Headlines
Second black box confirms co-pilot deliberately crashed Germanwings plane
Paris, April 3
Data analyzed from the second
black box of the crashed Germanwings Airbus A320 has confirmed that the
co-pilot deliberately downed the passenger plane while flying over the
French Alps, killing himself along with the other 149 people on board,
the French Bureau of Investigation and Analysis (BEA) said on Friday.
The
initial reading of the second black box, which contains technical
flight data records, revealed that Andreas Lubitz activated the
autopilot descent sequence, and then manually adjusted the settings to
increase the speed of the plane, Spanish news agency Efe reported citing
the BEA.
"A first reading shows that the pilot in the cockpit
used the automatic pilot to descend the plane towards an altitude of 100
feet (30 metres). Then, several times during the descent, the pilot
changed the automatic pilot settings to increase the aircraft's speed,"
the BEA said in its statement.
The second black box of the
Germanwings Airbus A320 that crashed on March 24 was found on Thursday
by French gendarmes and was examined after it was taken to the
headquarters of the BEA, which was also responsible for analysing the
audio in the cockpit recorded by the first black box.
The BEA
said the experts started examining the second black box as soon as it
arrived, noting that the analysis was still continuing in order to
clarify the sequence of events that took place on the flight, en route
from Barcelona in Spain to Dusseldorf in Germany.
The second black box recorded the last 25 hours of technical flight data, such as speed, altitude, and pilot mode.