Marseilles prosecutor Brice Robin said the co-pilot, 28-year-old Andreas Lubitz, locked the pilot out of the cockpit, leaving himself alone in control of the Airbus A320. The prosecutor said Lubitz then “accelerated the descent” of the aircraft, flying it at 700 kilometers an hour and crashing it into the remote, snowy mountains in southeastern France. All 150 people aboard were killed.
“The descent could only have been done deliberately,” Robin said at a news conference. “In all circumstances, it is deliberate.”
The prosecutor said “there is nothing to suggest a terrorist attack, but we’ll see the circumstances of that person.”
Robin said investigators, after listening to sounds in the aircraft from the flight’s last moments that were recorded on the plane’s cockpit voice recorder, heard increasingly desperate knocks on the cockpit’s locked door from the captain, whose name has not been disclosed, as he tried to get back into the cockpit.
But Robin said Lubitz refused to open the door and had no audio contact with air traffic controllers in the final minutes of the flight. It was bound from Barcelona, Spain, to the German city of Dusseldorf, with 144 passengers on board and six crew members.
Robin said that based on the sounds on the cockpit voice recorder, passengers only realized at the very end that the plane was about to crash.
“We hear some screams only at the last moment,” he said. “Death was instant.”
Robin declined to call Lubitz’s actions a suicide.
“I don’t call it a suicide when you have 150 people behind you,” he said.
The prosecutor said Lubitz had flown the A320 “a few months,” about 100 hours “on this type of plane,” compared with 10,000 hours of experience for the pilot.
Robin said he met with families of the victims before disclosing his conclusions about the flight’s demise.
“The families were in shock,” he said. “They found it difficult to believe.”
One source familiar with the cockpit voice recording said the pilot “is knocking lightly on the door [of the cockpit] and there is no answer. And then he hits the door stronger and no answer. There is never an answer.”
One investigator said the pilot could be heard trying to break the cockpit door down.
While recovery teams probe the wreckage for victims’ remains and for other clues to the cause of the crash, family and friends of the passengers and crew are making their way to the crash site. Airline Lufthansa has said it will provide counselors at the site and ask for help identifying remains.
In the small German town of Haltern, home to 16 teenage students and two teachers presumed dead in the crash, students at their school gathered around a makeshift memorial – candles, flowers, and signed messages – for a moment of silence on Thursday.
People from at least 18 countries were aboard the flight, with 72 Germans and at least 35 Spaniards among the casualties.
