with sociopathic tendencies. It might not always work. Sometimes the first sign of mental illness is the last violent act of the perpetrator. But better that we at least try.
Lastly, we could encourage the development of flight computer systems that would prevent a pilot from doing something that made no sense, like programming a descent that would take the airplane into the side of a mountain. Modern flight decks have access to worldwide terrain databases. Even the small four-seat airplane I fly has one.
Can we lock a pilot out of the ability to do damage to an airplane? Probably not entirely, but we can go a long way toward that goal. It would cost money — but it would go a long way toward ending these horrifying mass killings by airliner. The warning airline executives and aviation regulators got from Ethiopian Airlines Flight 702 went unheeded. Hopefully the tragedy of Germanwings 9525 will get the message across that we need to act and act now.”
anon, While I respect the publisher of a great magazine, I think he is off base on this. The effective solution is not high tech, but is what US airlines do. Have another person in the cockpit, simple, cheap, effective. Many times as in the Airbus, more technology is less safe as we found out in the Air France crash into the Atlantic. I have had an instance when ALL displays went out in the cockpit, something that is NOT supposed to be able to happen. Yet it did. The Airbus will not allow certain maneuvers if it doesn’t like them, even if such are needed to meet an emergency. They have also been known to not allowing the plane to land in some instances. When I was flying into IAH on the new runway, we always got a GPWS warning to PULL UP because the data base did not have the runway entered yet and knew we were going to crash into the field.
My faith is in the pilots, not technology. It is true that we are not infallible, but neither are engineers, their hubris notwithstanding.
http://time.com/3760283/germanwings-german-pilots-association/
“German pilots reacted with anger and confusion on Thursday after French and German statements said the co-pilot on the Germanwings crash earlier this week deliberately slammed the plane into the French Alps, killing all 150 people on board. Stunned at the revelations, some pilots believe that the authorities are eager to find a culprit to blame, before the relevant facts are known. “It is a very, very incomplete picture,” says James Phillips, international affairs director of the German Pilots Association, speaking on the phone to TIME late Thursday. He said his own reaction was “angry.” “I have the feeling that there was a search for a quick answer, rather than a good answer,” he said.
In a chilling press briefing on Thursday, the Marseille public prosecutor Brice Robin charged with investigating Tuesday’s crash told reporters that the plane’s 28-year-old co-pilot, Andreas Lubitz, deliberately flew the plane into a mountain while he was alone in the cockpit. His far more seasoned captain, Patrick Sonderheimer, had apparently left for a toilet break, and when Sonderheimer knocked on the cockpit door to come back in, Lubitz refused to open the door. Instead, he took the Airbus A320 plane steadily downwards at 3,000 feet per minute, until it slammed into the Alpine ravine, pulverizing the aircraft and killing 144 passengers and six crew members. Robin said Lubitz had “a willingness to destroy the aircraft.” Shortly after, Lufthansa CEO Carten Spohr and the German Transportation Minister each told reporters that they had concluded, based on Robin’s account, that Lubitz deliberately crashed the plane.
Phillips, who spoke to several members of the pilots’ association immediately after Robin’s press briefing, said they were “very, very confused,” and that the Marseille prosecutor, who is charged with investigating the crash, “raised more questions than he had answered.”
Chief among those questions is why the captain, who spent several minutes banging frantically on the cockpit door, did not use an emergency code, designed to override the system those inside the cockpit use to let someone in. “We all agree that the captain left the cockpit,” says Phillips. “But we have an emergency access code to get into the cockpit. That was not mentioned,” he said. Other pilots believe that the person within the cockpit can override any attempt to gain entry from outside.
Airbus has a YouTube video to instruct A320 crew members about what to do if one of them is trying to get inside the cockpit, but those inside do not open. According to the video, the crew would tap an emergency code on the keypad outside the cockpit door, setting off a 30-second alarm inside the cockpit, until the door opens for just five seconds, allowing the person to enter.
Robin said he was sure Lubitz was conscious, since the audio on the cockpit voice recorder has him breathing normally throughout the 10-minute descent into the mountains, until the moment of impact. But pilots are not convinced that the breathing sounds meant he was able to open the door to Sonderheimer. “Was he conscious? Could he open the door?” Phillips asked. “The prosecutor did not provide answers to that.”
With attention now focused on Lubitz’s mental state, Germanwings crew members who flew with the rookie pilot just days before Tuesday’s crash say he seemed totally normal. “We’ve spoken to crew that flew with him a few days before, and say he was relaxed and very normal,” Phillips says. “He was not acting in any way strange. He was friendly and outgoing, and there was never any sign that anyone should be concerned about.”
The International Federal of Airline Pilots Associations, or IFALPA, condemned the leaks of the cockpit voice recorder or CVR on Thurdsay, saying that it violated long-established practices after plane crashes, where details are kept confidential until the investigation is complete. “Leaks of this nature greatly harm flight safety since they invite ill-informed speculation from the media and general public and discourage cooperation with investigators in future accidents,” said a statement from the Montreal-based organization. “The sole purpose of a CVR is to aid investigators… not to apportion blame.””
Bugsy, The union is opposed to cameras for the same reason any worker would be. They are Big Brother like. I understand the reticence, but the genie is outta the bottle. Cameras are ubiquitous. So, no more BJ’s in the cockpit. Just wait till you’re in the hotel room on the layover.
Before the days of “transistorized flying”, we had a pilot, copilot, AND navigator/engineer in the cockpit. Time to advance backwards?
Nick
Your comment about cameras in the cockpit is an excellent idea. It will allow one to view what is transpiring within that space; however, it does not solve the problem of a rogue pilot, hell bent on taking his life and other lives along with him.
Why is the union so against cameras? I guess it’s the same reason the union would crush any suggestion that pilots be required to submit to a breath test before taking a seat in the cockpit. The breathalyzer would at least keep inebriated pilots from ever putting others in danger, even if it couldn’t exclude those with other drugs in their systems.
Simple ….. just make it against the law to crash a plane. 99guspuppet
Stephen L Avery
Five years ago April 10th, another crash changed political history in Central Europe and it had all the hallmarks of assassination. Did Putin do it? Was it a false flag from the West to point at Putin? One thing is for certain. It was a course changing event that altered Polish and perhaps all of Eastern/Central Europe trajectories for the contemporary democratic developments.
@ Stephen L Avery
What is your take on that crash
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/04/11/did-putin-blow-up-the-whole-polish-government-in-2010-a-second-look.html
also aside to this internal events at the time in response:
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/453/nemeses?act=1#play (audio report 453: Nemeses
Dec 16, 2011)
Bruce, the fact is that if I had done what the pilots of the Polish plane had done in my job as captain for an airline, I would have been fired for even accepting an approach clearance in those conditions, much less flying it. THAT is why there is no doubt about the cause of the crash. There is also no doubt as I stated at the time that the Poles will never accept any blame for the crash being their fault. They initially faulted the Russians for letting the plane fly the approach. omitting the fact that the only thing they could have done to stop it would be to shoot it down. I am sure that they will sooner or later come around to that idea too.
Darren, Your civil suit assessment is correct. And, the smart plaintiff families will not take the initial settlement offer, waiting for a suit to be filed and discovery work its course.
Here is a cached copy of Lubitz’s Facebook page:
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:dQv8WBnThSAJ:https://www.facebook.com/andreas.lubitz.3%3Ffref%3Dnf+&cd=1&hl=nl&ct=clnk&gl=hr
Squeeky Fromm
Girl Reporter
I bet the co-pilot had it on a selfie stick.