Inset: Andreas Lubitz the suicide co-pilot
By agency report
On March 24 2015, Germanwings Flight 9525 was cruising from Barcelona to Düsseldorf. Nothing seemed unusual.
Then, the captain stepped out of the cockpit, and tragedy began.
Co-pilot Andreas Lubitz locked the reinforced cockpit door. From that moment, no one could get inside.
He quietly programmed the plane into a steady descent toward the French Alps.
The captain pounded on the door. Passengers screamed in the cabin. Air traffic controllers tried to make contact.
But inside the cockpit, Lubitz said nothing. He simply watched the altitude fall.
At 700 km/h, the Airbus A320 slammed into a mountainside. The crash killed all 150 people on board in seconds.
Families, children, and an entire high school class on a trip — gone.
The investigation revealed chilling details. Lubitz had a long history of severe depression.
He had been declared unfit to work by doctors. But he hid his condition from his employer. He even searched online for ways to crash a plane in the days before the flight.
The reinforced cockpit door, designed after 9/11 to keep terrorists out, made rescue impossible.
What was meant to save lives became the very reason no one could stop him. A single locked door decided the fate of 150 people.
