Germanwings co-pilot Andreas Lubitz appears to have hidden evidence of an illness from his employers, including having been excused by a doctor from work the day he crashed a passenger plane into a mountain, prosecutors said Friday.
Media reports tell of a disturbed young man in relationship crisis as friends say he was happy in job.
Two different pictures of Andreas Lubitz emerged yesterday.
First there was the Lubitz who never appeared anything but thrilled to have landed a pilot's job with Germanwings, according to those who helped him learn to fly as a teenager in Montabaur, a town in the forested hills of western Germany.
Then there's the troubled man who suffered from depression and was struggling to come to terms with a relationship break-up.
French prosecutors yesterday said Lubitz, the co-pilot of Germanwings Flight 9525, "intentionally" crashed the jet into a mountain on Tuesday in the French Alps.
Members of his hometown flight club in Montabaur told the Associated Press that the 28-year-old Lubitz appeared to be happy with the job he had at the airline, a low-cost carrier in the Lufthansa Group.
After starting as a co-pilot with Germanwings in September 2013, Lubitz was upbeat when he returned to the LSC Westerwald e.V glider club to update his glider pilot licence.
"He was happy he had the job with Germanwings and he was doing well," said longtime club member Peter Ruecker, who watched Lubitz learn to fly. "He was very happy. He gave off a good feeling."
But German newspaper Bild reported that Lubitz took a break from flight training and received psychiatric treatment for a year and a half. He was diagnosed with a "major depressive episode". There were also reports he was recommended to be examined by a doctor before flying but passed all his psychological assessments and was later considered fit to fly.
Lubitz had continued to receive mental health support up until this week's crash, the Daily Mail reported.
Bild said that Lubitz was in the middle of the "relationship crisis" with his girlfriend in the weeks before the crash and may have been struggling to cope with a break-up. It was claimed that the couple were engaged to be married next year.
A Facebook picture of Germanwings co-pilot Andreas Lubitz at the Golden Gate bridge in San Francisco.
"He had a serious relationship crisis with his girlfriend before the disaster and the resulting heartbreak is thought to have led to this," said Bild. "Investigators are currently pursuing this line of inquiry with vigour."
Ruecker said he knew Lubitz had a girlfriend but had given no indication during his fall visit that anything was wrong.
"He seemed very enthusiastic" about his career, he said.
"I can't remember anything where something wasn't right."
At the house of Lubitz's parents yesterday, the curtains were drawn and four police cars were parked outside. Police blocked the media from the single-family, two-storey home in Montabaur, a town 60km northwest of Frankfurt.
A team of investigators entered the home and, yesterday, people could be seen emerging with blue bags, a big cardboard box and what looked like a large computer. Another person who came out was shielded from reporters with a coat by police.
A police spokesman said: "We wanted to search to see if we could find something that would explain what happened.
"We have found something which will now be taken for tests. We cannot say what it is at the moment but it may be a very significant clue to what has happened. We hope it may give some explanations."
Investigators also searched the apartment that Lubitz kept in Duesseldorf in an upscale three-storey building in an affluent neighbourhood.
It is believed he had shared the flat with his girlfriend.
In Montabaur, neighbour Johannes Rossmann said Lubitz appeared to be in good health and was a regular jogger. He described the pilot as calm and low-key.
"I do not believe he killed himself and claimed other people's lives," Rossmann said. "I can't believe it until it is 100 per cent confirmed."
Lubitz learned to fly at the glider club in a sleek white ASK-21 two-seat glider, which sits in a small hangar on the side of the facility's grass runway. Ruecker said he remembers Lubitz as "rather quiet but friendly".
After obtaining his glider pilot's licence as a teenager, he was accepted as a Lufthansa trainee after finishing the tough German preparatory school at the town's Mons-Tabor High School.
According to Lufthansa chief executive Carsten Spohr, Lubitz trained in Bremen, Germany, and in Phoenix, Arizona. He said there was a "several-month" gap in his training six years ago but he couldn't say what the reason was for that.
French Alps Crash: What happened
Spohr later told CNN that Lubitz had passed all his tests and medical exams, and gave no voluntary indication that he was unstable or mentally ill.
"We have at Lufthansa a reporting system where crew can report, without being punished, their own problems, or they can report about problems of others without any kind of punishment," he said.
"That hasn't been used either in this case, so all these safety nets we are so proud of here have not worked in this case."
Under the headline "The Secret Medical History of the Amok Pilot", Bild newspaper reported that Lubitz's break from flight training in 2009 had been caused after he was diagnosed with a "major depressive episode".
He was listed as "unable to fly" at the Lufthansa Flight Training School in Phoenix, Arizona, the newspaper reported, and his FAA file in the US contains a note indicating he underwent a special medical examination.
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung quoted the mother of a school friend who said Lubitz had told her daughter he had taken a break from training because he was suffering from depression.
"Apparently he had a burnout, he was in depression," said the woman, whom the paper did not name. She said her daughter had seen him again just before Christmas and that he had appeared normal. She added he was a "lovely boy".
"He had a good family background," she told the paper.
Spohr told reporters that after the break, Lubitz "not only passed all medical tests but also his flight training, all flying tests and checks".
He added that the co-pilot was "100 per cent fit to fly, without any limitations".
After completing his training, Lubitz spent an 11-month waiting period working as a flight attendant before becoming a co-pilot on the Germanwings A320 fleet. Spohr said such a waiting period was not unusual at Lufthansa.
Lubitz had logged 630 hours' flight time by the day of the crash, the airline said.
Lubitz's family could not immediately be reached, but a Facebook page bearing Lubitz's name showed him smiling in a dark brown jacket posing in front of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. Ruecker confirmed that the photo was of Lubitz.
The page, which was wiped from Facebook sometime in the past two days and restored yesterday as an "In Memory" site, said Lubitz was from Montabaur.
It also lists him as having several aviation-themed interests, including the A320, the model of plane that crashed on Tuesday.
The Facebook page also included a link to a result in the 2011 Lufthansa half-marathon in Frankfurt, where a runner with the nickname "Flying-Andy" ran the course in a 1 hour, 48 minutes, 51 seconds.
German Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere said German authorities had checked intelligence and police databases on the day of the crash and Lufthansa told them that regular security checks also turned up nothing untoward about the co-pilot.
"According to our knowledge at this point, and after comparing the information we have, there is no terrorist background for him as a person," de Maiziere said.
Meanwhile, the German press yesterday reflected the shock of the German people that one of their own could carry out such an act.
"We know that the crash site is the scene of a suicide bomber in the mountains of southern France. We'll never quite understand," Welt newspaper said in a comment piece.
"Can you imagine the feelings of the killed passengers and crew members' relatives, pushed into even deeper horror, even darker despair? Their loved ones are not victims of a technical failure, but the failure of a human soul," it continued.
Tagesspiegel wrote: "The disaster has suddenly turned into a crime again and back into a catastrophe of new dimensions.
"If anger is missing it's because the suicide mass murderer is no longer alive, and rage is doomed to permanent impotence ... A pilot as perpetrator. That's like a doctor who kills, a priest who abuses children."
Andreas Lubitz
• Brought up in the small town of Montabaur, 60km northwest of Frankfurt.
• Father was a successful business executive and mother a piano teacher.
• First started in the cockpit of a light aircraft at the age of 14.
• Began commercial pilot's training in the northern German city of Bremen in 2008.
• Took a break during training, before returning to qualify. The mother of a school friend told a German newspaper he had told her daughter he had suffered from depression.
• Started as a co-pilot with Germanwings in September 2013.
• Had notched 630 hours of flying time before Tuesday's crash. Flight's captain had flown for more than 6000 hours and had worked for Lufthansa for 10 years.
— AP
What we know
The captain and co-pilot were behaving normally before the crash
The pair engaged in "normal" conversation for the first 20 minutes of the flight heading from Barcelona to Dusseldorf. But Andreas Lubitz's replies became "laconic" as they started readying what would have been the normal descent to the German airport.
"His responses become very brief. There is no proper exchange as such," Marseille prosecutor Brice Robin said.
The captain left the co-pilot alone The captain asked Lubitz to take over, and left the cockpit for around 10 minutes, probably to use the bathroom.
Lubitz locked himself in the cockpit Investigators said Lubitz purposefully locked the captain out and himself inside the cockpit, because this can only be done manually. By doing so, he overrode the A320 Airbus' safety mechanism which allows emergency entry into the cockpit.
The descent begins When Lubitz was left alone, he used the flight monitoring system to lower the plane. The captain banged at the cockpit door The black box recorder revealed that someone, likely the pilot, pounded on the cockpit door after Lubitz locked the door.
There was no distress call What concerned investigators before the black box was found was that no distress was sent out from the cockpit when the plane began plummeting. Pleas for response from the control tower were also ignored by Lubitz, and of course the captain who was locked outside at the time.
Lubitz remained silent during the descent His breathing was calm as the plane's instrument alarms sounded and the captain pounded on the cockpit door. "You don't get the impression that there was any particular panic, because the breathing is always the same. The breathing is not panting. It's a classic, human breathing," Robin said. The captain is also ignored when he identifies himself through the intercom system.
Screaming could be heard as the plane neared impact The 144 passengers only realised at the last moment what was happening, and screams were heard only in the last moments of the recording, before the impact. "The victims realised just at the last moment," Robin said. "We can hear them screaming. Death was instant. It hit the mountain at 700km an hour."
The plane crashes The black box recorder picked up the sound of pounding during the final minutes as alarms sounded. Finally the sound of an impact is heard.
