The co-pilot of Germanwings Flight 9525 practiced sending the jetliner into a deadly descent on another flight, just two hours before he crashed into the French Alps, killing all aboard, investigators said Wednesday.
The revelation appears to support the theory that the Germanwings crash was not only deliberate but premeditated. It came in a 30-page interim report from the French accident investigation agency BEA.
Authorities are still puzzling over why Andreas Lubitz, who had suffered from suicidal tendencies and depression in the past, locked the captain out of the cockpit on March 24 and sent the Airbus A320 hurtling into a mountain, killing all 150 people on board.
Lubitz seemed to be toying with the airplane’s settings on the earlier flight from Duesseldorf, Germany, to Barcelona, programming it for a sharp descent multiple times in a 4 1/2-minute period while the pilot was out of the cockpit, the report said. Unlike on the later flight, he did not lock the pilot out of the cockpit.
The plane’s “selected altitude” changed repeatedly and several times was set as low as 100 feet above sea level. The report says Lubitz also put the engines on idle, which gives the plane the ability to quickly descend.
On the doomed flight from Barcelona to Duesseldorf, Lubitz set a 100-foot altitude before the plane crashed.
Aviation experts said it would be highly unusual for a pilot to repeatedly set a plane for such a low altitude for no apparent reason. The report said Lubitz did so while air traffic controllers were asking him to bring the airplane down gradually to 21,000 feet from 35,000 feet for its descent to Barcelona.
A BEA chart showed the plane didn’t actually descend sharply while Lubitz was repeatedly adjusting the settings, so the passengers and crew might not have noticed any change.
“The captain didn’t realize at all, because the co-pilot’s tests during the outgoing flight took place during a normal, preprogrammed descent and it never had an impact on the plane’s trajectory,” said Remi Jouty, the director of BEA.
Aviation experts said the BEA findings were clearly unusual.
“It’s clear that it’s a very unusual act,” said aviation safety expert John Cox, president of Safety Operating Systems. “I’ve never seen it done, and it is the same methodology he used to fly the airplane into the ground. Was he practicing? I think that certainly is a possibility.”
“He was practicing to see how the airplane behaved,” said John Goglia, an aviation safety expert and former member of the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board.
Airlines typically download information from planes’ flight data recorders for routine maintenance checks when the planes arrive at an airport where they plan to stay overnight.
But that data isn’t monitored constantly, Goglia said. Even if Germanwings had done so, it probably would have taken a while to notice a problem — or such odd readings might have been dismissed as an anomaly, he said.
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