Neighbours and friends struggle to explain actions of Germanwings first officer believed to have deliberately crashed Airbus 320 in French Alps

Andreas Lubitz, a 27-year-old from a small town in western Germany, seemingly had all the makings of an exemplary Lufthansa pilot. Fit, qualified and betraying no signs of psychological distress, he was clearly trusted by his colleagues and his employer.



Patrick Sonderheimer, the captain whose toilet break provided the chance for the younger co-pilot to apparently plunge the Airbus 320 carrying another 149 people into a French mountain, clearly did not think he was leaving the aircraft in the hands of a kamikaze for a few minutes.

The flight’s voice recorder, according to the French investigators, showed the two Germans chatting normally for the first 20 minutes of the flight from Barcelona to Düsseldorf before the more experienced pilot absented himself briefly – properly, according to the rules – once the plane had reached its cruising altitude.

According to neighbours and friends, Lubitz had always dreamed of being a pilot. The local air strip and gliding club sat just 100 metres from the family home in Montabaur, halfway between Frankfurt and Cologne. He enrolled there as a youth and gained his gliders licence as a teenager before attending the Lufthansa pilot training centre in Bremen at the age of 20, a few months after completing school and the German abitur – roughly the equivalent of A-levels.

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“His big dream was always to be a pilot,” an unnamed neighbour told the local newspaper Rhein-Zeitung. “He pursued that determinedly and made it.”

A few months ago he renewed his gliders licence in his home town. Peter Ruecker, a fellow glider, had known Lubitz for more than a decade. “He was happy he had the job with Germanwings and he was doing well,” he told the Associated Press. “He was very happy. He gave off a good feeling.”

Ruecker added to RTL radio: “He was a perfectly normal young man. He was very happy with this job. He was satisfied. He had achieved his dream. He had no problems. I don’t believe him capable of such a thing.”

In Bremen, Lubitz passed all the technical, flying and medical tests after starting training in 2008 and qualified as a first officer or co-pilot in 2013, said Carsten Spohr, Lufthansa’s chief executive, on Thursday. “He was 100% fit for flying.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Andreas Lubitz, Germanwings co-pilot, described as ‘normal young man’. Source: Reuters

Lufthansa prides itself on the thoroughness and high quality of its pilot training. Spohr said more than once that the company’s pilots were the world’s best. He added that those flying for Germanwings, Lufthansa’s budget subsidiary, went through precisely the same exacting courses.

But one gap in the narrative nagged. Lubitz had taken a break of several months from his pilot training. Spohr said there was nothing unusual about this but that he could not and “may not” give the reason for this for reasons of medical confidentiality.

The Lufthansa boss said the interruption in the training occurred six years ago. A journalist from Der Spiegel, reporting from Montabaur, cited acquaintances as saying that the break in 2009 was down to stress – “because of burnout or depression”.

Spohr said Lubitz was judged fit to resume the training scheme a few months later and then passed all the medical, psychological and flying tests. He went on to clock up 630 flight hours.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A candle in front of the home of Andreas Lubitz’s family in Montabaur, Germany. Photograph: Michael Probst/AP

While Thursday’s revelations were numbing in their sheer unexpectedness, the German authorities appear to have been on the case as soon as news of the disaster broke on Tuesday.

The interior ministry in Berlin ran security and intelligence checks on both pilots on Tuesday, said the interior minister, Thomas de Maizière. The databases were scoured. “There is no indication of any kind of terrorist background,” he said.

Lubitz was from Montabaur, a small and ancient town of 13,000 people an hour north-west of Frankfurt, Germany’s main air hub, and an hour south-east of Cologne, where Germanwings bases its operations. He apparently still lived there with his parents, although he also had a flat in Düsseldorf.

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Curiously, Lubitz’s Facebook page had been deleted before the French prosecutor Brice Robin revealed on Thursday that the plane appeared to have been crashed deliberately. It later reappeared with a different picture of him posing before San Francisco’s Golden Gate bridge.

But even before being deleted, there appeared to be little of note in the Facebook entries. It showed an interest in flying and gadgets, as well as in electronic music, discos and 10-pin bowling. His Facebook likes included Lufthansa and LFT Bremen, his pilot training school. Lubitz linked to the Airbus A320 technical site and a page dedicated to the Beechcraft Bonanza, an American six-seater light aircraft. There was a mention of Alexander Gerst, the German astronaut who last year blasted off to the International Space Station.

What can be gleaned of Lubitz’s social life from Facebook centred on the city of Koblenz near Montabaur. There are links to a climbing wall, Kletterwald Sayn, located in a forest, to a local bowling alley, Pinup, and one of Koblenz’s nightclubs, the Agostea Nachtarena. And to a branch of Burger King.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest LSC Westerwald aviation club, which Germanwings co-pilot Andreas Lubitz was a member of. Photograph: Action Press/REX

At his parents’ house in Montabaur on Thursday, the curtains were drawn and four police cars were parked outside.

Investigators are likely to delve into Lubitz’s personal life to try to uncover any clues about his mental state. “The very first thing the aviation authorities and investigators will do is go through his personal background and look at his professional life, in terms of his relationships, finances, flying record and medical record,” said Robert Bor, an aviation psychologist.

“They will also be interviewing pilots he has flown with over the last few weeks to see if there is anything about his behaviour, attitude or professional conduct that could be potentially relevant here. It’s an extremely rare thing for a pilot to crash his own plane.”

But the French investigators and Lufthansa were surprisingly forthright in emphasising that Lubitz had acted deliberately to take all passengers and crew to their deaths. “Usually, when someone commits suicide, he is alone,” said Spohr, the Lufthansa CEO. “When someone takes another 149 to their deaths, suicide is not the right word.”