German police search house of pilot who flew A320 into mountain

9 years ago | Posted in: Latest Politics News | 857 Views

(Reuters) – A young German co-pilot locked himself alone in the cockpit of Germanwings flight 9525 and set it on course to crash into an Alpine mountain, killing all 150 people on board including himself, prosecutors said on Thursday.

French prosecutors offered no motive for why 28-year-old Andreas Lubitz apparently took the controls of the Airbus A320, locked the captain out of the cockpit and deliberately set it veering down from cruising altitude at 3,000 feet per minute.

German police were searching his home for evidence that might offer some explanation for what was behind Tuesday’s crash in the French Alps.

French and German officials said there was no indication he was a terrorist. Acquaintances described Lubitz as an affable young man who had given no sign of harboring harmful intent.

According to Marseille prosecutor Brice Robin, Lubitz acted “for a reason we cannot fathom right now but which looks like intent to destroy this aircraft”.

Setting the plane’s controls for rapid descent was an act that “could only have been voluntary”, Robin said. “He had… no reason to stop the pilot-in-command from coming back into the cockpit. He had no reason to refuse to answer to the air controller who was alerting him on the loss of altitude.”

The captain, who had stepped out of the cockpit, probably to use the toilet, tried to force his way back in: “You can hear banging to try to smash the door down,” Robin said.

Describing sound recordings from one of the plane’s black boxes, Robin said most of the passengers would not have been aware of their fate until the very end.

“Only toward the end do you hear screams,” he said. “And bear in mind that death would have been instantaneous…the aircraft was literally smashed to bits.”

FlightRadar24, an online air tracking service that uses satellite data, said it had found evidence the autopilot was abruptly switched from cruising height to maintain an altitude of just 100 feet, the lowest possible setting. The plane crashed at about 6,000 feet.

“Between 09:30:52 and 09:30:55 you can see that the autopilot was manually changed from 38,000 feet to 100 feet and 9 seconds later the aircraft started to descend, probably with the ‘open descent’ autopilot setting,” Fredrik Lindahl, chief executive of the Swedish tracking service, said… see more

source: reuters

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