Suicide by Airbus???

PARIS — The co-pilot of Germanwings flight 9525 deliberately crashed the aircraft, French officials said Thursday, pointing to voice recorder evidence that he had locked the captain out of the cockpit, ignored his pleas for re-entry and steered down into the French Alps as passengers were heard screaming.

The assertions instantly changed the nature of the Tuesday crash, which obliterated the Airbus A320 and killed all 150 aboard, into a wide-ranging criminal investigation that focused on the co-pilot, a 27-year-old German with no obvious reason to commit mass murder, who had been hired less than two years ago. The top executive of Lufthansa, the parent company of Germanwings, said he was speechless at the news from France.

In Marseille, the chief prosecutor handling the criminal investigation, Brice Robin, said, “At this moment, in light of investigation, the interpretation we can give at this time is that the co-pilot through voluntary abstention refused to open the door of the cockpit to the commander, and activated the button that commands the loss of altitude.”

Mr. Robin said it appeared that the intention of the co-pilot, identified as Andreas Lubitz, had been “to destroy the aircraft.” He said the voice recorder showed that the co-pilot had been breathing until before the moment of impact, suggesting that he was conscious and deliberate in bringing the plane down and killing 144 passengers and five other crew members on Tuesday. The German Foreign Ministry said half the dead were Germans, including four dual-nationals.

Data Suggest Plane’s Autopilot Was Manually Reset to Bring It Down
The autopilot on Flight 9525 was manually reset to take the aircraft down to 96 feet, according to FlightRadar24, a web site that tracks aviation data. The website surmised that 96 feet was the lowest altitude setting the system would accept.

The change was made just before the plane began a steep descent that lasted more than 8 minutes. The aircraft struck a mountainside at an altitude of about 6,000 feet.

“Between 09:30:52 and 09:30:55, we can see that the autopilot was manually changed from 38,000 feet,” FlightRadar24 posted in a forum on its site, adding that nine seconds later, “the aircraft started to descend, probably with the ‘open descent’ autopilot setting.”

The autopilot will quite happily take you into a mountainside.