PARIS
Preliminary data retrieved from the second “black box" has also proved that the co-pilot of the Germanwings flight deliberately crashed the plane that went down last week in the French Alps, French investigators said Friday.
The French authority, BEA (Bureau d'Enquêtes et d'Analyses pour la sécurité de l'aviation civile),which is responsible for air crash investigations, said Friday in a statement that the co-pilot himself put the plane on the deadly path of descent.
"A first reading shows that the pilot in the cockpit used the automatic pilot to descend the plane towards an altitude of 100 feet (30 meters). Then, several times during the descent, the pilot changed the automatic pilot settings to increase the aircraft's speed," the BEA said in a statement.
The second black box was found at the crash site Thursday after nine days of hectic efforts by search teams.
Based on the audio recordings of the first black box, French and German prosecutors had already concluded that co-pilot Andreas Lubitz had deliberately crashed the plane by keeping the pilot outside the cockpit after he left to use the washroom.
The Germanwings Airbus A320 was en route from Barcelona, Spain, to Dusseldorf in Germany, when it went down on March 24, killing 144 passengers and six crew members on board. The majority of the victims were German and Spanish.
Germany’s largest airline Lufthansa, which owns low-budget Germanwings, had said Tuesday that an internal investigation revealed that the 27-year-old co-pilot had submitted medical documents to its pilot school in 2009 about a "previous episode of severe depression."
The company claimed last week that Lubitz was "100 percent fit to fly without any restrictions," but German prosecutors seized documents at the co-pilot’s house showing that he had received psychotherapy for having suicidal tendencies.
