Germanwings: 2nd Black Box Confirms Co-pilot Accelerated Descent

Data retrieved from the second ‘black box’ of the Germanwings plane that crashed in France confirmed that the co-pilot deliberately accelerated the plane’s descent, French investigators say. 

They said Andreas Lubitz, the co-pilot modified the automatic pilot system several times to increase the speed of descent.

The information the investigators recovered also confirms earlier findings that Lubitz deliberately crashed the plane.

The plane, which had been flying from Barcelona to Duesseldorf on March 24, crashed and killed all 150 people on board.

The second flight recorder, which was recovered on Thursday, showed that “the pilot in the cockpit used the automatic pilot to put the airplane on a descent towards an altitude of 100ft (30m)”, the French BEA crash investigation agency 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.

Earlier findings from the cockpit voice recorder suggested Lubitz locked the pilot out of the cockpit.

On Thursday, German prosecutors also said the co-pilot had researched suicide methods and the security of cockpit doors on the Internet the week before the crash.