The Germanwings Crash Is Likely The Second-Biggest Murder-Suicide By Pilot On Record

The revelation from a French prosecutor that co-pilot Andreas Lubitz deliberately crashed a Germanwings flight into the French Alps would make the disaster the aviation murder-suicide with the second-biggest number of fatalities.













On Thursday morning, Marseille prosecutor Brice Robin revealed that Germanwings co-pilot Andreas Lubitz deliberately locked his pilot out of the cockpit and descended into the French Alps, suggesting the cause of the crash may be murder-suicide.






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The news caused shock throughout the aviation industry, and it means that doomed Flight 9525 appears to have become one of only a handful of aviation disasters to have been willfully caused by a pilot or co-pilot, and the second biggest in history.






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One of the most notable previous incidents was when SilkAir Flight 185 — travelling from Jakarta to Singapore — crashed into the Musi River near Pelambang, Indonesia, in December 1997, killing all 107 people on board after descending from 30,000 feet.






Indonesian National Transportation Safety Committee (NTSC)/Public Domain














In a letter to its Indonesian counterpart, the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) said it failed to find anything wrong with the plane, adding that "the accident can be explained by intentional pilot action."

Indonesian investigators had launched their own parallel investigation, and did not accept the suicide explanation due to what was deemed insufficient evidence.

According to the cockpit voice recorder, Tsu left the flight deck after asking his co-pilot Darren Ward, a New Zealand national, if he wanted a glass of water.

Minutes later, both flight data recorders had stopped, and a short while after that, radar data showed that the aircraft began to make a swift descent, without issuing a distress call, before disappearing off the radar screen entirely, the New York Times reported.

The Indonesian report into the incident said Tsu had suffered heavy financial losses before the accident and had been reprimanded three times and demoted for breaches of discipline by SilkAir, the NYT said. Singaporean police confirmed that Tsu had been experiencing monetary problems.

However, a separate report by Singaporean police failed to find evidence that Tsu had any suicidal tendencies.







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