Lufthansa knew six years ago that the co-pilot who deliberately crashed a passenger plane in the French Alps last week had suffered from a “serious depressive episode,” the German airline said Tuesday.
The airline said that as part of its internal research it found emails Andreas Lubitz sent to the Lufthansa flight school when he resumed his training there in 2009 after an interruption of several months.
In them, he informed the school that he had suffered a “serious depressive episode” but that it had since subsided.
The airline said Lubitz subsequently passed all medical checks. It declined to provide further information.
The revelation that Lufthansa had been informed of Lubitz’s psychological problems raises further questions about why he was allowed to become a pilot for its subsidiary, Germanwings, in September 2013.
Authorities say the 27-year-old Lubitz, who in the past had been treated for suicidal tendencies, locked his captain out of the cockpit before deliberately crashing the Airbus 320 into a mountain on March 24. All 150 people aboard the flight from Barcelona to Duesseldorf were killed.
Separately Tuesday, German newspaper Bild and French magazine Paris Match said their reporters had been shown a video taken by someone inside the cabin of the doomed plane shortly before it crashed.
Both periodicals reported that the video was found on a memory chip that could have come from a cellphone found in the wreckage. The reports could not be independently verified, and Marseille prosecutor Brice Robin, overseeing the French criminal investigation into the crash, denied Tuesday night that cell phone video has been found from the plane.
Paris Match reported that “you can hear cries of ‘My God’ in several languages” and metallic banging, perhaps of the pilot trying to open the cockpit door with a heavy object. It said the screaming intensified toward the end of the video.
Bild said that “even though the scene on board is chaotic and completely shaky, and no individual person can be identified, the accuracy of the video is beyond question.”
Lufthansa earlier Tuesday said it had set aside $300 million to deal with possible costs from the crash as French aviation investigators said they were examining “systemic weaknesses” like cockpit entry rules and psychological screening procedures that could have led to the crash — issues that could eventually change worldwide aviation practices.
French aviation agency BEA signaled the latest re-think about airline procedures in the wake of the crash, saying the goal of its investigation is to make recommendations to aviation authorities, both in France and elsewhere, about what can be done to prevent similar crashes.
“(We will study) systemic weaknesses (that) might possibly have led to this aviation disaster,” BEA said in its first statement since prosecutors detailed the co-pilot’s suspected role in the crash.
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