‘Everyone will remember me’

Flight 9525’s cockpit recorder asks as many questions as it provides answers, with the world trying to understand how Andreas Lubitz could conceal a psyche so fragile, it caused him to take 149 with him to their doom in the Alps, Colin Randall reports.

Relatives of crash victims pay their respects at the memorial for the victims of the air disaster in the village of Le Vernet, near the crash site in the French Alps. Eric Gaillard / Reuters

Among the crestfallen relatives who gathered in the French Alps close to where Germanwings Flight 9525 smashed into countless pieces, one man cut an especially dejected figure, broken and inconsolable on the mountainside.

Hours before the simple memorial ceremony, Gunter Lubitz had learnt of the French investigators’ preliminary conclusion that his son Andreas, 27, co-pilot of the Airbus A320, had deliberately destroyed the plane.

A spectacular suicide had also become an act of mass murder, claiming the lives of the 149 others on board what should have been a routine hop from Barcelona to Dusseldorf on March 24.

"He gave the impression of a man carrying the entire weight of the catastrophe," Bernard Bartolini, mayor of the nearby village of Prads-Haute-Bleone, later told Le Dauphine Libere, a local newspaper serving Grenoble and the scattered alpine communities.

“This was someone in total distress who had taken upon himself the responsibility of this tragedy, a man whose life had been shattered.”

Mr Lubitz knelt several times, saying nothing. At one point, the mayor silently took him by the arm as “a simple gesture of comfort. There were no longer the words in such circumstances”.

What was going through his mind is not difficult to imagine. Time may tell what, if anything, he or his wife or their son’s reportedly pregnant girlfriend knew of the demons that tormented him.

But unless another explanation for the disaster unexpectedly emerges, the bright, well-liked young man with a lifelong passion for flying had succumbed in the most dramatic fashion to the psychological problems that blighted his life.

In the eight days since the crash, a steady stream of detail has shed light on the disturbing recent behaviour of Andreas Lubitz. None of these signs seems to have been evident to his employer, the German carrier Lufthansa, parent company of the low-cost Germanwings division.

A former girlfriend told the German newspaper Bild she now knew what he had meant when telling her: "One day I will do something that will change the system and everyone will then know my name and remember me."

The woman, a flight attendant, said he had talked bitterly of the long hours, pressures and relatively low pay of his work.

She was aware of his depression, severe enough for him to wake up in the middle of the night shouting “we’re going down”, and said this contributed to their break-up.

"I did not know what he meant by that at the time, but now it's clear," Bild quoted her as saying.

It was, she said, his extreme reaction to a reality he could not bear, that his long-term flying ambitions were in jeopardy.

“He did it because he realised that because of his health problems his big dream of a job with Lufthansa, a job as captain and as a long-haul pilot, was as good as impossible,” she said.

Lubitz’s health problems reportedly included deteriorating eyesight.

Prosecutors have disclosed that before he became a pilot he had been treated for suicidal tendencies, although recent medical consultations had shown “no suicidal tendencies or aggression against others”.

After the crash, torn-up sick notes were found in his flat in Dusseldorf. One showed that even on the day of the crash, he should have been off work.

Doctors had prescribed medication for his psychological problems but were prevented by medical confidentiality from informing his employers, and were presumably unaware that he was disregarding their advice.

“The fact there are sick notes saying he was unable to work that were found torn up, which were recent and even from the day of the crime, support the assumption based on the preliminary examination that the deceased hid his illness from his employer and his professional colleagues,” said the Dusseldorf public prosecutor’s office.

Investigators, aviation experts and the media have pored over every aspect of the co-pilot’s life in their attempts to understand what could have driven him to lock flight captain Patrick Sondenheimer, a 34-year-old father of two, out of the cockpit and fly the Airbus into the mountainside.

Who, then, was Andreas Lubitz? To the undoubted irritation of racists on Twitter, it was swiftly established who he was not.

Before his name became widely known several offensive tweets were posted, typically suggesting the co-pilot, by then under suspicion, would turn out to be called Mohammed.

Muslim and other subscribers were quick to condemn the attempted link between the destruction of a passenger aircraft and Islamist terrorism, but the powerfully negative potential of social media had once again been demonstrated. In fact, Andreas Lubitz was a product of Germany’s mainstream middle-class society. He was born and grew up in the town of Montabaur, a 26-kilometre drive from Koblenz in Germany’s western state of Rhineland-Palatinate.

His father is described by German media as a successful banker; his mother, Ursula, as a piano teacher who plays the organ at an evangelical church. The couple also have a younger son.

Flying came naturally to the young Lubitz, who began lessons at 14, operating the dual controls of light aircraft at his local aviation club, Luftorts Club Westerwald, until he qualified to fly on his own.

The club has links with a similar group in the French Alps, close to the crash site. French media reported Lubitz had visited other members.

Klaus Radke, the German club’s chairman, told Reuters he knew Lubitz from the early days and a refresher course last autumn.

“He was a completely normal guy,” Mr Radke said. “I got to know him, or I should say reacquainted with him, as a very nice, fun and polite young man.

“It was his dream to fly from an early age and it was a dream he began to fulfil here, so when he went on to gain his commercial licence and fly planes like the Airbus he was very happy and proud.”

Lubitz worked as a Lufthansa cabin attendant for a year before achieving the next step of his dream, acceptance for flight training.

He impressed those who met him casually or professionally as a decent, untroubled young man who took pleasure in common pursuits.

He enjoyed discovering new locations, as suggested by the now-familiar Facebook photograph of him at San Francisco‘s Golden Gate Bridge, and had unremarkable tastes in electronic dance music. And he kept himself physically fit, with jogging and long-distance running.

A German magazine, Focus, reported that he had bought new Audis for himself and his girlfriend only a few weeks ago. But other accounts said his partner, a teacher, was on the point of ending the relationship despite her pregnancy.

Lufthansa has been unwilling to discuss the medical problems that affected Lubitz’s life, beyond saying his conduct as an employee was “irreproachable” after he temporarily dropped out of the early stages of his pilot training six years ago for what is now known to have been treatment for depression, which lasted several months.

The airline had refused to reveal the reason for that gap in Lubitz’s career, nevertheless insisting he was deemed “100 per cent fit to fly without any restrictions” before the crash.

When The New York Times, which has reliable sources close to the investigation, raised the question of impaired vision, a Lufthansa official said such a problem would have been detected at his annual medical inspection last summer

But it is now clear that Lubitz defied German law requiring commercial pilots to declare their unfitness to fly.

As the investigation continues, a world struggling to comprehend Lubitz’s final act is shocked by what has become known, from the recovered “black box”, of the last minutes of Flight 9525.

An eight-minute descent to disaster began after Capt Sondenheimer was locked out of the cabin, having left to use the toilet with the encouragement of Lubitz, who then set the autopilot from 38,000 feet to 96ft.

It ended shortly after the captain could be heard hammering in vain on the locked door, with passengers screaming in mercifully late recognition of what was happening.

Psychiatrists have offered their own assessments of the co-pilot's actions. One of a group interviewed by the French newspaper, Le Journal du Dimanche, saw his gesture as an attempt to "crash Lufthansa".

Another identified a “protest against a world in which he no longer had his place”, and a third said his extraordinary calmness immediately before impact was not surprising.

“When, after interior tumult, someone suicidal has decided on the scenario, that person feels a great sense of peace,” said Dr Patrick Legeron, who specialises in stress at work.

For others, the term suicide is not even appropriate.

“I’m not a lawyer,” Carsten Spohr, the Lufthansa chief executive, said in Cologne. “But I would say that if a person takes 149 other people with him to their deaths, then we need a word other than suicide.”