Germanwings Flight 9525 was a scheduled international passenger flight from Barcelona–El Prat Airport in Spain to Düsseldorf Airport in Germany. The flight was operated by Germanwings, a low-cost carrier owned by the German airline Lufthansa. On 24 March 2015, the aircraft, an Airbus A320-211, crashed 100 km (62 mi; 54 nmi) north-west of Nice in the French Alps. All 144 passengers and six crew members were killed. It was the only fatal crash involving a Germanwings aircraft during the company's 18 years in operation.
The crash was deliberately caused by the co-pilot, Andreas Lubitz, who had previously been treated for suicidal tendencies and declared "unfit to work" by his doctor. Lubitz kept this information from his employer and instead reported for duty. Shortly after reaching cruise altitude and while the captain was out of the cockpit, he locked the cockpit door and initiated a controlled descent that continued until the aircraft impacted a mountainside.
Aviation authorities swiftly implemented new regulations that required two authorized personnel in the cockpit at all times, but by 2017, Germanwings and other German airlines had dropped the rule. The Lubitz family held a press conference in March 2017 at which Lubitz's father said that they did not accept the official investigative findings that his son deliberately caused the crash. As of February 2017, Lufthansa had paid €75,000 to the family of every victim, as well as €10,000 in pain and suffering compensation to every close relative of a victim.
Germanwings Flight 9525 took off from Runway 07R at Barcelona–El Prat Airport on 24 March 2015 at 10:01 am CET (09:01 UTC), 26 minutes behind schedule. It was due to arrive at Düsseldorf Airport by 11:39 CET. According to the French national civil aviation inquiries bureau, the Bureau of Enquiry and Analysis for Civil Aviation Safety (BEA), the pilots confirmed instructions from French air traffic control at 10:30 CET. At 10:31 CET, after crossing the French coast near Toulon, the aircraft left its assigned cruising altitude of 38,000 ft (11,600 m) and without approval began to descend rapidly. The air traffic controller declared the aircraft in distress after its descent and loss of radio contact.
The descent time from 38,000 ft was about 10 minutes; radar observed an average descent rate around 3,400 ft/min (58 ft/s (18 m/s)). Attempts by French air traffic control to contact the flight on the assigned radio frequency were not answered. A French military Mirage jet was scrambled from the Orange-Caritat Air Base to intercept the aircraft. Radar contact was lost at 10:40 CET; at the time, the aircraft had descended to 6,175 feet (1,880 m), and crashed in the remote commune of Prads-Haute-Bléone, 100 km (62 mi; 54 nmi) north-west of Nice. A seismological station of the Sismalp network, the Grenoble Observatory, 12 km (7.5 mi; 6.5 nmi) from the crash site, recorded the associated seismic event, determining the crash time as 10:41:05 CET.
The crash was the deadliest air disaster in France since the 1981 crash of Inex-Adria Aviopromet Flight 1308, in which 180 people died, and the third-deadliest French air disaster of all time, behind Flight 1308 and Turkish Airlines Flight 981. This was the first major crash of a civil airliner in France since the crash of Concorde flight Air France Flight 4590 on takeoff from Charles de Gaulle Airport in 2000.
The crash site is within the Massif des Trois-Évêchés, 3 km (1.9 mi; 1.6 nmi) east of the settlement Le Vernet and beyond the road to the Col de Mariaud, in an area known as the Ravin du Rosé. The aircraft crashed on the southern side of the Tête du Travers, a minor peak in the lower western slopes of the Tête de l'Estrop, at an elevation of 1,550 m (5,085.3 ft).: 28 The aircraft was travelling at 700 km/h (380 kn; 435 mph) when it crashed into the mountain. The site is about 10 km (6 mi; 5 nmi) west of Mount Cimet, where Air France Flight 178 crashed in 1953.
Gendarmerie nationale and Sécurité Civile sent helicopters to locate the wreckage. The aircraft had disintegrated; the largest piece of wreckage was "the size of a car." A helicopter landed near the crash site; its personnel confirmed no survivors. The search and rescue team reported the debris field covered 2 km2 (500 acres).
The aircraft involved was a 24-year-old Airbus A320-211,[b] serial number 147, registered as D-AIPX. It made its first flight on 29 November 1990 and was delivered to Lufthansa on 5 February 1991. The aircraft was leased to Germanwings from 1 June 2003 until mid-2004, then returned to Lufthansa on 22 July 2004 and remained with the airline until it was transferred to Germanwings again on 31 January 2014. The aircraft had accumulated about 58,300 flight hours on 46,700 flights.
During its final flight, the aircraft was carrying 144 passengers and six crew (two pilots and four cabin crew members) from at least 18 countries—mostly Germany and Spain. The count was confused by the multiple citizenship status of some people on board.
The flight's pilot in command was 34-year-old Captain Patrick Sondenheimer, who had 10 years of flying experience (6,000 flight hours, including 3,811 hours on the Airbus A320) flying A320s for Germanwings, Lufthansa, and Condor. The co-pilot was 27-year-old Andreas Lubitz, who joined Germanwings in September 2013 and had 630 flight hours of experience, with 540 of them on the Airbus A320.
Andreas Günter Lubitz was born on 18 December 1987 and grew up in Neuburg an der Donau, Bavaria, and Montabaur in the German state of Rhineland-Palatinate. He took flying lessons at Luftsportclub Westerwald, an aviation sports club in Montabaur.
Lubitz was accepted into a Lufthansa trainee programme after finishing high school. In September 2008, he began training at the Lufthansa Flight Training school in Bremen, Germany. He suspended his pilot training in November 2008 after being hospitalized for a severe episode of depression. After his psychiatrist determined that the depressive episode was fully resolved, Lubitz returned to the Lufthansa school in August 2009. Lubitz moved to the United States in November 2010 to continue training at the Lufthansa Airline Training Center in Goodyear, Arizona. From June 2011 to December 2013, he worked as a flight attendant for Lufthansa while training to obtain his commercial pilot's licence, until joining Germanwings as a first officer in June 2014.
Among the passengers were 16 students and 2 teachers from the Joseph-König-Gymnasium of Haltern am See, North Rhine-Westphalia. They were returning home from a student exchange with the Giola Institute in Llinars del Vallès, Barcelona. Haltern's mayor, Bodo Klimpel, described the crash as "the darkest day in the history of [the] town". Bass-baritone Oleg Bryjak and contralto Maria Radner, singers with Deutsche Oper am Rhein, were also on the flight.
The French BEA (Office of Investigations and Analysis for Civil Aviation Safety), Bureau of Enquiry and Analysis for Civil Aviation Safety (French: Bureau d'Enquêtes et d'Analyses pour la sécurité de l'aviation civile) opened an investigation into the crash; it was joined by its German counterpart, the Federal Bureau of Aircraft Accident Investigation (BFU). The BEA investigation was led by Arnaud Desjardin and was assisted by the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation. Hours after the crash, the BEA sent seven investigators to the crash site; these were accompanied by representatives from Airbus and CFM International. The cockpit voice recorder, which was damaged but still usable, was recovered by rescue workers and was examined by the investigation team. The following week, Brice Robin, the government prosecutor based in Marseille, announced that the flight data recorder, which was blackened by fire but still usable, had also been found. Investigators isolated 150 sets of DNA, which were compared with the DNA of the victims' families.
According to French and German prosecutors, the crash was deliberately caused by the co-pilot, Andreas Lubitz. Brice Robin said Lubitz was initially courteous to Captain Sondenheimer during the first part of the flight, then became "curt" when the captain began the midflight briefing on the planned landing. Robin said that when the captain left the cockpit, possibly to use the toilet, Lubitz locked the door, preventing anyone from entering. The captain had a code to unlock the door, but the lock's code panel could be disabled from the cockpit controls. The captain requested re-entry using the intercom; he knocked and then banged on the door, but received no response. The captain then tried to break down the door, but like most cockpit doors made after the September 11 attacks, it had been reinforced to prevent intrusion. During the descent, the co-pilot did not respond to questions from Marseille air traffic control, nor did he transmit a distress call. Robin said contact from the air traffic control tower, the captain's attempts to break in, and Lubitz's steady breathing were audible on the cockpit voice recording. The screams of passengers in the last moments before impact were also heard on the recording.
After their initial analysis of the aircraft's flight data recorder, the BEA concluded that Lubitz had made flight control inputs that led to the accident. He had set the autopilot to descend to 100 ft (30 m) and accelerated the speed of the descending aircraft several times thereafter. The BEA preliminary report into the crash was published on 6 May 2015, six weeks later. It confirmed the initial analysis of the aircraft's flight data recorder and revealed that during the earlier outbound Flight 9524 from Düsseldorf to Barcelona, Lubitz had practised setting the autopilot altitude dial to 100 ft several times while the captain was out of the cockpit.[100]
The BEA final report into the crash was published on 13 March 2016. The report confirmed the findings made in the preliminary report and concluded that Lubitz had deliberately crashed the aircraft as a suicide, which stated:
In November 2021, a coroner's inquest into the deaths of two British victims concluded with a verdict of unlawful killing.[101]
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