DUESSELDORF, GERMANY |
DÜSSELDORF, Germany — Andreas Lubitz, who was flying the Germanwings jetliner that slammed into a mountain in the French Alps on Tuesday, sought treatment for vision problems that may have jeopardized his ability to continue working as a pilot, two officials with knowledge of the investigation said Saturday.
The revelation of the possible trouble with his eyes added a new element to the emerging portrait of the 27-year-old German pilot, who the authorities say was also being treated for psychological issues and had hidden aspects of his medical condition from his employer. The police found antidepressants during a search of his apartment here on Thursday, an official said Saturday.
It is not clear how severe his eye problems were or how they might have been related to his psychological condition. One person with knowledge of the investigation said the authorities had not ruled out the possibility that the vision problem could have been psychosomatic.
Mr. Lubitz, the co-pilot, was alone in the cockpit of the Airbus A320 jetliner on the flight from Barcelona to Düsseldorf, ignoring demands from the captain to be let back in, when the plane crashed. The French prosecutor in the case, drawing from cockpit voice recordings and other data about the flight, has said that Mr. Lubitz deliberately guided the plane, with another 149 people on board, into the mountains.
Since then investigators in Germany and France, airline regulators, political leaders and the families of the victims have sought answers about what might have led Mr. Lubitz to do what he did.
The information available so far about a possible motive remains sketchy, and it is not yet clear whether his apparent decision to crash the plane was triggered by a particular development in his life. Investigators and journalists continue to search for clues from every period and corner of his life, including his relationship with a longtime girlfriend and a report in a German newspaper on Saturday that another woman with whom he had a relationship had described him as unstable.
Many questions remain unanswered, if not unanswerable, including whether his decisions in the cockpit on Tuesday morning were impulsive or planned.
Friends and acquaintances have repeatedly said how important flying was to Mr. Lubitz, who began piloting gliders at a flying club near his hometown at the age of 14.
Police officers searching Mr. Lubitz’s apartment here in Düsseldorf on Thursday found notes from various doctors testifying that he was too ill to work, including on the day of the crash. Prosecutors refused to comment on the illness specified in the notes. One had been torn up and thrown in the wastebasket, supporting investigators’ suspicion that he was hiding his medical problems from the airline.
It appears that Mr. Lubitz did not tell the airline about his vision concerns. The European Aviation Safety Agency has vision standards and pilots are tested every year as part of an annual medical exam, a spokesman for the agency said.
Continue reading the main story
The Düsseldorf University Hospital said in a statement on Friday that Mr. Lubitz had been evaluated at its clinic in February and as recently as March 10. Reached by phone on Saturday, a spokeswoman would not comment on whether he had sought treatment for vision problems, citing patient privacy laws. The hospital has an eye clinic. On Friday the hospital denied speculation that Mr. Lubitz had sought treatment for depression there.
Although he was flying for a commercial airline, Mr. Lubitz was a co-pilot and not working the kind of long-haul routes he aspired to.
When Klaus Radke, president of the club where Mr. Lubitz learned to fly gliders, the Luftsportclub Westerwald, first met him, he was a typical 14-year-old who was unusual only in his wide-eyed fascination with flying, Mr. Radke said. Last fall, when Mr. Lubitz came back to the club to put in some flight hours he needed to keep his glider’s license current, Mr. Radke was impressed at the fit, by all appearances self-assured and professional pilot that Mr. Lubitz had become.
“When I saw him as an adult compared to a youth, I thought, ‘He really amounted to something,’ ” Mr. Radke said Saturday. “He was confident, helpful. I thought, ‘Man, he’s someone who made it.’ ” Mr. Radke, who said the club had received emailed death threats for helping Mr. Lubitz begin his flying career, picked up no sign last year that anything was amiss.
“I’m not a doctor,” Mr. Radke said. “For me he was normal.”
Time and again, the same adjectives pop up when people remember Mr. Lubitz. He was courteous and friendly, but reserved and not someone who drew attention to himself — thoroughly normal. The one thing that set him apart was his love of flying.
Mr. Lubitz grew up in Montabaur. Detlef Adolf, manager of a Burger King there, described him as a reliable and punctual employee during the time, around 2007 or 2008, he worked part time as a cook at the restaurant. While there, Mr. Lubitz became romantically involved with a young blond-haired woman who worked at the counter, Mr. Adolf said.
His love of flying was already well known. An entry in a graduation yearbook published by Der Spiegel predicted that Mr. Lubitz would become a professional pilot. Mr. Adolf remembered how overjoyed Mr. Lubitz was when he was accepted into pilot training. “He was happy — happy that he
Mr. Lubitz entered Lufthansa’s flight training school in 2008, in a three-story brick building at the airport in Bremen. He continued his training in the United States at the Airline Training Center Arizona, a Lufthansa subsidiary where the year-round warm weather provides good practice conditions.
The first sign of any trouble in an otherwise promising career as a pilot came during Mr. Lubitz’s studies. Lufthansa, the parent company of Germanwings, said this week that Mr. Lubitz had interrupted his pilot training at one point for several months for reasons it did not disclose.
Whatever the cause it was not enough to derail his career. Mr. Lubitz completed his studies, worked as a flight attendant while awaiting an open slot as a pilot, then finally began working as a co-pilot for Germanwings in 2013. He logged 630 flying hours. In his spare time he was an avid runner who competed in several half-marathons and other races.
Continue reading the main story
Mr. Lubitz divided his time between his parents’ house in Montabaur, a small town about an hour’s drive from the German financial capital of Frankfurt, and a home here in Düsseldorf.
An official with knowledge of the investigation said that at the time of the crash, Mr. Lubitz was still dating his longtime girlfriend, the woman he had met while working at Burger King. The name Mr. Adolf gave as the name of the woman was written beside Mr. Lubitz’s on the mailbox at his apartment in Düsseldorf.
The German newspaper Bild published an interview with a different woman, a flight attendant who said she had dated Mr. Lubitz last year. The woman, speaking under an assumed name, described him as unstable and quoted him as saying that someday he would “do something that will change the entire system and everyone will know my name and remember it.”
Germany’s Federal Aviation Office said on Friday that Mr. Lubitz had a known medical condition, though he was still permitted to fly. Carsten Spohr, Lufthansa’s chief executive, said at a news conference on Thursday that Mr. Lubitz “was 100 percent flightworthy without any limitations.”
Commentators in the German news media have questioned whether the country’s strict privacy laws made it too easy for Mr. Lubitz to hide potentially serious health problems from the airline.
Referring to the break in his training and the fact that his flying license took note of medical issues, Mr. Radke of the Luftsportclub Westerwald said: “If that’s true, as a responsible employer you should ask questions. That’s my personal opinion.”
“If you’re driving a car and the oil light goes on, do you keep driving? No,” Mr. Radke said. “If no action was taken, there’s a flaw in the system.”
Melissa Eddy and Nicholas Kulish reported from Düsseldorf, Nicola Clark from Paris and Jack Ewing from Montabaur, Germany.
Duesseldorf (Germany) (AFP) - The co-pilot who investigators believe 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.
(Reuters) - German authorities said on Friday they had found torn-up sick notes showing that the pilot who crashed a plane into the French Alps was suffering from an illness that should have grounded him on the day of the tragedy.
French prosecutors believe Andreas Lubitz, 27, locked himself alone in the cockpit of the Germanwings Airbus A320 on Tuesday and deliberately steered it into a mountain, killing all 150 people on board.
"Documents with medical contents were confiscated that point towards an existing illness and corresponding treatment by doctors," said the prosecutors' office in Duesseldorf, where the co-pilot lived and where the doomed flight from Barcelona was heading.
Torn-up doctor's notes found in his home would have excused Lubitz from work for medical reasons, for a period that included the day of the crash. That supported the view that Lubitz had "hidden his illness from his employer and his colleagues", the prosecutors said.
They found no suicide note or confession, "nor was there any evidence of a political or religious background to what happened", they added.
Germanwings said Lubitz had not submitted any sick note that would have grounded him on Tuesday, March 24, the day of the crash.
In France, authorities said they had recovered between 400 and 600 body parts strewn across the Alpine crash site. No bodies were found intact and DNA testing would be the best way to identify the remains, Patrick Touron, deputy head of the criminal research division of France's Gendarmerie, told reporters at the site. Investigators would look for pieces of uniform to try to identify the crew including Lubitz.
Lubitz's mental health - and what Germanwings and parent company Lufthansa knew about it - could become central questions in any future legal case over the crash. Under German law, employees are required to inform their employers immediately if they are unable to work.
A hospital in Duesseldorf said Lubitz had visited to receive a diagnosis as recently as March 10. It would not give further details because of patient confidentiality rules but said media reports he was treated there for depression were inaccurate.
Reports in German media suggested Lubitz had suffered from depression in the past, and that Lufthansa would have been aware of at least some of that history.
Germany's Bild newspaper, citing internal documents forwarded by Lufthansa's Aero Medical Center to German authorities, reported that Lubitz had suffered a "serious depressive episode" around the time he suspended his pilot training in 2009. It said he subsequently spent over a year in psychiatric treatment.
Lufthansa and German prosecutors declined to comment on the report. The airline's CEO Carsten Spohr said on Thursday there was nothing in his past suggest Lubitz was a risk, and that after he resumed his training, he passed all tests with "flying colors".
An international agreement generally limits airline liability to around $157,400 for each passenger who dies in a crash, but if families can prove an airline was negligent they can pursue compensation for greater damages in lawsuits.
"I DON'T FEEL ANGER"
Lawyers who have represented families in past airline disasters told Reuters that potential lawsuits could focus on whether Germanwings properly screened the co-pilot before and during his employment, and on whether the airline had adequate safety policies controlling access to its cockpits.
Within hours after French prosecutors disclosed their theory that the crash was deliberate, several airlines changed their rules to require two crew members in the cockpit at all times, a measure already mandatory in the United States but not in Europe.
Lufthansa announced on Friday that it too would change its rules to require a second crew member in the cockpit. On Thursday, Spohr had said he saw no need to do so, sparking a social media backlash.
Brussels announced it would recommend that rule change to all EU airlines. Such a recommendation can be implemented faster than changing European regulations to impose the requirement.
Robert Tansell Oliver, whose 37-year-old American son Robert Oliver Calvo was killed in the crash, said the family was not eager to sue. His son, a father of two small children, had been working for a fashion company in Barcelona.
"I don't feel anger. I'm really sorry for the parents of that young pilot. I can't imagine what they are going through right now," the father said outside a hotel near Barcelona airport where family members of victims have been staying.
"MAD SUICIDAL ACTION"
French Prime Minister Manuel Valls said the German airline had an obligation to share information about Lubitz.
"I am careful when there is a judicial inquiry, but everything points to a criminal, mad, suicidal action that we cannot comprehend," Valls told iTELE.
Lubitz was described by acquaintances in his hometown of Montabaur in westernGermany as a friendly but quiet man who learned to fly gliders at a local club before advancing to commercial aviation as a co-pilot at Germanwings in 2013.
A friend who met Lubitz six years ago and flew with him in gliding school said he had become increasingly withdrawn over the past year.
Before Lubitz became a co-pilot in late 2013, the friend said the two had gone to movies and clubs together. But he noticed at two birthday parties they attended over the past year that he had retreated into a shell, speaking very little.
"Flying was his life," said the friend, who agreed to speak to Reuters about Lubitz's mental state on condition of anonymity. "He always used to be a quiet companion, but in the last year that got worse."
(Additional reporting by Tom Kaeckenhoff in Duesseldorf, Victoria Bryan and Michelle Martin in Berlin, Andy Callus in Paris, Marco Trujillo in Barcelona and Eric Gaillard in Seyne-les-Alpes; Writing by Noah Barkin and Peter Graff; Editing by Janet McBride andGiles Elgood)
Germanwings Pilot Andreas Lubitz Sought Treatment for Vision Problems Before Crash, Authorities Say
DÜSSELDORF, Germany — Andreas Lubitz, who was flying the Germanwings jetliner that slammed into a mountain in the French Alps on Tuesday, sought treatment for vision problems that may have jeopardized his ability to continue working as a pilot, two officials with knowledge of the investigation said Saturday.The revelation of the possible trouble with his eyes added a new element to the emerging portrait of the 27-year-old German pilot, who the authorities say was also being treated for psychological issues and had hidden aspects of his medical condition from his employer. The police found antidepressants during a search of his apartment here on Thursday, an official said Saturday.
It is not clear how severe his eye problems were or how they might have been related to his psychological condition. One person with knowledge of the investigation said the authorities had not ruled out the possibility that the vision problem could have been psychosomatic.
Mr. Lubitz, the co-pilot, was alone in the cockpit of the Airbus A320 jetliner on the flight from Barcelona to Düsseldorf, ignoring demands from the captain to be let back in, when the plane crashed. The French prosecutor in the case, drawing from cockpit voice recordings and other data about the flight, has said that Mr. Lubitz deliberately guided the plane, with another 149 people on board, into the mountains.
Since then investigators in Germany and France, airline regulators, political leaders and the families of the victims have sought answers about what might have led Mr. Lubitz to do what he did.
The information available so far about a possible motive remains sketchy, and it is not yet clear whether his apparent decision to crash the plane was triggered by a particular development in his life. Investigators and journalists continue to search for clues from every period and corner of his life, including his relationship with a longtime girlfriend and a report in a German newspaper on Saturday that another woman with whom he had a relationship had described him as unstable.
Many questions remain unanswered, if not unanswerable, including whether his decisions in the cockpit on Tuesday morning were impulsive or planned.
Friends and acquaintances have repeatedly said how important flying was to Mr. Lubitz, who began piloting gliders at a flying club near his hometown at the age of 14.
Police officers searching Mr. Lubitz’s apartment here in Düsseldorf on Thursday found notes from various doctors testifying that he was too ill to work, including on the day of the crash. Prosecutors refused to comment on the illness specified in the notes. One had been torn up and thrown in the wastebasket, supporting investigators’ suspicion that he was hiding his medical problems from the airline.
It appears that Mr. Lubitz did not tell the airline about his vision concerns. The European Aviation Safety Agency has vision standards and pilots are tested every year as part of an annual medical exam, a spokesman for the agency said.
Continue reading the main story
The Düsseldorf University Hospital said in a statement on Friday that Mr. Lubitz had been evaluated at its clinic in February and as recently as March 10. Reached by phone on Saturday, a spokeswoman would not comment on whether he had sought treatment for vision problems, citing patient privacy laws. The hospital has an eye clinic. On Friday the hospital denied speculation that Mr. Lubitz had sought treatment for depression there.
Although he was flying for a commercial airline, Mr. Lubitz was a co-pilot and not working the kind of long-haul routes he aspired to.
When Klaus Radke, president of the club where Mr. Lubitz learned to fly gliders, the Luftsportclub Westerwald, first met him, he was a typical 14-year-old who was unusual only in his wide-eyed fascination with flying, Mr. Radke said. Last fall, when Mr. Lubitz came back to the club to put in some flight hours he needed to keep his glider’s license current, Mr. Radke was impressed at the fit, by all appearances self-assured and professional pilot that Mr. Lubitz had become.
“When I saw him as an adult compared to a youth, I thought, ‘He really amounted to something,’ ” Mr. Radke said Saturday. “He was confident, helpful. I thought, ‘Man, he’s someone who made it.’ ” Mr. Radke, who said the club had received emailed death threats for helping Mr. Lubitz begin his flying career, picked up no sign last year that anything was amiss.
“I’m not a doctor,” Mr. Radke said. “For me he was normal.”
Time and again, the same adjectives pop up when people remember Mr. Lubitz. He was courteous and friendly, but reserved and not someone who drew attention to himself — thoroughly normal. The one thing that set him apart was his love of flying.
Mr. Lubitz grew up in Montabaur. Detlef Adolf, manager of a Burger King there, described him as a reliable and punctual employee during the time, around 2007 or 2008, he worked part time as a cook at the restaurant. While there, Mr. Lubitz became romantically involved with a young blond-haired woman who worked at the counter, Mr. Adolf said.
His love of flying was already well known. An entry in a graduation yearbook published by Der Spiegel predicted that Mr. Lubitz would become a professional pilot. Mr. Adolf remembered how overjoyed Mr. Lubitz was when he was accepted into pilot training. “He was happy — happy that he
Mr. Lubitz entered Lufthansa’s flight training school in 2008, in a three-story brick building at the airport in Bremen. He continued his training in the United States at the Airline Training Center Arizona, a Lufthansa subsidiary where the year-round warm weather provides good practice conditions.
The first sign of any trouble in an otherwise promising career as a pilot came during Mr. Lubitz’s studies. Lufthansa, the parent company of Germanwings, said this week that Mr. Lubitz had interrupted his pilot training at one point for several months for reasons it did not disclose.
Whatever the cause it was not enough to derail his career. Mr. Lubitz completed his studies, worked as a flight attendant while awaiting an open slot as a pilot, then finally began working as a co-pilot for Germanwings in 2013. He logged 630 flying hours. In his spare time he was an avid runner who competed in several half-marathons and other races.
Continue reading the main story
Mr. Lubitz divided his time between his parents’ house in Montabaur, a small town about an hour’s drive from the German financial capital of Frankfurt, and a home here in Düsseldorf.
An official with knowledge of the investigation said that at the time of the crash, Mr. Lubitz was still dating his longtime girlfriend, the woman he had met while working at Burger King. The name Mr. Adolf gave as the name of the woman was written beside Mr. Lubitz’s on the mailbox at his apartment in Düsseldorf.
The German newspaper Bild published an interview with a different woman, a flight attendant who said she had dated Mr. Lubitz last year. The woman, speaking under an assumed name, described him as unstable and quoted him as saying that someday he would “do something that will change the entire system and everyone will know my name and remember it.”
Germany’s Federal Aviation Office said on Friday that Mr. Lubitz had a known medical condition, though he was still permitted to fly. Carsten Spohr, Lufthansa’s chief executive, said at a news conference on Thursday that Mr. Lubitz “was 100 percent flightworthy without any limitations.”
Commentators in the German news media have questioned whether the country’s strict privacy laws made it too easy for Mr. Lubitz to hide potentially serious health problems from the airline.
Referring to the break in his training and the fact that his flying license took note of medical issues, Mr. Radke of the Luftsportclub Westerwald said: “If that’s true, as a responsible employer you should ask questions. That’s my personal opinion.”
“If you’re driving a car and the oil light goes on, do you keep driving? No,” Mr. Radke said. “If no action was taken, there’s a flaw in the system.”
Melissa Eddy and Nicholas Kulish reported from Düsseldorf, Nicola Clark from Paris and Jack Ewing from Montabaur, Germany.
Duesseldorf (Germany) (AFP) - The co-pilot who investigators believe 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.
No comments:
Post a Comment