Germanwings Flight 9525

Information
Germanwings Flight 9525 was a flight from Barcelona–El Prat Airport in Spain to Düsseldorf Airport in Germany. The flight was operated by Germanwings, a low-cost carrier owned by the German airline Lufthansa. On 24 March 2015, the aircraft, an Airbus A320-211, crashed 100 km (62 mi; 54 nmi) north-west of Nice in the French Alps. All 150 onboard were killed.

Pilots
The pilots consisted of 34-year-old Captain Patrick Sondenheimer, who had 10 years of flying experience (6,000 flight hours, including 3,811 hours on the Airbus A320) flying A320s for Germanwings, Lufthansa, and Condor. The co-pilot was 27-year-old Andreas Lubitz, who joined Germanwings in September 2013 and had 630 flight hours of experience, with 540 of them on the Airbus A320.

Background
Germanwings Flight 9525 took off from Runway 07R at Barcelona–El Prat Airport at 10:01 am CET (8:01 am UTC) and was supposed to be at Düsseldorf Airport by 11:39 CET. The flight's scheduled departure time was 9:35 CET. According to the Bureau of Enquiry and Analysis for Civil Aviation Safety (BEA), the pilots confirmed instructions from French air traffic control at 10:30 CET. After crossing the French coast near Toulon, at 10:31 CET, the aircraft left its assigned cruising altitude of 38,000 ft (11,600 m) and started to descend rapidly without approval. The air traffic controller declared the aircraft in distress after its descent and loss of radio contact.

The descent time from 38,000 ft was about 10 minutes; radar observed an average descent rate around 3,400 ft/min (58 ft/s or 18 m/s). French air traffic control tried to contact the flight on the assigned radio frequency, but were not answered. A jet was scrambled from the Orange-Caritat Air Base to intercept the aircraft. According to the BEA, radar contact was lost at 10:40 CET as the aircraft had descended to 6,175 ft (1,880 m), and crashed in the remote commune of Prads-Haute-Bléone, 100 km (62 mi; 54 nmi) north-west of Nice. A seismological station of the Sismalp network, the Grenoble Observatory, 12 km (7.5 mi; 6.5 nmi) from the crash site, recorded the associated seismic event, determining the crash time as 10:41:05 CET.

Andreas Lubitz
Andreas Günter Lubitz was born on 18 December 1987 and grew up in Neuburg an der Donau, Bavaria and Montabaur in the German state of Rhineland-Palatinate. He took flying lessons at Luftsportclub Westerwald, an aviation sports club in Montabaur.

Lubitz was accepted into a Lufthansa trainee programme after finishing high school. In September 2008, he began training at the Lufthansa Flight Training school in Bremen, Germany. He suspended his pilot training in November 2008 after being hospitalized for a severe episode of depression. After his psychiatrist determined that the depressive episode was fully resolved, Lubitz returned to the Lufthansa school in August 2009. Lubitz moved to the United States in November 2010 to continue training at the Lufthansa Airline Training Center in Goodyear, Arizona. From June 2011 to December 2013, he worked as a flight attendant for Lufthansa while training to obtain his commercial pilot's licence, until joining Germanwings as a first officer in June 2014.