Five days after the Germanwings co-pilot Andreas Lubitz seemingly crashed his plane into the French Alps, killing all 150 people on board, there was a growing backlash in Germany on Saturday against what many in his hometown feel is a tasteless rush to judgment.
Residents say French investigators have been too hasty in blaming Lubitz for the crash, and that the full facts about his medical condition and apparent long history of depression are not yet known.
Pilots’ organisations have also said that the conclusion of French air accident experts that Lubitz deliberately locked the captain out of the cabin, then calmly steered flight 4U9525 into a mountain, is premature.
The case against Lubitz rests on an examination of the cockpit voice recorder, retrieved from the crash site near the French village of Le Vernet. It shows him breathing normally as the captain, Patrick Sonderheimer, frantically tries to break down the cockpit door.
In 2009 Lubitz halted his pilot training with Lufthansa, telling friends he was suffering from stress. State prosecutors who searched Lubitz’s homes – a flat in Düsseldorf and his family home in the small town of Montabaur – discovered a torn-up sicknote dated to the day of the disaster.
The German Airline Pilots Association, however, pointed out that the plane’s flight data recorder hasn’t been recovered. “We should not rush to conclusions based upon limited data. The reasons that led to this tragic accident will only be determined after all data sources have been thoroughly examined,” Ilja Schulz, the association’s president, said.
The European Cockpit Association said many questions remain unanswered, and that the leaking of cockpit data in France was a “serious breach” of globally accepted rules. It called for an unbiased and independent investigation, which would be “complex and time consuming”.
In Montabaur, a town of 13,000 people, a group of students laid flowers and lit candles in the main square, Konrad-Adenauer Platz on Friday evening. They said they wanted to commemorate the victims of flight 4U9525, three of whom came from the same west German region, including one from the nearby town of Westerburg.
They also said they wanted to show solidarity with Lubitz, whom they felt had been unfairly judged and found guilty of suicidal mass murder, and to express support for his grieving family. “There’s been this enormous rush to blame him,” Martin Böttcher, who was in the year below Lubitz at the Mons-Tabor-Gymnasium school, said.
“I don’t think we should pre-judge the situation. Nobody has the right to decide about the lives of others, of course, but the coverage of this tragedy has been dreadful. It doesn’t help people who may be depressed. Andreas’s parents will be reading it. No parent will believe that their son could do such a thing,” he said.
The mayor of Montabaur, Edmund Schaaf, called the crash a tragedy, and said that he had deepest sympathy for Lubitz’s family, who are well known in the town, located between Cologne and Frankfurt. Lubitz’s father is a banker, and his mother Ursula plays the organ in the evangelical church. He has a younger brother. They have not been seen since the disaster.
On Saturday their neighbour Johannes Rossbach, who used to greet Lubitz while he was out jogging, said the family must be going through unbearable torment. “The parents have nothing to do with this. First, they lose their son. Second, the whole world reproaches them. It’s hard to imagine anything worse,” he said.
The information released by police and German prosecutors does suggest Lubitz had been receiving long-standing medical treatment. Officially, however, investigators have not confirmed the treatment was for mental health problems.
On Saturday, the German tabloid Bild published an interview with a former girlfriend. She claimed that he could be “sweet” but said that he complained about work pressure and “too little money”. He acknowledged he was receiving psychiatric treatment. On one occasion he locked her in a bathroom. He allegedly told her: “One day I’ll do something which will change the whole system and everyone will know and remember my name.”
Others have suggested that Lubitz’s behaviour seemed normal in the months before the crash. Fellow Germanwings pilot Frank Woiton, who also lives in Montabaur, said he had flown with Lubitz three weeks ago and had left him in sole charge of the controls.
“He talked about his training and how happy he was. He said that he wanted to fly long-haul and become a captain. He had mastered flying and was in control. That’s why I also left him alone in the cockpit to go to the toilet.”
Woiton has become a hero in Germany after volunteering to fly the same Barcelona to Düsseldorf route as the crashed Airbus A320 on Thursday. A passenger, Britta Englisch, took another flight piloted by him between Hamburg and Cologne.
She wrote on Facebook that Woiton had personally addressed the passengers from the front of the plane and told them that he and the crew were there by choice, that they had families of their own, and would do everything in their power to be with them again that evening. The passengers applauded wildly.
Englisch’s post went viral, garnering over 300,000 likes. It prompted a series of heartfelt exchanges between Germanwings crew and customers, some of whom have changed their profile pictures to a black mourning ribbon.
One crew member, Adriana Gaik, said that like all air crew “at the end of the day I want to have both my legs back on firm ground”. She expressed thanks to the beleaguered airline’s guests who trusted and valued the crew “in such difficult days”.
Back in Montabaur, Böttcher said that the town best known for being the home of the internet concern 1&1 would never be the same again. Before the crash, he said, the greatest source of conflict was between the young people who had nowhere to go and the pensioners who liked to go to bed early. “The disco went bust. We have just two pubs. These shut at midnight,” he said.
“Montabaur has never come across something like this before. It’s a small idyllic place. Nobody is protecting Andreas and it’s sad to see.”