'Open the damn door'
The captain of a passenger jet that investigators believe was deliberately crashed into the French Alps, killing all 150 aboard, shouted at the co-pilot to "open the damn door" as he desperately tried to get back into the locked cockpit, a German newspaper reported yesterday.
Full transcripts of the black box voice recorder recovered from Flight 9525 revealed for the first time the apparently premeditated nature of Andreas Lubitz's actions, which prosecutors say deliberately killed himself and 149 other people on the Airbus A320.
It also emerged that emerged Lubitz made repeated efforts to get the captain to leave him alone in the cockpit.
According to the Sunday edition of the German newspaper Bild, Lubitz twice urged captain Patrick Sondheimer to go to the toilet in the first 20 minutes of the flight from Barcelona to Dusseldorf.
When the captain eventually left the cockpit, the co-pilot manually set the door to “lock” and changed the autopilot from 38,000ft to 100ft, bringing the plane crashing down into the French Alps after a gradual descent.
French officials believe that the more senior pilot, identified by Germany's Bild newspaper as Patrick S., tried desperately to reopen the door.
It said "loud metallic blows" against the cockpit door could then be heard, before another warning alarm went off and then the pilot is heard to scream to a silent Lubitz in the cockpit "open the damn door".
As investigators seek to build up a picture of Lubitz and any possible motives, media reports have emerged that he suffered from eye problems, adding to earlier reports he was severely depressed.
German prosecutors believe Lubitz hid an illness from his airline but have not specified the ailment, and said he had apparently been written off sick on the day the Airbus crashed.
Bild's Saturday edition had published an interview with a flight attendant who it said had had a relationship last year with Lubitz and recalled him saying: "One day I'm going to do something that will change the whole system, and everyone will know my name and remember."
If Lubitz did deliberately crash the plane, it was "because he understood that because of his health problems, his big dream of a job at Lufthansa, of a job as captain and as a long-haul pilot was practically impossible", the woman told Bild.
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