Co-pilot locked cockpit, kept pilot from returning

PARIS – The apparently deliberate act of a German pilot that caused the deaths of 150 people in France is leading to a broad re-examination of international airline security rules, which allowed the pilot to lock his more senior crew member out of the cockpit.

The cockpit door-locking system, which was designed after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States, was intended to prevent suicidal terrorists from seizing control of jetliners, but may have had the unintended consequence of allowing a single pilot to do the same.

“We are absolutely headed to a re-evaluation of the system,” said Robert Ditchey, an aviation safety expert and former airline executive. “This is now an issue of how we keep mass murderers out of the cockpit.”

In response to the revelations about the crash of Germanwings Flight 9525, the German Aviation Association announced Thursday that all German carriers had agreed to new procedures, similar to those already in effect in the United States, that would require two people in a plane’s cockpit at all times. Several other carriers – including Air Canada, EasyJet, Norwegian Air Shuttle and Icelandair – announced similar changes in protocol.

French authorities said Andreas Lubitz, the German co-pilot of the flight from Barcelona, Spain, to Duesseldorf, Germany, on Tuesday kept the cockpit door locked after the pilot left, presumably to use the restroom. The pilot could be heard on the cockpit voice recorder pounding on the door after Lubitz purportedly set the aircraft on a deadly descent into the French Alps.

Investigators said Lubitz ignored radio calls and could be heard breathing normally as the aircraft went on a fairly steep descent from its 38,000-foot cruising altitude to about 5,000 feet, while passengers were screaming as they presumably saw the mountains looming and watched the pilot frantically trying to re-enter the cockpit.

The cockpit door was locked from the inside to override the captain’s code input, French prosecutor Brice Robin told reporters in Marseille, France.

“He didn’t say a word after the captain left the cockpit,” Robin said.

“One can hear at this point human breathing inside the cockpit and up to the moment of impact,” Robin said. “That means that the co-pilot was alive. His breaths were normal. This wasn’t the breathing of a man having a heart attack. One didn’t have the sense that he was feeling panic.”

European authorities, along with the chief executive of Germanwings parent Lufthansa, said that nothing in Lubitz’s background could explain his behavior. The 27-year-old pilot had no known association with extremist or terrorist groups, German Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere said.

The young co-pilot had flown with the Lufthansa subsidiary Germanwings since September 2013, logging 630 flight hours without incident, Lufthansa chief executive Carsten Spohr said Thursday at a news conference in Cologne, Germany.

Lubitz, who was single, divided his free time between his parents’ home in the town of Montabaur, in Germany’s Rhineland-Palatinate state, and a small apartment in Duesseldorf, the latter searched Thursday by police looking for clues to motives.

Spohr said Lubitz had passed all medical and aviation tests “with flying colors” after flight training that began in 2008.

“It’s part of our DNA at Lufthansa. We don’t just seek out intelligence, but psychological suitability” when hiring flight crews, Spohr said. “We trust all of our pilots. They are and remain the best in the world.”

Lubitz interrupted his flight training for three months in 2008, Spohr said, declining to disclose the reasons for the break, citing German regulations on the privacy of medical records. Spohr also asserted that such interruptions in a pilot’s training are not uncommon.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel said the news had given the tragedy “a new, simply incomprehensible dimension. … Something like this goes beyond anything we can imagine.”

The dead included three Americans.

In the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, the aviation industry and U.S. law enforcement officials decided that cockpit doors would have to be hardened and locked securely to thwart a repeat. At the time, experts knew that the system would have to be tamper-proof or it would not ensure an end to hijackings.

“We discussed the unintended consequences of leaving a single pilot in the cockpit and we did an analysis of the greater risk, a suicidal pilot or a terrorist,” said Michael Barr, a U.S. air safety expert and former accident investigation instructor at the University of Southern California. “The decision was a terrorist was the greater risk. We don’t want to reopen that door now.”

But the Germanwings incident was among more than half a dozen documented instances of a crew or crew member suspected of deliberate acts to crash a passenger plane.

In 1999, in one of the most notorious cases, an EgyptAir Boeing 767 jetliner plunged into the Atlantic Ocean shortly after takeoff from New York. U.S. investigators said the co-pilot had sent the jetliner on a dive after the pilot left the cockpit.

“It’s striking that in both instances it sounds like the pilot left the cabin,” said John Pistole, the agent who investigated the accident.

In another case, a Malaysia Airlines jetliner disappeared over the Indian Ocean in 2014 without a trace, and although the crew may have been incapacitated by a loss of cabin pressure, or some other cause, a deliberate act has not been ruled out. And a 1997 crash involving SilkAir in Indonesia was determined by U.S. investigators to be a deliberate act, although Indonesian officials sharply disputed the finding.

Notably, none of those cases involved U.S. pilots or airlines. Though not perfect, the U.S. has by wide agreement the world’s most experienced pilots and tightest safety regulations.