It was March 24, 2015, when Germanwings Flight 9525 took off from the Barcelona El-Prat runway, on what should have been a short and straightforward flight to Düsseldorf Airport. After about half an hour the plane had ascended to about 38000 feet, flown by 34-year-old Captain Patrick Sondenheimer with co-pilot 27-year-old Andreas Lubitz at his side.But when Captain Sondheimer briefly left the cockpit, Flight 9535 took a tragic and deadly turn.
Upon his return, Sondheimer found the door to the cockpit locked from the inside. While he tried in vain to break down the door, the plane began to descend by about 58 feet per second. 10 minutes later, it crashed into the Alps, instantly killing the 144 passengers and 6 crew members on board. Cockpit recordings revealed that Lubitz, who had previously been hospitalised for depression, ignored repeated attempts by air traffic control to right the course of the plane and did not transmit any kind of distress call.
Prosecutors have since determined that Lubitz crashed Flight 9525 on purpose, and that he had practised setting the autopilot altitude dial to 100 feet several times on an earlier flight. A look into his medical history revealed that Lubitz had been showing symptoms of psychotic depression and had seen over 40 different practitioners in the 5 years prior to the crash. At his apartment, a doctor’s letter was found in the bin declaring the young co-pilot unfit to fly.
