Flight data suggest Germanwings crash was deliberate

French accident investigators said Friday that flight data recovered from the Germanwings crash site indicated that the co-pilot deliberately crashed the airplane.

The flight data recorder found on Thursday appears to corroborate evidence from a cockpit audio recording recovered from a first black box hours after the March 24 crash.

“A first reading shows that the pilot in the cockpit used the automatic pilot to put the airplane on a descent toward an altitude of 100 feet,” France’s aviation safety bureau (BEA) said in a statement.

“Then several times the pilot modified the automatic-pilot settings to increase the speed of the airplane as it descended,” it added.

Prosecutors have said the cockpit audio from the voice recorder suggested that 27-year-old co-pilot Andreas Lubitz locked the captain out of the cockpit and set the plane on course to crash in the French Alps.

The flight data recorder contains a detailed readout of hundreds of parameters, including any commands made from the co-pilot's seat on the Düsseldorf-bound flight.

The BEA said that they were still working to establish the facts surrounding the flight leading up to the crash, which killed 150 people.

Lubitz appears to have spent time online researching suicide methods and cockpit door security in the week before crashing Flight 9525, prosecutors said Thursday – the first evidence that the fatal descent may have been a premeditated act.

German prosecutors have said Lubitz's medical records from before he received his pilot's license referred to “suicidal tendencies,” and Lufthansa, Germanwings' parent company, said it knew six years ago that Lubitz had had an episode of “severe depression” before he finished his flight training.

In Marseille, prosecutor Brice Robin underlined French investigators’ conviction that he was conscious until the moment of impact, and appears to have acted repeatedly to stop an excessive speed alarm from sounding.

Wire services