Fatal Descent Andreas Lubitz and the Crash of Germanwings Flight 9525 By Jeff Wise Copyright © 2015 by Jeff Wise CONTENTS I. TEN MINUTES II. MONTABAUR III. FIT TO FLY IV. CONVERSION DISORDER V. THE LURE OF SUICIDE VI. THE WAY OUT VII. I AM ANDREAS LUBITZ VIII. AFTERWORD NOTES ABOUT THE AUTHOR I. TEN MINUTES The departure area is nearly empty. Above the floor of polished pink granite, white latticelike trusses support walls of glass two stories high that offer a cinematic view over the concrete expanse of the tarmac and its ceaseless traffic of baggage carts, fuel trucks, and taxiing jets. The sky is overcast, and the air a little cooler than usual for this time of year in Barcelona, just barely nudging up into the 50s. Spring just a few days old, and still in the habits of winter. One by one, and by twos, and then in larger clusters, the passengers arrive and sit down to wait. A young father bounces his baby while his wife prepares a bottle. A seated woman leans against a brown leather backpack, her elbow on her knee and her cheek on her fist. A cluster of teenage students streams in, chattering in German. A young man rises to find something for his mother to eat. People stare out the floor-to-ceiling windows, or page through their paperbacks, or look at their cell-phone screens. Here they are, stuck in the place between doing one thing and doing the next, the kind of time when one can neither truly focus nor relax. A little after 9 a.m., a plane rolls up to the jetway. A stream of passengers emerges from one of the gates, pools near the Samsung TV displaying a judo match, and then meanders off. Over the PA comes the announcement that the flight will begin boarding. The passengers, who have been waiting patiently, file down the gray-walled jetway, turn left, and are greeted at the aircraft door by a flight attendant wearing a maroon jacket and scarf over a white wide-collar shirt: “Guten Morgen!” she says with a tireless smile. “Good morning!” Through the open doorway, the captain is visible in the left-hand seat, running through checklists in preparation for the flight. The first officer’s seat is out of sight to the right. The plane, an Airbus A320-211, is old. Built in 1990, it is one of the last of its kind still flying. Designed to carry 150 to 180 passengers on short-haul routes, it has had a hard life, sometimes flying as many as four round-trips a day for its owner, Lufthansa. It should have been headed for the boneyard, but recently European aviation authorities have relaxed their rules so it has been cleared to fly for many more years. It’s no longer deemed worthy of service for Germany’s flag carrier, however, so it’s been assigned to one of the carrier’s subsidiaries, the budget airline Germanwings. The passengers file down the single center aisle to take their seats. In front of the first row, marked off with a pleated gray curtain, is the galley, and a few feet beyond that, the cockpit door. A plastic window to the left of the curtain gives passengers on that side of the plane a clear view of this door. The passengers stow their bags and settle into their seats. The captain comes on the PA and says the flight is running 20 minutes late, but the crew will try to make up the time en route. The flight attendants conduct the safety briefing in German and English, then pass up and down the aisle. Everyone waits. The plane comes to life and begins to move backward. The engines spool up, and the plane reverses direction, rolling forward before turning left and then right on the taxiway. After a few more minutes of waiting, the plane dashes onto the runway and turns parallel to the centerline. The engines immediately crescendo to a roar as the craft surges forward. The front of the plane cranes into the air, and the passengers feel themselves bellying upward into the sky, the tarmac and the apron falling away. To the right the ocean stretches into the distance beneath a lid of low clouds. The engines drone as the plane rises over beachside tennis courts and swimming pools. Then the view instantly goes white, and the passenger compartment bumps along momentarily through the blankness inside the clouds, until just as suddenly the view resolves itself into a vista of snowy cloud tops and dazzling blue sky. Passengers close their eyes, or study the snack menu, or adjust the overhead air vent. The plane settles on an easterly heading just off the coast, paralleling the beaches and rocky headlands of the Costa Brava of northeastern Spain. Passengers’ ears pop as the plane climbs through 10,000 feet. Leaving land behind, the flight heads east across the mouth of the Gulf of Lion. The clouds below give way to glittering dark sea. To the right lies the expanse of the Mediterranean; to the left, the coast of southern France, with the distinctive eye- of-the-needle Thau Lagoon set in a smooth broad arc of shoreline. Flight attendants push a food cart up the aisle, passing out drawstring bags with cold-cut sandwiches, a small bottle of water, and a packet of Haribo gummy bears. The engines’ steady drone grows quieter and settles in pitch as the plane reaches its cruising altitude of 38,000 feet. Five minutes later, at 10:30 a.m., it heads inland just south of Marseille. Passengers sitting on the left side can see the pink-roofed ancient port city sprawl along the rugged coast. The left wing dips. Out the windows the landscape wheels for a moment, and then the plane straightens out on its new course. The cockpit door opens, the gray curtain shifts aside, and the captain, 34-year-old Patrick Sondenheimer, emerges. Smooth-cheeked, with a high forehead and a receding hairline, he carries himself with brisk precision down the aisle past the passengers, toward the lavatory at the rear of the plane. Moments later, the engines under the wings become significantly quieter, and the plane seems to tilt downward, as though in preparation for landing. For most of the passengers, the change in attitude barely registers. It’s just one of the many adjustments in speed, heading, and angle of attack that planes make as they wend their way through busy airspace. Below, Provence scrolls past. Long ridges rise above broad valleys patched with towns and fields. To the left, neatly paralleling the plane’s track, the Durance River threads a sinuous course from the Alps to the sea. The view is changing, and it’s not just because the land below is rising toward the mountains. There’s a hard-to-define quality about the scenery, for the few who are taking it in. It looks different. The reason is that in the last three minutes the plane has descended 8,000 feet—a fifth of its altitude. Captain Sondenheimer emerges from the lavatory and strolls back to the front of the plane, his gait a little quicker than before. He parts the gray curtain, slips through, and presses two digits on a keypad on the wall near the entrance to the cockpit. He waits. Checking his watch, Sondenheimer picks up an intercom handset, pushes a button, and holds the phone to his ear. A moment later he hangs up. Passengers at the front of the plane can see he’s frustrated as he enters a longer sequence of digits into the keypad. Nothing. He knocks. Then knocks again, harder. “Um Gottes Willen, mach die Tür auf!" he barks. “For God’s sake, open the door!” A murmur ripples through the front of the cabin. The captain is banging on the door now. What is going on? Is it possible—is he locked out? Out the window, the world clearly doesn’t look the way it should from a plane at cruising altitude. It doesn’t have that flat, abstract look—the passengers aren’t above the world, they’re in it. The mountains have palpable three- dimensional shapes. The view to the right is of a forested ridge. To the left, small villages nestle in a bowl of peaks that seem nearly as high as the plane. Wait, have we started the descent? That’s not right. We’ve got another hour to go. The passengers’ murmuring grows louder, punctuated by gasps and exclamations at each of the captain’s shouts. He’s banging with all his might now. “Mach die verdammte Tür auf!"—“Open the damned door!” All the window shades are up now. Mountain ridges slide past at nearly eye level. Forested slopes fill the windows on either side. The desperation in the captain’s voice is palpable as he attacks the door. Everyone’s awake. Passengers sitting by the windows press their faces against the acrylic panes, while those in the aisle seats crane their necks, looking left and right. The peaks drift past like the banks of a swift-moving stream. It’s like a dream, to see the mountains so close. Flutters of anxiety are giving way to a harder edge of fear. Of course, the passengers tell themselves, this must be normal, everything always is. There must be a good reason. The plane so low, the pilot screaming—what if it is what it looks like? What if the plane is out of control? Something’s wrong, and the pilot’s locked out. Something’s wrong and he can’t fix it. This is bad. This is bad. Something has gone horribly wrong. Each of the passengers has had the feeling before, in an instant of worry during unexpected turbulence, of breathtaking dread, that sudden confrontation with the all-too-real possibility that life could end, not somewhere in the distant future, but here and now, right now. On other occasions, those thoughts have been fleeting. Now they have come back, dwarfing those earlier shivers like the sun outshines a spark. No. A warbling cry. A shout. The cabin erupts in screams: “Mein Gött!” “Dios mio!” “Mama!” No. You can see each tree from this height. Each fissure in a crag. No! Each stone. AT 10:41 A.M. ON Tuesday, March 24, 2015, an Airbus A320 operating as Germanwings Flight 9525 flew into a gully in the French Alps near the village of Le Vernet at a speed of 460 mph, instantly killing the 150 people on board. Like any commercial air crash, it drew international news coverage. But its unusual nature generated an outsize share of attention. Why would a modern airliner with no apparent mechanical defects descend steadily from cruising altitude until it hit the ground? Such an incident would be disturbing enough on its own, but it was all the more unsettling given the context. In the past year there have been a string of unprecedented and unexplained commercial air crashes. First, on the previous March 8, Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 diverted from its planned route and vanished from radar screens. The whereabouts of the Boeing 777 remain unknown. Four months later, another 777 operated by Malaysia Airlines was blasted out of the sky by a Russian surface-to-air missile over a rebel-held area of eastern Ukraine. Then, in December, an AirAsia Airbus A320 crashed off the coast of Borneo under circumstances that remain unexplained. Experts agreed that the events were unrelated. Yet it was hard to shake an uncanny feeling that international air travel was under some kind of dark cloud. The baffling circumstances of the Germanwings tragedy seemed to fit perfectly into the apparently growing trend. A hundred and fifty people dead, and no plausible explanation at hand. It was not only tragic, but also worrying. Official investigators eventually released findings that painted a clearer yet no less disturbing picture of the crash. According to French prosecutor Brice Robin, the plane’s first officer, a 27-year-old German named Andreas Lubitz, had locked the captain out of the cockpit and then deliberately flown the plane into the side of a mountain. Lubitz, Robin revealed, had had a history of mental illness, and, due to recent medical problems, feared that his career was about to end. He had committed suicide and murdered 149 other people in the process. This account solved the mystery, but only up to a point. Even though we know what happened, a deeper and perhaps unanswerable enigma remains: how? What was going on between Andreas Lubitz’s ears that would lead him to carry out such an incomprehensible act? In the weeks that followed, the world press scoured Lubitz’s home town, the city where he had last lived, and the schools he had attended in a desperate attempt to shed light on what drove him to commit suicide and mass murder. Reporters talked to friends, classmates, colleagues, and girlfriends. Few could say anything more than that he had seemed like a nice guy—friendly, polite, and dependable. In the absence of any other indications of suspicious behavior or character flaws, attention kept circling back to his mental illness. It emerged that he had been seeing multiple doctors just before he crashed the plane. Police searching his house reportedly found “a small mountain of pills.” Clearly, something must have been very wrong. Time passed, and investigators stopped discussing the case. Those who knew Lubitz grew tired of answering journalists’ questions. The media caravan rolled on. The deeper mystery remained. As I write this, two months have passed since Germanwings 9525 crashed in the Alps. In the quiet aftermath of the media storm, I traveled to Germany, France, and Spain to see the places where Lubitz spent his formative years and to talk to people who knew him. Combining my reporting with previous accounts and official information, including the passenger manifest, black-box data, and transcripts of the cockpit voice recorder, I believe that we can finally begin to answer the questions still looming over the most disturbing aviation disaster in recent memory. How could an authority figure as trusted and vetted as a commercial airline pilot turn murderous without a flicker of warning? What actually happened inside the cockpit? And: Do existing airline regulations leave us vulnerable to similar attacks in the future? II. MONTABAUR If there are any answers to be found in the mystery of Germanwings 9525, the place to start looking is here, in a flat grassy field a half-mile from the center of the small town of Montabaur, Germany. The field, 3,250 feet long and 200 feet wide, is bounded by forest and farm fields, with a steep ramp-like rise at one end and a small control tower at the other. This is the home of Luftsportclub Westerwald, a nonprofit soaring club that keeps a few gliders in a hangar next to the tower. These graceful planes have no motors; long, lightweight wings convert the energy of gravity into speed and lift. In calm air they can glide nearly a mile for every 100 feet of altitude they lose. But when conditions are favorable, and the sun heats the landscape in uneven patches, glider pilots can prolong their flights indefinitely by circling within rising columns of air called thermals. To get in the air in the first place, gliders are either towed behind a powered aircraft or, as is more common at Westerwald, pulled into the air by a high-powered winch. On a recent weekend afternoon I sat in the back of a two-seat German-made Schleicher ASK 21 glider as it rested on the grass at the tower end of the airstrip. The day was flawless, cool and sunny, with a languid westerly breeze. The pilot, in the front seat, gave a hand signal and 3000 feet away a 300-horsepower diesel motor mounted on the back of a truck began furiously spinning. In an instant the towrope ahead of us went taut and, with a yank that seemed to pull the skin back from my face, the glider leaped forward. For a moment we skimmed a few feet over the grass, then the pilot pulled back on the stick and we nosed up sharply into a 50-degree climb. The ground fell away as the altimeter dial turned: 100 meters, 200, 300. At 400 meters, the tow rope dropped away and we were soaring free. Almost immediately we found ourselves in a thermal and gyred upward: 500, 600, 700 meters. We were in what is known as a house thermal—a reliable source of warm, rising air that serves pilots as a dependable elevator into the sky. Farmland, forests, and small towns wheeled around us as we turned, the panorama stretching to a haze-shrouded horizon. To the east, beyond a wooded hill crowned with radio towers, the winding course of the Rhine shone like a bright ribbon. There are clubs like this every 10 or 20 miles all across Germany. No other country has such a passion for gliding. Indeed, of all the glider pilots in the world (a number among which I count myself), the majority are German. There are historical reasons for this phenomenon. For one thing, the first practical