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The co-pilot of Germanwings Flight 9525 appears to have deliberately crashed the plane after he was left alone in the cockpit, according to a French prosecutor.
Marseille prosecutor Brice Robin said the commander left the cockpit, presumably to go to the lavatory, and then was unable to regain access. In the meantime, he said, co-pilot Andreas Lubitz manually and “intentionally” set the plane on the descent that drove it into the mountainside in the southern French Alps.
It was the co-pilot’s “intention to destroy this plane,” Robin said.
Robin said: “The intention was to destroy the plane. Death was instant. The plane hit the mountain at 700 km per hour.
“I don’t think that the passengers realised what was happening until the last moments because on the recording you only hear the screams in the final seconds.”
The revelations came after audio files taken from the black box recorder suggested that one of the pilots was forced to try and smash down the door after being unable to enter the flight deck, according to the New York Times.
The co-pilot has been identified as Andreas Lubitz, a German citizen. Friends and family of Lubitz, who was 28, said he showed no signs of depression. “He was happy he had the job with Germanwings and he was doing well,” said a member of the glider club, Peter Ruecker, who watched him learn to fly. “He gave off a good feeling.”
The Airbus A320, on a flight from Barcelona to Duesseldorf, began to descend from cruising altitude after losing radio contact with ground control and slammed into the remote mountain on Tuesday morning, killing all 150 people on board, including three Americans.