Germanwings copilot said to have caused crash

Brice Robin, Marseille's public prosecutor who is in charge of the investigation into the Germanwings A320 crash in the French Alps on Tuesday, confirmed that the commander exited the cockpit in order to go to the bathroom some minutes before the catastrophe occurred.

At that moment, the co-pilot blocked the door and initiated landing manouvers.

"I am saying that given the elements I have today, I can only say that he deliberately allowed the loss of altitude. It's not a loss that is totally abnormal, 1,000ft per minute; but he had no reason to do it, or not to allow the captain into the cabin. He had no reason not to explain to air traffic control why he was losing altitude", Robin said.

According to the prosecutor, the captain was heard asking the co-pilot to take control of the aircraft. "We can assume [the commander] went to relieve himself", Robin said.

The commander returned to the door of the cockpit and then spoke via an interphone to the co-pilot but got no answer.

“All we can hear is the sound of breathing, until impact suggesting the co-pilot was alive until impact”, Robin added.

"There was no contact between the pilot and the co-pilot during the last eight minutes of the flight," the French prosecutor said.

The possibility of a deliberate accident was pointed out on Wednesday by Remy Jouty, chief of the office for the investigation of air accidents (BEA, as abbreviated in French). The aircraft's trajectory had already become suspicious to the investigators, according to a report by the Spanish newspaper El País. According to the lead investigator, the route was “not compatible with an aircraft controlled by pilots [….] or by an automatic pilot.”

In fact, the eight-minute drop that the plane underwent, from an altitude of 38,000ft to 6,000ft, is one of the main points of the ongoing investigation. This led to the theory of a crash induced by the crew.

Robin appears to have backed this suspicion: "I think he refused to open the door and hit the button to get down the plane. It was a voluntary action on the part of the co-pilot."

Furthermore, Robin identified the copilot as Andreas Lubitz, a 28-year-old German with no terrorist profile. "He is not known as a terrorist, absolutely not,” the prosecutor confirmed at the press conference. Lubitz had been working for the company since 2013. He had 630 hours' flying experience with similar aircraft under his belt.

He received his training in Bremen as well as at Lufthansa's Flight Training Centre.

The captain was identified as Patrick S. by the German daily Bild. He was reported to be a well-experienced captain, who had been working for 10 years at Lufthansa. He had more than six-thousand flight hours experience with aircraft similar to the one that crashed.

According to a lawyer interviewed by the Telegraph, "If pilot suicide is found to be the cause of Germanwings, then we strongly believe that the airline will be full liable for unlimited compensation, as discussed earlier, to the families."

Read more: All the information on the crash of Germanwings flight 4U9525 as it develops