.
Questions are being asked as to how co-pilot Andreas Lubitz could have been prevented from crashing a Germanwings Airbus into the Alps in March.
A preliminary report claims he repeatedly set the same plane for an unauthorised decent earlier that day.
Shouldn’t such a manoeuvre have been detected and rung alarm bells? A spokesperson for a German pilots’ association thinks not:
“I don’t think that the passengers would have noticed that, because the input on the altitude setting was very short, so the aircraft did not have any time to react to the input, so I guess nobody noticed,” said Markus Wahl from “cockpit”.
Following the March 24 crash German investigators discovered that Lubitz had been signed off sick from work that day, and a home computer showed he had researched suicide methods.
The airline has been criticised for not picking up Lubitz’s mental state. Former Corsair pilot Jean Serrat doesn’t think it’s possible to assess
pilots adequately under the current system:
