MONTCADA, Spain — Three months after the Germanwings jet crashed in the French Alps, about 500 tearful mourners packed a funeral home Saturday to say goodbye to Robert Oliver Calvo, who was on his last regular business trip abroad before a work change that would have kept him home more.
The father of two small children and the only child of his parents was remembered in an auditorium by the standing-room-only crowd as a deeply religious and dedicated family man, who had been on a business trip abroad for the Barcelona-based clothing store chain Desigual.
The only mention of the crash itself during the service in the hilly Barcelona suburb of Montcada was in the funeral program, which said he died at age 36 “in the airplane tragedy in the Alps on the Germanwings Airbus A320 owned by Lufthansa.”
“This is the worst thing that can happen to a father and a mother: lose a loved one,” Oliver Calvo’s father, Robert Tansill Oliver, said in an interview after the memorial service — the only one so far for a victim of the plane crash that journalists have been allowed to attend.
Oliver Calvo had worked for years as a real estate manager for a successful company that bucked Spain and Europe’s financial crisis with store openings galore, and his job was to travel to countries such as Austria, Germany, Poland and Switzerland for midweek trips lasting three to four days to make sure the openings went off without a hitch.
On March 24, he was on his way to open a new Duesseldorf store when the plane’s co-pilot, Andreas Lubitz, locked the pilot out of the cockpit and deliberately crashed the aircraft into a mountain. The trip was supposed to be Oliver Calvo’s last before a promotion that would have kept him involved in the chain’s real estate business but traveling nowhere near as much.
“He just didn’t want to be on the road so much. He had been traveling all over Europe for years, and now he wasn’t going to be traveling every week or every other week so he could spend more time with his family,” friend Luis Anera, who led the memorial service, said.
His father and many others at the funeral home read aloud from the Bibles they brought to the funeral service. He said the family finds some solace because they are Jehovah’s Witnesses and are convinced that Oliver Calvo will be resurrected.
His son’s remains were among those of 32 victims sent to Spain this week after the remains of German victims were sent home. In all, 150 people died in the plane crash — most of them German or Spanish.
Tansill Oliver said after the service that the crash investigation must answer how Lubitz managed to continue flying despite visiting dozens of doctors in the five years he had been working for the low-cost division of Lufthansa.
And he urged people who may have known Lubitz to contact authorities in the hope that their observations about his behavior might help explain what caused him to crash the Germanwings flight and what warning signals might have been missed before he did so.
