DUESSELDORF, Germany — The co-pilot of the doomed Germanwings flight locked himself in the cockpit and, with apparent cool precision, slammed into a mountain, a French prosecutor said Thursday.
The flight recorder showed the co-pilot of Germanwings Flight 9525, identified as Andreas Lubitz, did not say a word once the captain left the cockpit. All that was heard was his breathing until the crash.
“It was absolute silence in the cockpit,” said Marseille, France-based prosecutor Brice Robin.
The conclusions, based on cockpit flight recordings recovered from the wreckage, shifted the crash investigation into a realm that Germany’s chancellor called “incomprehensible”: an intentional, eight-minute descent Tuesday that ended with the A320 jet disintegrating in the French Alps, killing all 150 people aboard.
Those who knew Lubitz, 28, said he never appeared anything but thrilled to have landed a pilot’s job with Germanwings.
“He was happy he had the job with Germanwings, and he was doing well,” said Peter Ruecker, a member of Lubitz’s hometown flight club, who watched him learn to fly. “He was very happy. He gave off a good feeling.”
Lubitz had been flying with Germanwings since September 2013 and had flown 630 hours, said Lufthansa, the parent company of the budget carrier.
Robin said Lubitz, 28, had no known links to suspected terrorist groups but noted the investigation remained wide open.
“People who commit suicide usually do so alone. … I don’t call it a suicide,” he said.
A “new, simply incomprehensible, dimension,” German Chancellor Angela Merkel said after learning of the French claims. “Something like this goes beyond anything we can imagine.”
In his native village of Montabaur, about 50 miles northwest of Frankfurt, Lubitz had been a member of a local aviation club since he was a teenager.
“Andreas became a member of the association and wanted his dream of flying to be realized. He began in the gliding school and made it to become a pilot,” read a statement on the website of the club, Luftsportclub Westerwald.
Germany’s interior minister, Thomas de Maiziere, said checks on domestic police and intelligence databases on the day of the crash turned up no red flags concerning Lubitz.
Like nearly all pilots in the Lufthansa airline group, Lubitz did part of his training at the carrier’s facility outside Phoenix — selected by many aviation schools for the area’s arid and clear weather.
Lubitz’s Facebook page included a photo of him smiling in a relaxed pose with the Golden Gate Bridge in the background.
Lubitz once interrupted his training. Lufthansa could not make public the reasons for the break but considered Lubitz “fit to fly” Tuesday, said the carrier’s chief executive, Carsten Spohr.
“We at Lufthansa are speechless,” he said in Cologne, Germany.
Spohr said normal procedures were followed when the pilot left the cockpit — waiting until the flight was at cruising altitude and with no weather problems foreseen. He described the cockpit exchanges between the pilot and Lubitz as normal, even “cheerful.”
“You are in control,” the pilot said to Lubitz as he left, Spohr recounted.
The audio recording later carries the frantic sounds of someone banging at the cockpit door.
The captain of the plane had more than 6,000 hours of flying time and had been a Germanwings pilot since May 2014, having previously flown for Lufthansa and Condor, Lufthansa said, according to news reports.
An Airbus training video shows that the cockpit door of the A320 has safeguards in case one pilot becomes incapacitated inside while the other remains outside, or if both pilots inside were to lose consciousness.
If there is no response, a member of the flight crew can tap in an emergency code. If there is still no response, the door opens automatically. If a person has been denied access, the door remains locked for five minutes, according to the training video.
But the Lufthansa CEO said there are ways to override the system and fully lock the cockpit.
“The co-pilot deliberately refrained from opening to the pilot and activated the device leading to the loss of altitude of the plane,” Robin said. “The reason why the co-pilot chose to do this is unknown so far.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
