Germanwings Flight 9525 was a scheduled international passenger flight from Barcelona–El Prat Airport in Spain to Düsseldorf Airport in Germany. The flight was operated by Germanwings, a low-cost carrier owned by the German airline Lufthansa. On 24 March 2015, the Airbus A320 operating the flight crashed 100 km (62 mi; 54 nmi) north-west of Nice in the French Alps, killing all 150 people on board.
The crash was deliberately caused by the first officer, Andreas Lubitz, who had previously been treated for suicidal tendencies and declared unfit to work by his doctor. Lubitz kept this information from his employer and instead reported for duty. Shortly after reaching cruise altitude and while the captain was out of the cockpit, Lubitz locked the cockpit door and set the plane to fly downward in a controlled descent into a mountain.
Aviation authorities swiftly implemented new recommendations from the European Union Aviation Safety Agency that required at least two authorised people to be in the cockpit at all times but, by 2017, this rule had been dropped.
By 2017, Lufthansa had paid €75,000 to the family of every victim, as well as €10,000 in pain and suffering compensation to every close relative of a victim.
Flight
Germanwings Flight 9525 took off from Runway 06R at Barcelona–El Prat Airport on 24 March 2015 at 10:01 am CET (09:01 UTC), 26 minutes behind schedule. It was due to arrive at Düsseldorf Airport by 11:39 CET. According to the French national civil aviation inquiries bureau, the Bureau of Enquiry and Analysis for Civil Aviation Safety (BEA), the pilots confirmed instructions from French air traffic control at 10:30 CET.
At 10:31 CET, after crossing the French coast near Toulon, the aircraft left its assigned cruising altitude of 38,000 ft (11,600 m) and without approval began to descend rapidly. The air traffic controller declared the aircraft in distress after its descent and loss of radio contact.
The descent time from 38,000 ft was about 10 minutes; radar observed an average descent rate around 3,400 ft/min (57 ft/s; 17 m/s). Attempts by French air traffic control to contact the flight on the assigned radio frequency were not answered. A French Mirage fighter jet was scrambled from the Orange-Caritat Air Base to intercept the airliner. Radar contact was lost at 10:40 CET; at the time, the aircraft had descended to 6,175 feet (1,880 m), and crashed in the remote commune of Prads-Haute-Bléone, 100 km (62 mi; 54 nmi) north-west of Nice. A seismological station of the Sismalp network run by the Grenoble Observatory, 12 km (7.5 mi; 6.5 nmi) from the crash site, recorded the associated seismic event, determining the impact time as 10:41:05 CET.
Crash site
The crash site is within the Massif des Trois-Évêchés, 3 km (1.9 mi; 1.6 nmi) east of the settlement Le Vernet and beyond the road to the Col de Mariaud, in an area known as the Ravin du Rosé. The aircraft crashed on the southern side of the Tête du Travers, a minor peak in the lower western slopes of the Tête de l'Estrop, at an elevation of 1,550 m (5,090 ft). The aircraft was travelling at 700 km/h (380 kn; 435 mph) when it struck the mountain. The site is about 10 km (6 mi; 5 nmi) west of Mount Cimet, where Air France Flight 178 crashed in 1953.
Gendarmerie nationale and Sécurité Civile sent helicopters to locate the wreckage. The aircraft had disintegrated; the largest piece of wreckage was the size of a car. The signal recorded at the nearest seismological station shows that only 0.03% of the aircraft's kinetic energy was converted into seismic energy, the remainder (99.97%) generating a violent explosion in the open air. This phenomenon, probably due to the marly Callovian (mid-Jurassic) badlands found at the crash site, explains such a scattering of very small debris.
A helicopter landed near the crash site; its personnel confirmed that there were no survivors. The search and rescue team reported the debris field covered 2 km2 (500 acres).
Aircraft
The aircraft involved was an Airbus A320-211, serial number 147, registered as D-AIPX. The aircraft had accumulated about 58,300 flight hours on 46,700 flights.
During its final flight, the aircraft was carrying 144 passengers and 6 crew (2 pilots and 4 cabin crew members) of 19 different nationalities.
Passengers and crew
Among the passengers were 16 students and 2 teachers from the Joseph-König-Gymnasium of Haltern am See, North Rhine-Westphalia. They were returning home from a student exchange with the Giola Institute in Llinars del Vallès, Barcelona. Haltern's mayor, Bodo Klimpel, described the crash as "the darkest day in the history of [the] town". Bass-baritone Oleg Bryjak and contralto Maria Radner, singers with Deutsche Oper am Rhein, were also on the flight. Among the passengers were two Iranian football journalists and analysts returning home after covering El Clásico between FC Barcelona and Real Madrid at Camp Nou. Also among the passengers was an American contractor for the satellite mapping office of the US Department of Defense, as well as an Israeli citizen who lived in Barcelona.
The flight's pilot in command was 34-year-old Captain Patrick Sondenheimer, who had 10 years' experience (6,000 flight hours, including 3,812 hours on the Airbus A320) flying A320s for Germanwings, Lufthansa, and Condor. The co-pilot was 27-year-old Andreas Lubitz, who joined Germanwings in September 2013 and had 630 flying hours, 540 of them on the Airbus A320.
Andreas Lubitz
Co-pilot Andreas Günter Lubitz (18 December 1987 — 24 March 2015), was raised in Neuburg an der Donau, Bavaria, and Montabaur in the German state of Rhineland-Palatinate. He took flying lessons at Luftsportclub Westerwald, an aviation sports club in Montabaur.
Lubitz was accepted into a Lufthansa trainee programme after finishing high school. In September 2008, he began training at the Lufthansa Flight Training school in Bremen, Germany. He suspended his pilot training in November 2008 after being hospitalised for a severe episode of depression. After his psychiatrist determined that the depressive episode was fully resolved, Lubitz returned to the Lufthansa school in August 2009. Lubitz 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 licence, and joined Germanwings as a first officer in June 2014.
Investigation
The French Bureau of Enquiry and Analysis for Civil Aviation Safety (BEA) opened an investigation into the crash; it was joined by its German counterpart, the Federal Bureau of Aircraft Accident Investigation (BFU). The BEA investigation was led by Arnaud Desjardin and was assisted by the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation. Hours after the crash, the BEA sent seven investigators to the site; these were accompanied by representatives from Airbus and CFM International. The cockpit voice recorder, which was damaged but still functional, was recovered by rescue workers and examined by the investigation team. The following week, Brice Robin, the government prosecutor based in Marseille, announced that the flight data recorder, blackened by fire but still usable, had also been found. Investigators isolated 150 sets of DNA, which were compared with the DNA of the victims' families.
Cause of crash
According to French and German prosecutors, the crash was an act of mass murder deliberately caused by the first officer, Andreas Lubitz. Robin said Lubitz was courteous to Captain Sondenheimer during the first part of the flight, then became "curt" when the captain began the midflight briefing on the planned landing. Robin said that when the captain left the cockpit, possibly to use the toilet, Lubitz locked the door and overrode the door code from the inside, preventing anyone from entering. The captain requested re-entry using the intercom; he knocked and then banged on the door, but received no response. The captain then tried to break down the door, but like most cockpit doors made after the September 11 attacks, it had been reinforced to prevent intrusion. During the descent, the co-pilot did not respond to questions from Marseille air traffic control, nor did he transmit a distress call. Robin said contact from the air traffic control tower, the captain's attempts to break in, and Lubitz's steady breathing were audible on the cockpit voice recording. The screams of passengers in the last moments before impact were also heard on the recording.
After their initial analysis of the aircraft's flight data recorder, the BEA concluded that Lubitz had made flight control inputs that led to the crash. He had set the autopilot to descend to 100 ft (30 m) and accelerated the speed of the descending aircraft several times thereafter. The BEA preliminary report into the crash was published six weeks later, on 6 May 2015. It confirmed the initial analysis of the aircraft's flight data recorder and revealed that during the earlier outbound Flight 9524 from Düsseldorf to Barcelona, Lubitz had practised setting the autopilot altitude dial to 100 ft several times while the captain was out of the cockpit.
The BEA final report into the crash was published on 13 March 2016. The report confirmed the findings made in the preliminary report and concluded that Lubitz had deliberately crashed the aircraft as a murder–suicide. The report stated:
The collision with the ground was due to the deliberate and planned action of the co-pilot, who decided to commit suicide while alone in the cockpit. The process for medical certification of pilots, in particular self-reporting in case of a decrease in medical fitness between two periodic medical evaluations, did not succeed in preventing the co-pilot, who was experiencing mental disorder with psychotic symptoms, from exercising the privilege of his license.
— Causes, BEA Final Report
Investigation of Lubitz
Three days after the crash, German detectives searched Lubitz's Montabaur properties and removed a computer and other items for testing. They did not find a suicide note nor any evidence that his actions had been motivated by "a political or religious background". During their search of Lubitz's apartment, detectives found a letter written by a doctor indicating Lubitz had been declared unfit to work. Germanwings stated it had not received a sick note from Lubitz for the day of the flight. News accounts said Lubitz was "hiding an illness from his employers". Under German law, employers do not have access to employees' medical records, and sick notes excusing people from work do not give information about medical conditions, so employers must rely on employees to declare their lack of work fitness.
The following day, authorities again searched Lubitz's home where they found evidence he suffered from a psychosomatic illness and had been prescribed two antidepressants, escitalopram and mirtazapine, and a sleep medication, zopiclone. Toxicological examination of Lubitz's post-mortem revealed the presence of all three. Escitalopram, a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor, is associated with a risk of suicidal thoughts and behaviours, especially soon after treatment is commenced. Lubitz was prescribed escitalopram nine days before the crash. Criminal investigators said Lubitz had then, in the week before, researched online "ways to commit suicide" and "cockpit doors and their security provisions". Robin said doctors had told him Lubitz should not have been flying, but medical secrecy requirements prevented his physician from making this information available to Germanwings. Such secrecy should consider public safety, said BEA investigator Arnaud Desjardin.
The investigation into Lubitz revealed his treatment for suicidal tendencies prior to his training as a commercial pilot, when he had been temporarily denied a US pilot's licence because of treatments for psychotic depression. For years, Lubitz had frequently been unable to sleep because of what he believed were vision problems; he consulted over 40 doctors, fearing he was going blind. Motivated by the fear that blindness would cause him to lose his pilot's licence, he began conducting online research about methods of committing suicide before deciding to crash Flight 9525.
Aftermath
French Minister of the Interior Bernard Cazeneuve announced that due to the "violence of the impact", "little hope" existed that any survivors would be found. Then-Prime Minister Manuel Valls dispatched Cazeneuve to the scene and set up a ministerial task force to coordinate the response to the incident. German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier flew over the crash site, describing it as "a picture of horror". German Chancellor Angela Merkel and the minister-president of North Rhine-Westphalia Hannelore Kraft travelled to the crash site the following day. Merkel, Valls, and Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy visited the recovery operations base at Seyne-les-Alpes. Bodo Klimpel, mayor of Haltern am See, reacting to the deaths of 16 students and 2 teachers from the town, said that people were shocked by the crash.