Killer in the Cockpit!

Andreas Lubitz – co-pilot’s fatal action prompts cockpit review.

Lufthansa’s chief executive Carsten Spohr, wearing a black tie an somber expression pronounced the apparent deliberate crash of Germanwings plane into the Alps – killing all 150 passengers and crew on board. “by far the most awful event in more than sixty year history of out company”. He said Cologne “in our worst nightmares we could not have imagined that such a tragedy could happen in our company”, and that he have been left speechless by French prosecutors’ initial findings that the planes 27 year old Andreas Lubitz co-pilot had engineered the disaster deliberately.

The co-pilot was a “quite friendly” man who has a passion for flying from childhood according to acquaintances in his home town a well off suburb of Montabaur 30miles from Frankfurt in West Germany.

Lubitz had a sick note for the day of crash and should have been off work.

Lubitz 27 unmarried, no children, who also kept an apartment in Dusseldorf. Mr Lubitz after graduating in 2007 from his local high school Mon-Tabor Gymnasium , joined Bremen pilot training academy of Lufthansa and became a co-pilot with Germanwings in September 2013 and had flown over 630 hours according to an official.  Lubitz is suspected by investigators of using an override lock, to prevent his pilot from using a code to reenter the cockpit as he put the Airbus A320 into its fatal descent. In US, regulations require two people to remain in the cockpit at all times, but EC rules do not. This fatal actions will be spurring a cockpit review.

Today’s cockpit doors, which have to be locked throughout a flight, open and close on an electronic key code held by the flight and cabin crew. When someone keys in the code from the outside, the pilot inside the cockpit has the right to grant or refuse entry by pressing a button. If no button is pressed, then the door will open automatically after delay of few seconds.

If the code does not work, there is an override key to open the door, but again can be refused by the pilot inside the cockpit.