Germanwings Crash: Co-Pilot Practised Descent Move on Previous Flight

The Germanwings co-pilot suspected of deliberately crashing a jet in the Alps in March entered the fatal descent settings several times on an earlier outbound flight, investigators have said.

A report on the crash by the BEA, France’s air accident investigation agency, showed that Andreas Lubitz had set the altitude dial on the Airbus A320’s autopilot to 100ft (30 metres) five times while alone in the cockpit on the previous flight, from Düsseldorf to Barcelona, on 24 March.

He then restored the plane to the correct altitude when the flight captain returned.

Black box recordings from the doomed flight back from Barcelona to Düsseldorf later that morning suggested that Lubitz locked the captain out of the cockpit before putting the plane into a controlled descent.

He also ignored repeated attempts to contact him by air traffic controllers and the French military.

All 150 on board were killed when the plane ploughed into a mountain.

After the crash, German investigators discovered that Lubitz, 27, had been signed off sick by his doctor on the day of the tragedy. He had suffered from severe depression in the past and a computer found in his home showed he had used the internet to research suicide methods in the days leading up to the crash.

The cockpit voice recorder found in the wreckage in a rocky ravine in the French Alps showed Lubitz had locked the captain, Patrick Sondheimer, out of the flight deck after his colleague left to use the lavatory after putting the aircraft at its cruise altitude of 38,000ft. Lubitz then put the plane’s automatic pilot into a controlled descent, increasing the speed of the Airbus several times as it dropped. Sondheimer can be heard trying to smash his way in, shouting: “Open the damned door.” Seconds later, the aircraft crashed near Digne-les-Bains.

The BEA preliminary report released on Wednesday states that the sound of breathing was recorded on the CVR until a few seconds before the end of the flight. There was movement of the “right sidestick”, the co-pilot’s control stick, for about 30 seconds 1min 33sec before the plane’s impact with the mountain, but it was not enough to disengage the autopilot, according to information from the flight data recorder (FDR), the second black box.

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