|
Andreas Günter Lubitz (December 18, 1987 – March 24, 2015) was the German pilot who intentionally crashed the Germanwings Flight 9525 heading from Barcelona, Spain to Dusseldorf, Germany, after locking the captain out of the cockpit and manipulating the flight controls, killing himself along with all 149 on board. It was the only fatal crash involving a Germanwings aircraft during the company's 18 years in operation.
Background edit
Personal life edit
Andreas Lubitz was born on December 18, 1987 and he grew up in Neuburg an der Donau, Bavaria, and Montabaur in the German state of Rhineland-Palatinate. He came from a stable family. His father was a banker and his mother was a piano teacher who played the organ at a church. Lubitz was known to be a quiet boy, with a crew cut and a sweet smile. Since boyhood, he had been passionate about becoming a pilot, Lubitz papered his bedroom with posters from Airbus, Boeing and Lufthansa.
Lubitz attended the Mons-Tabor Gymnasium in Montabaur, where he was known to be a disciplined student. At the age of 14, he became an expert glider pilot, spending many weekends at a flying club in Montabaur. He was voted "third-most orderly" of his graduating class of 2007.
In September of 2008, Lubitz was accepted into the Lufthansa Flight Training Pilot School in Bremen, Germany. But in November, he suspended his pilot training after being hospitalized for suffering a severe episode of depression. After Lubitz' psychiatrist determined that he had fully recovered from the depressive episode, Lubitz returned to the Lufthansa school in August 2009, after 9 months of treatment. He moved to the United States in November 2010 to continue training at the Lufthansa Airline Training Center in Goodyear, Arizona.
From June 2011 to December 2013, he worked as a flight attendant for Lufthansa while training to obtain his commercial pilot's license, until joining Germanwings as a first officer in June of 2014.
Mental health edit
Lubitz suffered a relapse of depression just before Christmas of 2014. The relapse began with symptoms of psychosis. The main symptom was a powerful and unfounded fear, that he was going blind. Lubitz contacted over 40 doctors about this, but none were able to cover any problems with his vision nor his fear of the same. He also would complain that he was having hallucinations where he would see flying insects, flashes of light, stars, streaks and halos. He was also suffering from light sensitivity and double vision, as well as being tormented by insomnia. By early March, Lubitz, terrified by the idea that his eventual blindness would cost him his pilot's license, he became suicidal and he began searching the internet for ways to commit suicide on his laptop.
In the days before the plane crash, Lubitz had been treated for suicidal tendencies by doctors and he was declared "unfit to fly". The doctors gave him several sick notes and advised him not to fly again, but he simply ignored their advises. On March 20, a new method of suicide came to Lubitz' mind, as he searched the internet for information about the locking mechanism on cockpit doors. On March 22, the day before returning to work, he wrote “Decision Sunday,” along with the flight code BCN, for Barcelona, on a scrap of notebook paper that was later retrieved from the trash in his apartment. Below that heading, Lubitz listed several options: “find the inner will to work and continue to live,” “deal with stress and sleeplessness,” “let myself go.”
The plane crash edit
On March 24, 2015 during the flight from Düsseldorf to Barcelona which took of at 7 A.M., while the captain Patrick Sondenheimer, left the cockpit briefly, leaving Lubitz alone in the cockpit, he switched the plane's automatic pilot to 100 feet, the lowest setting. But, that was just a test run. He quickly switched it back again before any air-traffic controllers had taken notice. On the next flight from Barcelona to Düsseldorf at 10 A.M., Lubitz was initially courteous to Sondenheimer, but became "curt" when the captain began the midflight briefing on the planned landing. Sondenheimer told Lubitz that he didn't use the bathroom before the flight, to which Lubitz repeatedly urged him that he should go now. At about 10:30 A.M. Sondenheimer once again stepped out of the cockpit, leaving Lubitz alone, this time he put his plan into action.
Lubitz locked the cockpit door and disabled Sondenheimer's emergency access code. Moments later, he changed the autopilot's cruising altitude from 38,000 feet, to the lowest setting of 100 feet. Just before 10:31 A.M., after crossing the French coast near Toulon, the aircraft left its cruising altitude and began dropping at a rate of 3,500 feet per minute, or 58 feet per second. French air-traffic controllers noticed the unauthorized change made several attempts to contact the aircraft, but Lubitz did not answer them. Sondenheimer felt the rapid descent of the aircraft and suspected something, to which he returned 3 minutes later from the bathroom. He attempted to re-enter the cockpit, only to find the door locked. Initially he knocked on the door and tried to ask Lubitz to open the door, but got no answer.
Alarmed, Sondenheimer began repeatedly and loudly banging on the door and begging Lubitz to open it, but was still met with silence. At that point, the passengers and flight attendants start noticing that there is a problem, and panic erupted across the cabin. Sondenheimer asked a flight attendant to get him a fire axe hidden in the back of the plane, which he used in his desperate attempts to break the cockpit door open while shouting at Lubitz to open it, unfortunately however, like all cockpit doors in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, all major airlines have reinforced their cockpit doors to prevent intrusion. Several alarms were going off in the cockpit, but Lubitz was not reacting at all. Two minutes before impact, Lubitz put on an oxygen mask and his slow and steady breathing could be heard on the cockpit voice recorder. He did not speak a word at all.
In the final seconds before the plane crashed, the plane's right wing collided with a mountain, intensifying the screams and cries of the terrified passengers, Lubitz remained silent as he increased the speed of the aircraft. Eventually, the plane crashed into the French Alps, incinerating Lubitz along with all 149 on-board.