Germanwings co-pilot set plane to go faster before crash
The data recorder was recovered on Thursday from the crash site in the Alps and sent to BEA's offices in Paris
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Toulouse: The data recorder on Germanwings Flight 9525 shows the co-pilot set the airliner on a descent to an altitude of 100 feet and then repeatedly accelerated the plane, causing the crash that killed all 150 people on board.
Further analysis of the plane’s second black box, known as a flight data recorder, is under way, BEA, the French air accident investigation agency, said in an e-mailed statement on Friday. The data recorder, which stores thousands of parameters about the plane’s systems during the flight, was recovered Thursday from the crash site in the Alps and sent to BEA’s offices in Paris.
The initial review appears to back up information from the cockpit voice recorder, found earlier. French prosecutors investigating the 24 March crash have said co-pilot Andreas Lubitz steered the jet into a mountain after locking the captain out of the cockpit.
“An initial reading indicates that the pilot present in the cockpit used automatic pilot to put the plane into a descent toward an altitude of 100 feet, and then several times during the course of the descent, the pilot modified the setting of the automatic pilot to increase the speed of the descent," BEA said in the statement.
Work will continue to establish the specific facts about the flight, BEA said.
Mental state
BEA’s statement on Friday doesn’t specify which of the two pilots was seated in the cockpit when the descent began. Audio files from the flight deck, however, revealed that the co-pilot put the plane into a descent after the captain stepped out of the cockpit, prosecutor Brice Robin said in Marseille, France, last week. Lubitz denied re-entry to the captain, Robin said.
The investigation has centered largely on Lubitz’s mental state. Information gathered after the crash shows that the 27- year-old suffered from a psychosomatic condition and was being treated by neurologists and psychiatrists, according to a person familiar with the investigation. In 2009 he told the flight training school operated by Deutsche Lufthansa AG, the owner of Germanwings, that he had had an episode of severe depression.
Prosecutors in Dusseldorf found a sick note at Lubitz’s home there suggesting he was unfit to fly on the day of the crash. Data retrieved from a computer at his home showed that in days prior to the crash he researched suicide methods and the mechanics of cockpit doors.
BEA’s information confirms data released earlier by Flightradar24, a private tracking service, which showed Flight 9525’s autopilot was programmed to 30,000 feet (9,100 meters) as the jet climbed, then reset to 32,000 feet and finally to its 38,000-foot cruising altitude. The data then shows the altitude was set manually to the lowest setting, Mikael Robertsson, Flightradar24’s co-founder, said in a telephone interview.
Setting autopilot for the lowest possible altitude amounted to a death sentence for a plane crossing rugged terrain with an elevation of a mile above sea level. Bloomberg
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