Father of Germanwings suicide pilot Andreas Lubitz angers victims' families as he protests son's innocence
The father of Andreas Lubitz, the Germanwings co-pilot who deliberately crashed his aircraft killing 150 people, on Friday claimed his son was not responsible for the disaster.
An emotional Günther Lubitz told a press conference in Berlin his son was not depressed or suicidal at the time of the 2015 tragedy, as is widely believed.
But he failed to produce the evidence he had promised that would clear his son’s name.
Instead, he offered a new report commissioned by the family which picked holes in the official investigation and suggested a different sequence of events.
Rather than locking Capt Patrick Sondenheimer out of the cockpit and flying the Airbus into the French Alps, the 17-year-old co-pilot could have started a routine descent and then fallen unconscious at the controls, the report argued.
“I know you would like an alternative accident scenario, but I do not know what happened on board the Germanwings aircraft,” Tim van Beveran, a well-known German aviation journalist who wrote the report for the family, said.
“I can only offer new possible explanations.”
The official investigation found that Lubitz repeatedly overrode an electronic keypad the captain used to try to unlock the cockpit door and save the doomed flight.
But Mr van Beveran, suggested the keypad could have malfunctioned. He had received information that the keypad on the plane in question was faulty and that flight crew had been unable to use it to enter the cockpit on the ground just two days before the disaster, he said.
Lawyers for the family said the official investigation had failed to prove Lubitz’s guilt and called for it to be reopened.
“We have to live with the fact that we have not only lost our son, but that he was portrayed as a depressed mass murderer two days later,” Lubitz’s father, the emotion showing on his face, told the packed press conference.
“We have to live with the fact that our son is always mentioned when something terrible happens. We have to live with the fact that our son is portrayed as a severe depressive.”
Mr Lubitz admitted his son suffered a serious episode of depression in 2008 and 2009, but claimed he had recoevred.
“I would like to emphasize that we saw our son full of life in the six years before the crash. Our son was not depressed at the time of the crash,” he said.
But when he was asked directly whether he believed his son was innocent, Mr Lubitz twice failed to answer, instead replying: “We are looking for the truth”
Germanwings Flight 9525 took off from Barcelona on its way to Düsseldorf at just after 1am on March 24, 2015. Half an hour later the aircraft began descending rapidly and controllers lost radio contact. The wreckage was found in the French Alps.
Among the dead were a party of 16 German school children returning from an exchange trip with a Spanish school and three Britons, including a seven-month old baby.
Investigations by the French and German authorities found conclusive evidence that Andreas Lubitz, the 27-year-old co-pilot, had deliberately locked the captain out of the cockpit and crashed the aircraft in an act of suicide.
Capt Patrick Sondenheimer, who had left the flight deck to go to the toilet, can be clearly heard on the cockpit voice recorder hammering on the door and calling to Lubitz to let him in. Lubitz does not reply, but the sound of him breathing can be heard.
The fight data recorder shows that Lubitz made inputs into the aircraft’s autopilot ordering it to make a rapid descent and fly into the Alps.
Lubitz had a history of depression and a doctor had grounded him and ordered his pilot training suspened in 2008 during a severe episode. He was later diagnosed to have recovered and cleared to fly again.
