French investigators yesterday were to publish their final crash report on the Germanwings plane deliberately flown into a French mountainside by its co-pilot in a tragedy that raised unprecedented safety questions.
French Bureau of Investigation and Analysis (BEA) civil aviation investigators were primarily expected to make recommendations on the locking of cockpit doors during flights.
As a result of the Germanwings last year — in which 150 people traveling between Barcelona, Spain, and Duesseldorf, Germany, died — European aviation authorities have already recommended making it compulsory to have two people in the cockpit at any time during flights.
However, some nations are opposed to the measure, with Germany’s pilots’ union believing it poses “risks that outweigh any supposed improvements in security.”
In the fateful flight on March 24 last year, co-pilot Andreas Lubitz locked the pilot out of the cockpit. Ten minutes later, the Airbus 320 crashed into a mountain hillside, killing all 144 passengers and six crew.
It emerged that Lubitz had been suffering from depression and had seen dozens of doctors in the years preceding the crash.
However, under German law, none was able to alert his employers to his state of mind and he was allowed to continue flying.
On the “black box” voice recorder recovered at the crash scene, all that is heard from Lubitz is regular breathing. He gave no words of explanation for his murderous course of action.
The European Aviation Safety Agency has already recommended stepping up medical testing for pilots, including more psychological tests.
BEA director Remi Jouty said the French investigation had sought to identify the “systematic failures which led to this accident.”
The investigators have also looked at the “balance between medical secrecy and flight security.”
The dead included 72 Germans, including a group of 16 high-school students, and 50 Spaniards.
A German lawyer for some of the families of the dead this month said they intended to sue the training school in Phoenix, Arizona, which Lubitz attended, claiming it should have flagged up his psychological problems.
“The co-pilot interrupted his training there for a while due to psychological problems,” lawyer Christof Wellens said. “He should not have been allowed to resume his training.”
Germanwings’ parent company Lufthansa has paid 50,000 euros (US$56,000) per victim in an initial payment and offered an additional 25,000 euros to each of the families plus 10,000 euros to each immediate relative including parents, children and spouse.
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion