The Germanwings copilot who is thought to have deliberately crashed the Airbus he was flying in the French Alps, killing all 150 aboard, told his ex-girlfriend that “one day everyone will know my name,” according to German newspaper Bild.
In an interview, the 26-year-old flight attendant identified as Maria W told Bild that when she heard about the crash she recalled Andreas Lubitz telling her last year: “One day I’m going to do something that will change the whole system, and everyone will know my name and remember.”
The “black box” voice recorder indicates that Lubitz, 27, locked his captain out of the cockpit on Tuesday before apparently flying Flight 4U9525 into a mountainside in a deliberate act, French officials have said, in what appears to have been a case of suicide and mass killing.
Photo: Reuters
French Prime Minister Manuel Valls said that all the signs were “pointing toward an act that we cannot describe: criminal, crazy, suicidal.”
German prosecutors said that searches of Lubitz’s homes netted “medical documents that suggest an existing illness and appropriate medical treatment,” including “torn-up and current sick leave notes, among them one covering the day of the crash.”
They did not specify the illness. According to Bild, the young woman, who was “very shocked,” flew with Lubitz on European flights for five months last year, during which time they are believed to have been romantically involved.
Photo: Reuters
If Lubitz did deliberately crash the aircraft, “it is because he understood that because of his health problems, his big dream of a job at Lufthansa, as captain and as a long-haul pilot was practically impossible,” she told Bild.
The pair separated “because it became increasingly clear that he had a problem,” she told the daily, adding that at night he would wake up and scream “We’re going down,” and was plagued by nightmares.
Bild earlier reported that Lubitz sought psychiatric help for “a bout of serious depression” in 2009 and was still getting assistance from doctors, quoting documents from Germany’s air transport regulator.
Lufthansa chief executive Carsten Spohr said that Lubitz had suspended his pilot training, which began in 2008, “for a certain period,” before restarting and qualifying for the Airbus A320 in 2013.
Half of the 150 victims of Tuesday’s disaster were German, with Spain accounting for at least 50 and the remainder composed of more than a dozen other nationalities.
Germanwings on Friday said it had offered the victims’ families “up to 50,000 euros [US$54,800] per passenger” toward families’ immediate costs.
The assistance, which the families would not be required to pay back, was separate from the compensation that the airline is likely to have to pay over the disaster, a Germanwings spokesman told reporters.
Lubitz lived with his parents in his small home town of Montabaur in Germany’s Rhineland and kept an apartment in Duesseldorf, the city where his aircraft was bound from Barcelona.
Duesseldorf prosecutors said the evidence “backs up the suspicion” that Lubitz “hid his illness from his employer and his colleagues.”
They said they had not found a suicide note, confession or anything pointing to a “political or religious” motive but added it would take “several days” to evaluate the rest of what was collected.
Reiner Kemmler, a psychologist who specializes in training pilots, said that people “know that depression can compromise their airworthiness and they can hide it.”
“If someone dissimulates, i.e., they do not want other people to notice, it is very, very difficult [to diagnose],” Kemmler told Deutschlandfunk public radio.
Lubitz apparently locked himself into the cockpit when the captain went out to use the toilet, then refused his colleague’s increasingly desperate entreaties to reopen the door, French prosecutor Brice Robin said.
According to Bild, the captain even tried using an axe to hack through the armored door.
Meanwhile in Montabaur, Mayor Edmund Schaaf urged reporters camped out in the community to show restraint toward Lubitz’s parents, a banker and a church organist.
“Regardless of whether the accusations against the copilot are true, we sympathize with his family and ask the media to be considerate,” he said.
Investigators said that Lubitz’s intention was clear because he operated a button that sent the aircraft into a plunge.
For the next eight minutes, Lubitz was apparently calm and breathing normally.
Recovery operations at the remote crash site were still under way, with French officials continuing to comb the mountain for human remains and additional evidence.
The aircraft’s second black box, which records flight data, has not yet been recovered.
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