(Bloomberg) -- The co-pilot of the Germanwings flight that crashed in the French Alps, killing 150 people, appears to have deliberately initiated a fateful descent while the pilot was locked out of the cockpit, French prosecutors found.
Cockpit conversations and sounds of the last minutes of the Barcelona-Dusseldorf flight show the co-pilot took the aircraft out of cruising altitude after the captain left the cockpit and was denied re-entry, prosecutor Brice Robin said at a press conference in Marseille. The co-pilot could be heard breathing and remained otherwise silent right until the plane slammed into a mountain slope at full speed, he said.
The new findings point to a deliberate destruction of the Airbus A320 aircraft rather than a technical fault, in what is the worst aviation accident yet for Deutsche Lufthansa AG and its Germanwings low-cost subsidiary. The co-pilot was named by Robin as Andreas Lubitz, a 28-year-old German citizen. Germanwings had only identified him as a junior pilot who had logged 630 flight hours since joining the airline in late 2013.
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