Germanwings: second black box suggests crash was deliberate

The box, the second of two on the plane, has been at the centre of a hunt by search crews since the first was recovered last week.

It was said to have been found on Thursday and could be key to the investigation, as authorities attempt to find out what happened on the Germanwings passenger jet that crashed in the French Alps on 24 March.

Read more: What we know so far about Andreas Lubitz

Recordings and data already recovered revealed that co-pilot Andreas Lubitz locked the pilot out of the cockpit when he went to the toilet, at which point he put the aircraft into its fatal eight-minute descent.

Investigators had only retrieved the cockpit voice recordings from one of the black boxes until now.

The French BEA crash investigation office said in a statement on Friday: “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.”

Final moments

Marseille prosecutor Brice Robin said that evidence from the first black suggested that Lubitz had “manipulated the flight monitoring system to action the descent of the plane”.

Read more: Germanwings crash co-pilot Lubitz researched suicide methods

Unconfirmed reports suggest the autopilot mechanism may also have been tampered with to prevent any intervention. “The action of selecting the altitude could only have been done voluntarily,” Mr Robin said.

During the final minutes of the flight’s descent, pounding could be heard on the outside of the cabin door as alarms sounded. Passengers could be heard screaming as captain Patrick Sondenheimer tried desperately to re-open it from the outside.

German prosecutors on Thursday said that the Lubitz had been researching suicide methods online shortly before the crash.

In a statement issued in Dusseldorf, prosecutors said Lubitz had “looked for information on ways to commit suicide” in computer searches between 16 March and 23 March – one day before the crash.

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What do we know about pilot Andreas Lubitz?Jonathan Miller has been looking at the background of the man who brought down the Germanwings plane.

Posted by Channel 4 News on Thursday, March 26, 2015