Table Of ContentFatal Descent
Andreas Lubitz and the Crash of Germanwings Flight
9525
By Jeff Wise
Copyright © 2015 by Jeff Wise
CONTENTS
I. TEN MINUTES
II. MONTABAUR
III. FIT TO FLY
IV. CONVERSION DISORDER
V. THE LURE OF SUICIDE
VI. THE WAY OUT
VII. I AM ANDREAS LUBITZ
VIII. AFTERWORD
NOTES
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
I. TEN MINUTES
The departure area is nearly empty. Above the floor of polished pink
granite, white latticelike trusses support walls of glass two stories high that offer
a cinematic view over the concrete expanse of the tarmac and its ceaseless traffic
of baggage carts, fuel trucks, and taxiing jets. The sky is overcast, and the air a
little cooler than usual for this time of year in Barcelona, just barely nudging up
into the 50s. Spring just a few days old, and still in the habits of winter.
One by one, and by twos, and then in larger clusters, the passengers arrive
and sit down to wait. A young father bounces his baby while his wife prepares a
bottle. A seated woman leans against a brown leather backpack, her elbow on
her knee and her cheek on her fist. A cluster of teenage students streams in,
chattering in German. A young man rises to find something for his mother to eat.
People stare out the floor-to-ceiling windows, or page through their paperbacks,
or look at their cell-phone screens. Here they are, stuck in the place between
doing one thing and doing the next, the kind of time when one can neither truly
focus nor relax.
A little after 9 a.m., a plane rolls up to the jetway. A stream of passengers
emerges from one of the gates, pools near the Samsung TV displaying a judo
match, and then meanders off. Over the PA comes the announcement that the
flight will begin boarding. The passengers, who have been waiting patiently, file
down the gray-walled jetway, turn left, and are greeted at the aircraft door by a
flight attendant wearing a maroon jacket and scarf over a white wide-collar shirt:
“Guten Morgen!” she says with a tireless smile. “Good morning!” Through the
open doorway, the captain is visible in the left-hand seat, running through
checklists in preparation for the flight. The first officer’s seat is out of sight to
the right.
The plane, an Airbus A320-211, is old. Built in 1990, it is one of the last of
its kind still flying. Designed to carry 150 to 180 passengers on short-haul
routes, it has had a hard life, sometimes flying as many as four round-trips a day
for its owner, Lufthansa. It should have been headed for the boneyard, but
recently European aviation authorities have relaxed their rules so it has been
cleared to fly for many more years. It’s no longer deemed worthy of service for
Germany’s flag carrier, however, so it’s been assigned to one of the carrier’s
subsidiaries, the budget airline Germanwings.
The passengers file down the single center aisle to take their seats. In front
of the first row, marked off with a pleated gray curtain, is the galley, and a few
feet beyond that, the cockpit door. A plastic window to the left of the curtain
gives passengers on that side of the plane a clear view of this door.
The passengers stow their bags and settle into their seats. The captain
comes on the PA and says the flight is running 20 minutes late, but the crew will
try to make up the time en route. The flight attendants conduct the safety
briefing in German and English, then pass up and down the aisle. Everyone
waits. The plane comes to life and begins to move backward. The engines spool
up, and the plane reverses direction, rolling forward before turning left and then
right on the taxiway. After a few more minutes of waiting, the plane dashes onto
the runway and turns parallel to the centerline. The engines immediately
crescendo to a roar as the craft surges forward.
The front of the plane cranes into the air, and the passengers feel themselves
bellying upward into the sky, the tarmac and the apron falling away. To the right
the ocean stretches into the distance beneath a lid of low clouds. The engines
drone as the plane rises over beachside tennis courts and swimming pools. Then
the view instantly goes white, and the passenger compartment bumps along
momentarily through the blankness inside the clouds, until just as suddenly the
view resolves itself into a vista of snowy cloud tops and dazzling blue sky.
Passengers close their eyes, or study the snack menu, or adjust the overhead
air vent. The plane settles on an easterly heading just off the coast, paralleling
the beaches and rocky headlands of the Costa Brava of northeastern Spain.
Passengers’ ears pop as the plane climbs through 10,000 feet. Leaving land
behind, the flight heads east across the mouth of the Gulf of Lion. The clouds
below give way to glittering dark sea. To the right lies the expanse of the
Mediterranean; to the left, the coast of southern France, with the distinctive eye-
of-the-needle Thau Lagoon set in a smooth broad arc of shoreline.
Flight attendants push a food cart up the aisle, passing out drawstring bags
with cold-cut sandwiches, a small bottle of water, and a packet of Haribo gummy
bears. The engines’ steady drone grows quieter and settles in pitch as the plane
reaches its cruising altitude of 38,000 feet. Five minutes later, at 10:30 a.m., it
heads inland just south of Marseille. Passengers sitting on the left side can see
the pink-roofed ancient port city sprawl along the rugged coast.
The left wing dips. Out the windows the landscape wheels for a moment,
and then the plane straightens out on its new course. The cockpit door opens, the
gray curtain shifts aside, and the captain, 34-year-old Patrick Sondenheimer,
emerges. Smooth-cheeked, with a high forehead and a receding hairline, he
carries himself with brisk precision down the aisle past the passengers, toward
the lavatory at the rear of the plane.
Moments later, the engines under the wings become significantly quieter,
and the plane seems to tilt downward, as though in preparation for landing. For
most of the passengers, the change in attitude barely registers. It’s just one of the
many adjustments in speed, heading, and angle of attack that planes make as
they wend their way through busy airspace.
Below, Provence scrolls past. Long ridges rise above broad valleys patched
with towns and fields. To the left, neatly paralleling the plane’s track, the
Durance River threads a sinuous course from the Alps to the sea.
The view is changing, and it’s not just because the land below is rising
toward the mountains. There’s a hard-to-define quality about the scenery, for the
few who are taking it in. It looks different. The reason is that in the last three
minutes the plane has descended 8,000 feet—a fifth of its altitude.
Captain Sondenheimer emerges from the lavatory and strolls back to the
front of the plane, his gait a little quicker than before. He parts the gray curtain,
slips through, and presses two digits on a keypad on the wall near the entrance to
the cockpit. He waits.
Checking his watch, Sondenheimer picks up an intercom handset, pushes a
button, and holds the phone to his ear. A moment later he hangs up. Passengers
at the front of the plane can see he’s frustrated as he enters a longer sequence of
digits into the keypad. Nothing. He knocks. Then knocks again, harder. “Um
Gottes Willen, mach die Tür auf!" he barks. “For God’s sake, open the door!”
A murmur ripples through the front of the cabin. The captain is banging on
the door now. What is going on? Is it possible—is he locked out?
Out the window, the world clearly doesn’t look the way it should from a
plane at cruising altitude. It doesn’t have that flat, abstract look—the passengers
aren’t above the world, they’re in it. The mountains have palpable three-
dimensional shapes. The view to the right is of a forested ridge. To the left, small
villages nestle in a bowl of peaks that seem nearly as high as the plane. Wait,
have we started the descent? That’s not right. We’ve got another hour to go.
The passengers’ murmuring grows louder, punctuated by gasps and
exclamations at each of the captain’s shouts. He’s banging with all his might
now. “Mach die verdammte Tür auf!"—“Open the damned door!”
All the window shades are up now. Mountain ridges slide past at nearly eye
level. Forested slopes fill the windows on either side. The desperation in the
captain’s voice is palpable as he attacks the door.
Everyone’s awake. Passengers sitting by the windows press their faces
against the acrylic panes, while those in the aisle seats crane their necks, looking
left and right.
The peaks drift past like the banks of a swift-moving stream. It’s like a
dream, to see the mountains so close. Flutters of anxiety are giving way to a
harder edge of fear. Of course, the passengers tell themselves, this must be
normal, everything always is. There must be a good reason.
The plane so low, the pilot screaming—what if it is what it looks like? What
if the plane is out of control? Something’s wrong, and the pilot’s locked out.
Something’s wrong and he can’t fix it. This is bad. This is bad.
Something has gone horribly wrong.
Each of the passengers has had the feeling before, in an instant of worry
during unexpected turbulence, of breathtaking dread, that sudden confrontation
with the all-too-real possibility that life could end, not somewhere in the distant
future, but here and now, right now. On other occasions, those thoughts have
been fleeting. Now they have come back, dwarfing those earlier shivers like the
sun outshines a spark.
No.
A warbling cry. A shout.
The cabin erupts in screams: “Mein Gött!”
“Dios mio!”
“Mama!”
No.
You can see each tree from this height. Each fissure in a crag.
No!
Each stone.
AT 10:41 A.M. ON Tuesday, March 24, 2015, an Airbus A320 operating as
Germanwings Flight 9525 flew into a gully in the French Alps near the village of
Le Vernet at a speed of 460 mph, instantly killing the 150 people on board. Like
any commercial air crash, it drew international news coverage. But its unusual
nature generated an outsize share of attention. Why would a modern airliner with
no apparent mechanical defects descend steadily from cruising altitude until it
hit the ground?
Such an incident would be disturbing enough on its own, but it was all the
more unsettling given the context. In the past year there have been a string of
unprecedented and unexplained commercial air crashes. First, on the previous
March 8, Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 diverted from its planned route and
vanished from radar screens. The whereabouts of the Boeing 777 remain
unknown. Four months later, another 777 operated by Malaysia Airlines was
blasted out of the sky by a Russian surface-to-air missile over a rebel-held area
of eastern Ukraine. Then, in December, an AirAsia Airbus A320 crashed off the
coast of Borneo under circumstances that remain unexplained.
Experts agreed that the events were unrelated. Yet it was hard to shake an
uncanny feeling that international air travel was under some kind of dark cloud.
The baffling circumstances of the Germanwings tragedy seemed to fit perfectly
into the apparently growing trend. A hundred and fifty people dead, and no
plausible explanation at hand. It was not only tragic, but also worrying.
Official investigators eventually released findings that painted a clearer yet
no less disturbing picture of the crash. According to French prosecutor Brice
Robin, the plane’s first officer, a 27-year-old German named Andreas Lubitz,
had locked the captain out of the cockpit and then deliberately flown the plane
into the side of a mountain. Lubitz, Robin revealed, had had a history of mental
illness, and, due to recent medical problems, feared that his career was about to
end. He had committed suicide and murdered 149 other people in the process.
This account solved the mystery, but only up to a point. Even though we
know what happened, a deeper and perhaps unanswerable enigma remains: how?
What was going on between Andreas Lubitz’s ears that would lead him to carry
out such an incomprehensible act?
In the weeks that followed, the world press scoured Lubitz’s home town, the
city where he had last lived, and the schools he had attended in a desperate
attempt to shed light on what drove him to commit suicide and mass murder.
Reporters talked to friends, classmates, colleagues, and girlfriends. Few could
say anything more than that he had seemed like a nice guy—friendly, polite, and
dependable. In the absence of any other indications of suspicious behavior or
character flaws, attention kept circling back to his mental illness. It emerged that
he had been seeing multiple doctors just before he crashed the plane. Police
searching his house reportedly found “a small mountain of pills.” Clearly,
something must have been very wrong.
Time passed, and investigators stopped discussing the case. Those who
knew Lubitz grew tired of answering journalists’ questions. The media caravan
rolled on. The deeper mystery remained.
As I write this, two months have passed since Germanwings 9525 crashed
in the Alps. In the quiet aftermath of the media storm, I traveled to Germany,
France, and Spain to see the places where Lubitz spent his formative years and
to talk to people who knew him. Combining my reporting with previous
accounts and official information, including the passenger manifest, black-box
data, and transcripts of the cockpit voice recorder, I believe that we can finally
begin to answer the questions still looming over the most disturbing aviation
disaster in recent memory. How could an authority figure as trusted and vetted as
a commercial airline pilot turn murderous without a flicker of warning? What
actually happened inside the cockpit? And: Do existing airline regulations leave
us vulnerable to similar attacks in the future?
II. MONTABAUR
If there are any answers to be found in the mystery of Germanwings 9525,
the place to start looking is here, in a flat grassy field a half-mile from the center
of the small town of Montabaur, Germany. The field, 3,250 feet long and 200
feet wide, is bounded by forest and farm fields, with a steep ramp-like rise at one
end and a small control tower at the other. This is the home of Luftsportclub
Westerwald, a nonprofit soaring club that keeps a few gliders in a hangar next to
the tower.
These graceful planes have no motors; long, lightweight wings convert the
energy of gravity into speed and lift. In calm air they can glide nearly a mile for
every 100 feet of altitude they lose. But when conditions are favorable, and the
sun heats the landscape in uneven patches, glider pilots can prolong their flights
indefinitely by circling within rising columns of air called thermals. To get in the
air in the first place, gliders are either towed behind a powered aircraft or, as is
more common at Westerwald, pulled into the air by a high-powered winch.
On a recent weekend afternoon I sat in the back of a two-seat German-made
Schleicher ASK 21 glider as it rested on the grass at the tower end of the airstrip.
The day was flawless, cool and sunny, with a languid westerly breeze. The pilot,
in the front seat, gave a hand signal and 3000 feet away a 300-horsepower diesel
motor mounted on the back of a truck began furiously spinning. In an instant the
towrope ahead of us went taut and, with a yank that seemed to pull the skin back
from my face, the glider leaped forward. For a moment we skimmed a few feet
over the grass, then the pilot pulled back on the stick and we nosed up sharply
into a 50-degree climb. The ground fell away as the altimeter dial turned: 100
meters, 200, 300. At 400 meters, the tow rope dropped away and we were
soaring free. Almost immediately we found ourselves in a thermal and gyred
upward: 500, 600, 700 meters. We were in what is known as a house thermal—a
reliable source of warm, rising air that serves pilots as a dependable elevator into
the sky. Farmland, forests, and small towns wheeled around us as we turned, the
panorama stretching to a haze-shrouded horizon. To the east, beyond a wooded
hill crowned with radio towers, the winding course of the Rhine shone like a
bright ribbon.
There are clubs like this every 10 or 20 miles all across Germany. No other
country has such a passion for gliding. Indeed, of all the glider pilots in the
world (a number among which I count myself), the majority are German. There
are historical reasons for this phenomenon. For one thing, the first practical
