He was 27, loved to fly and apparently raised no suspicions or showed obvious signs that he was troubled.
The co-pilot of the fatal Germanwings Flight 9525 from Barcelona, Spain, to Düsseldorf, Germany, was identified as Andreas Lubitz, who grew up in Montabaur, a Rhineland town of some 15,000 people, a neat, pretty place of timber and brick homes in western Germany.
The co-pilot of the fatal Germanwings Flight 9525 from Barcelona, Spain, to Düsseldorf, Germany, was identified as Andreas Lubitz, who grew up in Montabaur, a Rhineland town of some 15,000 people, a neat, pretty place of timber and brick homes in western Germany.
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| The chief executive of Lufthansa and members of the LSC Westerwald flight club, where Andreas Lubitz had been a member, discussed the Germanwings co-pilot’s past |
In a tragedy full of unanswered questions from the moment he was said to have turned the Airbus A320’s nose downward over the French Alps on Tuesday morning, Mr. Lubitz has emerged as the most terrifying mystery of all.
As the world absorbed the news Thursday that he is said to have suicidally or murderously driven the jetliner into a mountainside, taking 149 people to their deaths along with him, the focus turned to what had driven him to such an act — and to whether the airline industry and regulators do enough to screen pilots for psychological problems As The Newyork Times said
There were few immediate answers or easily discernible signs of a young man in trouble, only a small unexplained gap in his training record.
As the world absorbed the news Thursday that he is said to have suicidally or murderously driven the jetliner into a mountainside, taking 149 people to their deaths along with him, the focus turned to what had driven him to such an act — and to whether the airline industry and regulators do enough to screen pilots for psychological problems As The Newyork Times said
There were few immediate answers or easily discernible signs of a young man in trouble, only a small unexplained gap in his training record.
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| French emergency workers at the site of Tuesday’s crash of Germanwings Flight 9525. All 150 people aboard were killed. |
Online, Mr. Lubitz appeared to be a keen runner, including at Lufthansa’s Frankfurt sports club, and had completed several half-marathons and other medium-distance races, including an annual New Year’s run in Montabaur in 2014.
A Facebook page with a few tidbits of his possible “likes” was visible Wednesday but had been removed by late morning on Thursday. It showed a photograph of a young man near the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, though there were no clues to when the image was taken or any other details.
Mr. Lubitz’s flying career began at the flight club’s grassy landing strip outside Montabaur, which features a small corrugated hangar with peeling paint and an attached control tower no more than three stories high. The facility has more the air of a clubhouse than an airstrip.
Like most of the rest of the town, the strip was deserted on Thursday evening save for reporters using it as a backdrop for their reports.
He lived, at least part time, with his parents. Mr. Lubitz’s mother was an organist at a Protestant church near the town center.
Officials at Germanwings and its parent company, Lufthansa, provided a bare-bones description of Mr. Lubitz on Thursday — and insisted that his motivation, if he indeed committed such a horrendous act, remained a mystery to them.
“We have no indication what could have led the co-pilot to commit this terrible act,” said Carsten Spohr, Lufthansa’s chief executive, at a news conference near the Germanwings headquarters in Cologne, just hours after a French prosecutor had described in vivid detail the harrowing last minutes of the flight.
“Such an isolated act can never be completely ruled out,” he said. “The best system in the world can’t stop it.”
Officials said Mr. Lubitz was accepted into the pilot training program in 2008 and did his training in Bremen, as well as in the United States.
Martin Riecken, a Lufthansa spokesman, said, “Every Lufthansa pilot does part of their training in Phoenix, simply because the weather there is so good and conditions are good for flying.”
The flight-school program usually lasts a year and a half to two years, and includes a few months in Arizona doing real flying in small training aircraft, as well as simulator and classroom work, Mr. Riecken said. The Airline Training Center Arizona, an arm of Lufthansa, has trained the German airline’s pilots for more than 40 years, according to its website.
The Phoenix area is home to a large number of flight schools, which take advantage of the region’s usually clear sky. The pilot who crashed a hijacked airliner into the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001, did his flight training in Arizona.
Mr. Lubitz interrupted his training for several months at one point, for an unknown reason, Mr. Spohr said. If the cause was medical, he said, he would not know because German rules on privacy prevented the sharing of such information. Those records would, however, be available to prosecutors.
Mr. Lubitz waited 11 months for a pilot’s slot after completing his training, filling the time by working as an airline steward, said Mr. Spohr, adding that there was nothing unusual about that. He eventually joined Germanwings as a co-pilot in fall 2013 and had notched 630 hours flying, Mr. Riecken said.
“He was 100 percent flightworthy without any limitations,” Mr. Spohr said.
The issue of pilot health has long been a concern in the industry. In the United States, pilots are screened for medical or psychological problems before being hired, and are randomly tested afterward for drug and alcohol use. They must undergo medical examinations once or twice a year, depending on their age, to keep their certification with the Federal Aviation Administration.
They are supposed to disclose all physical and psychological conditions and medications or face significant fines. In addition to this “self-reporting” standard, most airlines also rely on other crew members to report suspicious behavior or monitor the health of their co-workers.
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| Investigators carried boxes from the apartment of Germanwings co-pilot Andreas Lubitz in Duesseldorf, Germany, on Thursday |
Late Thursday, the police started searching Mr. Lubitz’s parents’ home in Montabaur, and in the Ruhr city of Düsseldorf, which is a Germanwings hub in western Germany.
In Düsseldorf, Mr. Lubitz lived on the upper floor of a three-story apartment house in a leafy residential area on the outskirts, roughly halfway between its airport and the one in Cologne. Neighbors had hung a German flag at half-staff on a lamppost.
Markus Niesczery, a spokesman for the Düsseldorf police, said five officers were scouring the apartment Thursday afternoon. The search was carried out at the request of French prosecutors, he said.
“We are combing the place in hopes of finding any indication of a motive,” Mr. Niesczery said.
Brice Robin, the French prosecutor, said that Mr. Lubitz was not known to law enforcement officials, and nothing about the destruction of the airliner indicated that it was a terrorist attack. Later, the German interior minister, Thomas de Maizière, said all records had been checked and no one on board turned up with terror links.
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The flying club posted a short death notice for “Andreas” on its website. It said that he had joined as a 14-year-old and that he had long dreamed of being a pilot.
On Thursday, Mr. Rücker said Mr. Lubitz had seemed “happy he had the job with Germanwings and he was doing well.”
“He gave off a good feeling,” Mr. Rücker told The Associated Press.
“Andreas became a member of the club as a youth to fulfill his dream of flying,” the LSC Westerwald club said in the death notice that appeared on its website before Mr. Robin indicated that Mr. Lubitz deliberately caused the crash. Mr. Lubitz, the notice said, “fulfilled his dream, the dream he now paid so dearly with his life.”
Some airline personnel took to chat rooms to express skepticism about the prosecutor’s and the airline’s account. None indicated in their comments that they knew Mr. Lubitz personally.
Reaction among those close to the victims was far angrier, and more bewildered.
“I am asking when this nightmare in which we find ourselves is finally going to end,” said Bodo Klimpel, the mayor of Haltern am See, the small Ruhr town that lost 16 high school students and two teachers in the crash. “I am stunned, furious, speechless and deeply shocked.”
