Political Forums - Germanwings

This is some really sick shit. :mad:

Quote:

PARIS (AP) — Ignoring the captain's frantic pounding on the door, the co-pilot of the Germanwings jet barricaded himself inside the cockpit and deliberately rammed the plane full speed into the French Alps as passengers screamed in terror, a prosecutor said Thursday.

In a split second, all 150 people aboard were dead.

Andreas Lubitz's "intention (was) to destroy this plane," Marseille prosecutor Brice Robin said, laying out the horrifying conclusions French investigators reached after listening to the final minutes of Tuesday's Flight 9525 from the plane's black box voice data recorder.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel said the conclusions brought the tragedy to a "new, simply incomprehensible dimension."

The prosecutor said there was no indication of terrorism, though he did not say why investigators do not suspect a political motive. The inquiry is instead focusing on the co-pilot's "personal, family and professional environment" to try to determine why he did it, Robin said.

The Airbus A320 was flying from Barcelona to Duesseldorf when it lost radio contact with air traffic controllers and began dropping from its cruising altitude of 38,000 feet. The prosecutor said Lubitz did not say a word as he manually set the plane on an eight-minute descent into the craggy French mountainside that pulverized the plane.

He said the German co-pilot's responses, initially courteous in the first part of the trip, became "curt" when the captain began the mid-flight briefing on the planned landing.

Robin said the pilot, who has not been identified, left the cockpit when the plane reached cruising altitude, presumably to go to the lavatory. Then the 27-year-old co-pilot took control of the jet as requested.

"When he was alone, the co-pilot manipulated the buttons of the flight monitoring system to initiate the aircraft's descent," Robin said.
View gallery
Deadly Airbus A320 crash In the French Alps
French gendarmes and investigators make their way through debris from wreckage on the mountainside a …

The pilot knocked several times "without response," the prosecutor said, adding that the cockpit door can only be blocked manually from the inside.

The co-pilot said nothing from the moment the captain left, Robin said. "It was absolute silence in the cockpit."

The A320 is designed with safeguards to allow emergency entry into the cockpit if a pilot inside is unresponsive. But the override code known to the crew does not go into effect — and indeed goes into a lockdown — if the person inside the cockpit specifically denies entry.

During the flight's final minutes, pounding could be heard on the cockpit door as the plane's instrument alarms sounded. But the co-pilot's breathing was calm, Robin said.

"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.

No distress call ever went out from the cockpit, and the control tower's pleas for a response went unanswered.

Air traffic control cleared the area to allow the plane to make an emergency landing if needed, and asked other planes to try to make contact. The French air force scrambled a fighter jet to try to head off the crash.

Just before the plane hit the mountain, passengers' cries of terror could be heard on the voice recorder.

"The victims realized just at the last moment," Robin said. "We can hear them screaming."

http://news.yahoo.com/official-1-pil...072049706.html