- The co-pilot of the Germanwings flight that crashed in the French Alps, named as Andreas Lubitz, appeared to want to "destroy the plane", officials said.
Marseille prosecutor Brice Robin, citing information from the "black box" voice recorder, said the co-pilot was alone in the cockpit.
He intentionally started a descent while the pilot was locked out.
The minute-by-minute account of the last half hour is interesting. One can construct a few, not-too-compelling alternate interpretations. The deliberate actions of a co-pilot seems most convincing. If they find anything remaining of the co-pilot's body, they might be able to determine if he had a seizure of some sort, but yes, the recorder said so-pilot was breathing normally.
MESSAGE TO AIRLINES: Pilot should always have alternate means of getting into cockpit if the door seems locked from within.
They do have an alternative - to an extent. This video and this article explain it, but there is a procedure that can be followed that allows a person access to the cockpit. However, that can be manually overridden by whoever is in the cockpit at the time so we can only assume that the co-pilot denied the pilot access to the cockpit.
Am I the only one who does no like the fact that the co-pilot's name is thrown around everywhere?
It is not typical for German journalism to do this. Unlike in the U.S., pictures usually get censored and names are kept anonymous to not affect friends, family etc.
But this time, for whatever reason, German journalists didn't give a fuck. Might be due to the shock in Germany. Still, human dignity is above all.
Would be interested in your opinion about this.
I'm completely unaware of how German news reporting and journalism works, and at this point I'm so used to the whimsical nature of US reporting that I wouldn't have thought twice about it. I think it's bad for the same reason that plastering a killers face and name everywhere is a bad idea - because it could inspire others to act out of a desire for attention or by now seeing whatever action as viable.
Maybe they didn't care or reported the way they did because of the global nature of this incident. It's something with consequences that extend far beyond German airlines, and again point back to the complete shortcomings of societies ability to deal with mental illness in a proactive manner. If German media didn't report the name and identity I'm sure it would still end up all over the place in this incident. One other thought I had is that maybe there's no respect for somebody who most likely murdered 150 people.
Respect for him or not. But what usually happens here is that his family and friends will be harassed.
In germany issues like this are taken seriously. Here is a famous example of German laws concerning human dignity.
That's a really good point, I hadn't considered family and friends and I recently read that they had to station police officers at his family's house to prevent them from being harassed too much. Wow, I'm glad that there are laws like that in Germany. Can't even imagine somebody winning a case like that in America without having a much worse reason than that.