New York Times and AFP news agency say evidence from cockpit voice recorder suggests pilot left before flight 4U9525’s descent and could not get back in

Evidence from a cockpit voice recorder recovered from the Germanwings flight 4U9525 that crashed on Tuesday suggests that one pilot left the cockpit before the plane’s descent and was unable to get back in, according to two separate reports.

French air accident investigators say they have extracted a recording that contains “voices and sounds” from the cockpit of the plane before it crashed in the Alps, killing all 150 people on board.

A senior military official involved in the investigation told the New York Times that there was a “very smooth, very cool” conversation between the two pilots during the early part of the flight from Barcelona to Düsseldorf.

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Later in the recording, the audio suggests that one of the pilots left the cockpit and could not re-enter. The audio gives no indication of the condition of the pilot who remained in the cockpit.

“The guy outside is knocking lightly on the door and there is no answer,” the investigator, who asked to remain anonymous, told the New York Times. “And then he hits the door stronger and no answer. There is never an answer.



“You can hear he is trying to smash the door down.”

“We don’t know yet the reason why one of the guys went out,” said the official, who requested anonymity because the investigation is continuing.

“But what is sure is that at the very end of the flight, the other pilot is alone and does not open the door.”

The French news agency AFP reported that it had been told by a source close to the investigation that one of the pilots had been “locked out” the cockpit.

The agency said the cockpit recording indicated that one of the pilot’s seats was pushed back and the door opened and closed. Knocking is then heard, said the source, adding “there was no more conversation from that point until the crash”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Remi Jouty, director of BEA, answers reporters during a press conference. Photograph: Francois Mori/AP

The source said an alarm indicating the proximity to the ground could be heard before the moment of impact.

A spokesman for Lufthansa, the parent airline of Germanwings, said the carrier was aware of the New York Times story, adding: “We have no information from the authorities that confirms this report and we are seeking more information. We will not take part in speculation on the causes of the crash.”

The Airbus A320 plane is designed with safeguards to allow emergency entry to the cockpit if a pilot inside is unresponsive, but the override code known to the crew does not go into effect and indeed goes into a five-minute lockdown if the person inside the cockpit specifically denies entry, according to an Airbus training video and a pilot who spoke to the Associated Press.

The pilot said airlines in Europe are not required to have two people in the cockpit at all times.

French air accident investigators confirmed on Wednesday that they have extracted a recording that contains “voices and sounds” from the cockpit of the plane.



The French Bureau d’Enquêtes et d’Analyses (BEA) said it was “optimistic” that the second black box, the flight data recorder, would be found and the mystery of the crash solved.

“We have an audio file we can use,” said Rémi Jouty, the director of the BEA, at a press conference in Paris. The task of the investigators in the first instance is “a job … of understanding the sounds, the alarms, the voices, to attribute the voices to different people,” he added.

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“The crash zone is two hectares, which is big but not massive. We are combing the site and we will find the flight data recorder, which is built to resist a severe crash. I am confident we will find out what happened.”

The Airbus A320 that ploughed into an Alpine mountain flew “right to the end”, the investigators said, and did not explode mid-flight. It also appeared not to have suffered a sudden drop in pressure.

The BEA, said that “usable” material had been extracted from the black box cockpit voice recorder found at the crash site, in the French Alps.

Jouty said it covered the entire flight but would not say what conversations, if any, between the pilots had been captured on the recording, nor what language they had been conducted in.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Lufthansa group CEO Carsten Spohr briefs the media in Barcelona. Photograph: David Ramos/Getty Images

Neither of the plane’s two pilots have been named, but the captain had more than 10 years of experience and had clocked up more than 6,000 flight hours on the Airbus model. The co-pilot joined Germanwings in September 2013, directly after training, and had flown 630 hours, Lufthansa said.

The A320 was on its second flight of the day, having earlier left Düsseldorf for Barcelona, landing at 8.57am, before its second takeoff for the 90-minute flight.

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On Wednesday Lufthansa CEO Carsten Spohr, himself a pilot, said he found the crash of a plane flown by two experienced captains while at cruising altitude “inexplicable.” Cruise is considered the safest part of a flight, with only about 10% of crashes occurring at that altitude.

“We still cannot understand what happened there yesterday,” he said. “Lufthansa has never in its history lost an aircraft in cruise flight and we cannot understand how an airplane that was in perfect technical condition, with two experienced and trained Lufthansa pilots, was involved in such a terrible accident.”

In Seyne-les-Alpes, the picturesque alpine mountain village of 1,500 people which has been transformed into a makeshift centre of operations, support staff received the first relatives of the victims. Many families had chosen to fly to Marseille overnight and be taken by bus to the Alps to get as near as possible to the crash site and to begin grieving as they waited for relatives’ remains.

French President Francois Hollande and German Chancellor Angela Merkel at the Germanwings crash site Photograph: Jeff Pachoud/AFP/Getty Images

The French president, François Hollande, visited the area on Wednesday afternoon with the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, and Spanish prime minister, Mariano Rajoy. At a joint press conference they pledged to do everything they could to find the cause of the crash.

In the village, there was a mood of grief and sadness. Looking up at the mountain beyond which the plane had crashed, Maurice Borel, a retired volunteer firefighter, said: “We’re in shock, nothing of this scale has ever happened here before.”



The Seyne-les-Alpes youth centre, which would normally be packed with riotous children’s sports clubs on a Wednesday afternoon, had been made into a silent makeshift chapel and remembrance centre for the victims’ relatives.

“We just feel so powerless,” said René Dufour, a retired textile worker, as he looked out towards the snowy peaks beyond which the plane crashed. “All we can do is send all our thoughts to the families.”