'People will know my name'

Andreas Lubitz

The co-pilot who crashed a passenger jet into the French Alps, killing all 150 aboard, worried "health problems" would dash his dreams and vowed one day to do something to "change the whole system", an ex-girlfriend told a German newspaper.

The woman, a flight stewardess named only as Maria W, said Andreas Lubitz told her he was receiving psychiatric treatment and would wake up distressed in the night during their five-month relationship in 2014.

"At night, he woke up and screamed: 'We're going down!', because he had nightmares,” she said. “He knew how to hide from other people what was really going on inside."

She was quoted by the German newspaper Bild as recalling how Lubitz would change when he talked about the pressures and conditions of his job.

"He never talked much about his illness, only that he was in psychiatric treatment,” she said.

"We always talked a lot about work and then he became a different person. He became upset about the conditions we worked under: too little money, fear of losing the contract, too much pressure."

German prosecutors say there are indications Lubitz concealed an illness from his employers and has been signed off work on the day of the air disaster. Police searching his home discovered torn-up medical notes and Germanwings later confirmed it did not receive sick notes from Lubitz.

On Saturday, a member of his local flying club told French media that Lubitz was familiar with the French Alps and was even “obsessed” with the area.

Maria said news of the crash triggered a memory of previous conversations with the 27-year-old, with one sentence in particular weighing heavily in her mind. “There was just a tape playing in my head of what he said.

"'One day I'll do something that will change the system, and then everyone will know my name and remember it'.

"I didn't know what he meant by that at the time, but now it's obvious," she continued.

She claimed that if Lubitz did deliberately down the plane, it would be “because he realised that, due to his health problems, his big dream of working at Lufthansa, of a having job as a pilot, and as a pilot on long-distance flights, was nearly impossible”.

Lubitz locked himself into the cockpit when the captain went out to use the toilet, then refused his colleague's increasingly desperate pleas to reopen the door, French prosecutor Brice Robin said.

The tragedy has prompted a shake-up of airline safety rules and several airlines to adopt the "rule of two" rule in the cockpit.

Investigators say Lubitz's intention was clear because he operated a button sending the plane into a plunge.

For the next eight minutes, Lubitz was apparently calm and breathing normally.