Two years to the day after 150 people died aboard a Germanwings flight in the French Alps, the father of co-pilot Andreas Lubitz has rejected investigator findings that his son was depressed and deliberately crashed the plane.
Families of the crash victims attacked Friday’s press conference by Günter Lubitz as tasteless, coming just as they mourned their loved ones who died aboard flight 4U9525 from Barcelona to Düsseldorf.
Mr Lubitz said his decision to go public would have caused controversy no matter when he did so, insisting his family – like all others – had been “stunned” by the tragedy.
“We have to live with not just losing our son, but that he’s presented in the media as an unstable mass murderer . . . and long-term depression sufferer,” he said to journalists in Berlin. That image contradicted his own memory of Andreas Lubitz as a “life-affirming” person.
His son had been not been treated for depression since 2009, Mr Lubitz said, and he visited doctors before the crash complaining of clouded vision and sleep problems.
On suspicion the pilot’s complaints were psychosomatic, doctors prescribed Andreas Lubitz anti-depressants permissible for use by pilots and not believed to impair judgment, he said.
Mr Lubitz said that in the two years since the crash, his son’s grave had been damaged and his memory defamed. A tabloid newspaper report, claiming Lubitz told an ex-girlfriend he would do something for which “everyone will remember my name”, was now viewed by investigators as made up.
Crash files
The Lubitz family commissioned air crash investigator Tim van Beveren to examine the crash investigation files. Mr van Beveren’s report describes as illegal the seizure – and leaking – of the co-pilot’s medical records and contradicts core assertions of the French investigator.
The French inquiry found the senior pilot was locked out of the cockpit after going to the toilet and was unable to regain entry, because the door was locked from the inside. Mr van Beveren, however, said it was not at all clear that Lubitz was alone in the cockpit at the time of the impact.
Even if he was, he added, breathing heard on the final moments of the cockpit recording gave no indication whether he was awake or unconscious.
In Mr van Beveren’s view, the French investigator’s reconstruction of the last minutes of Flight 4U9525 were “pure speculation”, not least because the black box flight path-tracking chip was charred in the crash.
“I was very surprised that the cause of the accident was clear to French investigators after just two days,” he said. Though he had no complete theory as to what caused the crash, he said the Lubitz family would continue “looking for the truth”.
As about 500 people gathered in the French Alpine town of Digne-les-Bains to remember the dead, Germany’s western city of Haltern remembered 16 school students who died in the crash after a trip to Spain.
Relatives of the dead are still battling Germanwings’ parent company Lufthansa, demanding a doubling of compensation paid of €25,000 per victim.
