Co-pilot practiced deadly descent
Report tells of actions on day of deliberate crash
A co-pilot who purposely crashed a German airliner into the Alps appeared to have rehearsed a deadly descent on another flight just two hours earlier, a new report says.
Paris — A co-pilot who purposely crashed a Germanwings A320 plane into the French Alps appeared to have rehearsed sending the jet into a deadly descent on another flight just two hours earlier, investigators said Wednesday.
Authorities still are puzzling over why Andreas Lubitz, who had suffered from suicidal tendencies and depression in the past, locked the captain out of the cockpit on March 24 and sent Flight 9525 from Barcelona to Duesseldorf straight into a mountain, killing all 150 people on board.
The revelation about the earlier flight that day from Duesseldorf to Barcelona appeared to support the theory that the Germanwings crash was not only deliberate but premeditated. It came in a 30-page interim report from the French accident investigation agency BEA.
The development also raised questions about all flights where Lubitz was in the cockpit but BEA said that, due to practical considerations, it would not investigate those flights.
Lubitz seemed to be toying with the airplane’s settings on the flight into Barcelona, programming it for a sharp descent multiple times in a 41⁄ 2- minute period while the pilot was out of the cockpit before resetting the controls, the report said. Unlike the later flight, he did not lock the pilot out of the cockpit.
On the flight to Barcelona, the plane’s “selected altitude” changed repeatedly and several times was set as low as 100 feet above sea level. The report says Lubitz also put the engines on idle, which gives the plane the ability to quickly descend.
On the return flight to Germany, Lubitz also set a 100-foot altitude before the plane crashed into the Alps.
Aviation experts say it would be highly unusual for a pilot to repeatedly set a plane for such a low altitude for no apparent reason. But the report said Lubitz did so while air traffic controllers were asking him to bring the airplane down gradually from 35,000 feet to 21,000 feet for its descent to Barcelona.
A BEA chart showed that the plane didn’t actually descend sharply while Lubitz was repeatedly adjusting the settings, so the passengers and crew might not have noticed any change.
“The captain didn’t realize at all, because the co-pilot’s tests during the outgoing flight took place during a normal, preprogrammed descent and it never had an impact on the plane’s trajectory,” said Remi Jouty, the director of BEA.
Airlines typically download information from planes’ flight data recorders for routine maintenance checks when the planes arrive at an airport where they plan to stay overnight.
But that data isn’t monitored constantly, said John Goglia, an aviation safety expert and former member of the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board. Even if Germanwings had done so, it probably would have taken a while to notice a problem or such odd readings might have been dismissed as an anomaly, he said. “They don’t analyze every recorder every day for every minute it recorded,” he said. “The lag time is about 30 days to analyze it.”