Germanwings Flight 9525 (4U9525/GWI9525) was a scheduled international passenger flight flying from Barcelona, Spain to Düsseldorf, Germany, operated by the Lufthansa-owned low-cost airline Germanwings.
On 24 March 2015, the Airbus A320-200 jetliner crashed around northwest of Nice, in the French Alps. All 144 passengers and six crew members were killed.
The crash was a murder-suicide planned and acted out by 27-year old co-pilot Andreas Lubitz.
Overview
The plane, which had taken off at 10:01 a.m. from the Barcelona-El Prat airport, disappeared from the radars at 10:39 a.m., when it was at an altitude of 2,000 meters above the department of Alpes de Alta. Provence, in the Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur region.
Telemetry data indicated that, before disappearing from radar, the A320 would have started to fall at 10:31 a.m. and would have lost about 4,000 meters of altitude in four minutes. At first it was thought that the pilots had issued an emergency signal at 10:47, when the plane was at an altitude of 1,500 feet and in an abnormal situation, but it was actually sent by the controllers. In the words of the President of the French Republic, François Hollande, the conditions of the incident suggest that there would be no survivors. Hollande also initially stated that the plane was carrying German, Spanish and Turkish passengers, without specifying whether there were more victims of other nationalities.
The main hypothesis for the cause of the aircraft crash is that co-pilot Andreas Lubitz deliberately caused it to crash. The recording of one of the black boxes of the destroyed Airbus allows us to verify that Lubitz activated the closing of the cockpit door and deliberately began the descent of the plane over the mountains. His breathing at the time of descent was normal and he ignored the captain's instructions to open the door, even when the latter tried to knock it down with an ax to regain control of the aircraft.
Crew and passengers
Opera singers Oleg Bryjak and Maria Radner were passengers on the plane.
Notes
References
Other websites
"Accident to the Airbus A320-211 registered D-AIPX, flight GWI18G, on 24 March 2015" ( ) - Bureau d'Enquêtes et d'Analyses pour la Sécurité de l'Aviation Civile Statement by Germanwings