The stories you want. The opinions that matter.
No, thanks
Tag: andreas lubitz
The Troubled Young Terrorist Next Door

The Troubled Young Terrorist Next Door

The details about Mohammad Abdulazeez, the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga grad accused of murdering four Marines and a sailor, dripped out in the familiar pattern. The first thing to come out of the shocking news is the name of the alleged attacker. Then there is speculation about what sick ideology may have inspired the horrendous act. And there are pictures of the comfy suburban nest the killer came from alongside interviews with baffled neighbors.

Finally comes the inside story bearing the inevitable headline, “Family Troubles Before Killings in Chattanooga.” Abdulazeez’s mother had tried to divorce the father in 2009, accusing him of abusing her and the children and planning to take a second wife, which he held would have been allowable under Islamic law. The parents reconciled, but that’s a lot of craziness.

As for Mohammad, he was facing a court date for drunken driving and illegal drug use and had been fired from a job at a nuclear plant. A family spokesman said the 24-year-old had been fighting depression, pointing to mental illness as a possible cause.

It takes an extremely twisted personality — twisted for whatever combination of reasons — to shoot unarmed strangers, which the Marines and sailor were. So the terrorist needs a larger cause to hide behind.

It appears that Abdulazeez chose radical Islam as a cover for his personal disintegration — though investigators do not yet know whether organized Mideast terrorist groups got to him during a visit to Jordan.

Look at the back stories of other young men who committed or are accused of committing acts of terrorism in this country. The similarities are hard to ignore.

Consider Dylann Roof, the 21-year-old charged with massacring worshippers at a black church in Charleston, South Carolina. His parents had gone through multiple divorces, and he had reportedly attended at least seven schools.

The kid was obviously unbalanced. He had previously dressed in black and asked creepy questions of workers at a mall. Police found drugs on him, and he was ordered to stay away from the shopping center.

Quite the mess, Roof found grandiosity among the fumes of white supremacist ideology.

Adam Lanza was the 20-year-old who shot up an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, murdering 26, mostly children. He was mentally ill, beyond a doubt. But even more craziness reigned behind his freshly painted suburban front door. Lanza’s mother was a gun nut who left weapons and ammunition lying around the house. He hadn’t seen his father in two years.

Neighbors saw Lanza as “a little weird” but not homicidal, according to a New Yorker article. But psychiatrists observed a deeply disturbed individual, his feelings of worthlessness alternating with flashes of self-importance.

And although Lanza didn’t seem glued to a particular ideology, the article did not hesitate to label him a terrorist: “Adam Lanza was a terrorist for an unknowable cause,” it said.

About half of mass murderers kill themselves at the end. As a Harvard psychiatrist noted, they want to “end life early surrounded by an (aura) of apocalyptic destruction.”

As such, Andreas Lubitz, the 27-year-old Germanwings co-pilot who crashed a planeload of passengers into a mountainside, could be called a terrorist, as well.

The question remains about what mix of toxic thinking and brain chemicals would motivate these people, all men in their 20s, to kill masses of unarmed innocents. And with that, we must wonder how much a role teachers of cracked belief systems play in causing such atrocities.

Do they create terrorists out of normal people, or do they provide the match that ignites walking tinderboxes of inner chaos? No easy answers are forthcoming.

Follow Froma Harrop on Twitter @FromaHarrop. She can be reached at fharrop@gmail.com. To find out more about Froma Harrop and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Web page at www.creators.com.

Photo: U.S. flag flies alongside a sign in honor of the four Marines killed in Chattanooga, Tennessee July 17, 2015. REUTERS/Tami Chappell

Investigators: Germanwings Co-Pilot Tested Descent On Earlier Flight

Investigators: Germanwings Co-Pilot Tested Descent On Earlier Flight

By Jessica Camille Aguirre, dpa (TNS)

PARIS — The co-pilot suspected of deliberately downing a Germanwings jet in March tested the controls of the plane during an earlier flight the same morning, French investigators said Wednesday.

On March 24, co-pilot Andreas Lubitz is believed to have crashed flight 4U 9525 into the French Alps killing himself and 149 others on board. The plane was en route to Dusseldorf from Barcelona.

French aviation safety authority BEA said that on an earlier flight, Lubitz conducted seconds-long descent maneuvers.

The report said he brought the plane’s altitude down to 100 feet multiple times over a four-minute period before returning to normal altitude.

During those maneuvers, the captain was absent from the cockpit.

Much of the information in the BEA report, which reveals further details about the flight and Lubitz’s medical history, is based on the black box, consisting of the cockpit voice recorder and the flight data recorder found at the crash site.

Earlier, prosecutors in Germany said that Lubitz searched for suicide methods and cockpit-locking mechanisms on the Internet in the week before he locked himself alone in the cockpit and accelerated the aircraft into the mountainside.

A flight training school for Lufthansa, Germanwings’ parent company, also said earlier that it was aware Lubitz struggled with depression.

Wednesday’s BEA report showed that Lubitz was twice refused a medical certificate re-validation in April 2009 by Lufthansa aeromedical center because of depression and the medication he was taking for it.

When he was issued a new certificate in July 2009, it had a note specifying that it was with the limitation stating regular medical examinations. The limitation also requires the medical examiner to contact the license issuer before conducting an evaluation for a medical certificate renewal.

Lubitz’s most recent medical certificate was issued in July 2014 and was valid until August 2015.

“We are in a situation where the medical problem was known, was investigated, and a decision was made,” French civil aviation authority director Remi Jouty said while explaining the findings.

Lubitz had struggled with depression and had a doctor’s note for the day he allegedly downed the plane, but he had hidden the note and been cleared for flying by Germanwings parent company Lufthansa.

The case has raised questions in Germany about privacy practices after Germanwings and Lufthansa said they were not aware of Lubitz’s doctor’s note.

The BEA report said it was considering “how and why pilots can be in the cockpit with the intention of causing the loss of the aircraft and its occupants, despite the existence of regulations setting mandatory medical criteria for flight crews, especially in the areas of psychiatry, psychology, and behavioral problems.”

It also said it was considering the effect of regulations imposed after the September 11, 2001, attacks in the United States, on cockpit safety procedures.

BEA investigators reiterated prosecutors’ findings that the flight’s captain tried to re-enter the cockpit several times as the plane descended.

Lubitz also did not respond to multiple calls from air traffic controllers and the French Air Defence system, the BEA report said. Starting approximately two minutes before impact, investigators said, “noises similar to violent blows on the cockpit door were recorded on five occasions.”

Photo: Fanden selv via Flickr

Germanwings Co-Pilot Accelerated Plane Before Crash, Officials Say

Germanwings Co-Pilot Accelerated Plane Before Crash, Officials Say

By Jessica Camille Aguirre, dpa (TNS)

PARIS — The second black box recovered from the wreckage of Germanwings flight 4U9525 shows that co-pilot Andreas Lubitz accelerated the aircraft as it descended into the Alps, French aviation officials said on Friday.

French aviation authority BEA also said that the flight data recorder confirms that Lubitz changed the autopilot to lower the plane to an altitude of 100 feet, a figure that experts have speculated was likely the lowest that it could have been set at.

The changes, which caused the Airbus A320’s demise and killed all 150 people on board, are the subject of a raft of investigations into the culpability of Lubitz. The BEA findings add to evidence that he destroyed the plane on purpose, although investigators in Germany and France have still not identified a clear motive.

According to audio recordings from the first black box, Lubitz locked the cockpit door, preventing the return of the plane’s main pilot, and was alone while changing the flight controls.

German prosecutors have revealed that Lubitz searched for suicide methods and cockpit locking mechanisms online during the week prior to the fatal crash.

In the absence of a suicide note or claim of responsibility, prosecutors have focused on Lubitz’s psychological history to try to understand what could have prompted the 27-year-old to steer the aircraft into the ground as it flew from Barcelona, Spain, to Dusseldorf, Germany, on March 24.

A string of revelations have come to light, including that Lubitz had temporarily suspended pilot training in 2009 due to severe depression and had informed Lufthansa, Germanwings’ parent company, of his mental state.

Two days after the crash, Lufthansa chief executive Carsten Spohr had said Lubitz had passed all his medical tests, and that he “was fit for flying without any restrictions.”

Lubitz had also passed medical and psychological evaluations to obtain a student pilot certificate from the US Federal Aviation Authority in 2010.

But a note on his medical file showed that Lubitz had suffered from suicidal tendencies before receiving his pilot’s license, German prosecutors said, and he had regular appointments with doctors despite having no diagnosis of a physical illness.

In the wake of the crash, authorities are scrambling to find out whether there are fundamental flaws in the system that allowed a man with an apparent death wish to sit at the controls of an airliner, and airlines around the world have independently brought in a two-person cockpit rule.

Safety investigators in France and a panel of German officials are conducting separate reviews of aviation safety procedures, including cockpit-locking mechanisms and psychological screening for pilots.

Following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in the United States, international standards were put in place requiring reinforced cockpit doors that must be locked during the flight.

If a pilot is incapacitated, there is a way for a cabin crew member to open a locked door, but Lubitz is thought to have overridden this system and manually blocked re-entry.

According to the cockpit voice recorder files heard by French prosecutors, the main pilot grew increasingly insistent in attempting to get a response from Lubitz as the plane descended.

(c)2015 Deutsche Presse-Agentur GmbH (Hamburg, Germany), Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC

Photo: French prosecutor Brice Robin, center, discusses evidence pointing to deliberate actions by the co-pilot in the crash of a Germanwings jet, killing all 150 people on board, during a press conference on Thursday, March 26, 2015. Robin confirmed that Andreas Lubitz, a 28-year-old German citizen, refused to reopen the cockpit door for the pilot and pressed a button that sent the plane into its fatal descent. (Ruoppolo Guillaume/Maxppp/Zuma Press/TNS)

French Officials Refute Claims Of Plane Crash Video Recording

French Officials Refute Claims Of Plane Crash Video Recording

By Jessica Camille Aguirre and Sebastian Kunigkeit, dpa (TNS)

PARIS — French prosecutors said they did not possess a cell phone video recording of the final moments of Germanwings flight 4U9525 on Wednesday, telling dpa that remnants of mobile phones found at the crash site were likely too damaged to yield footage.

“In the event that someone has such a video, they should turn it over to police without delay,” Marseille prosecutor Brice Robin told French media on Wednesday, repeating comments he made to dpa late on Tuesday dismissing media reports claiming to have seen footage.

France’s Paris Match and German tabloid Bild published minute-by-minute accounts of the plane’s last minutes late on Tuesday, which they say are based on quotes and information drawn from a video found on a mobile phone at the crash site.

The accounts largely reflect statements Robin gave to press last week after listening to a recovered cockpit voice recorder, from which he surmised that 27-year-old co-pilot Andreas Lubitz intentionally crashed the plane into mountainside in southern France killing himself and 149 others.
—
Site of the crash

Data from the cockpit voice recorder is one of the key pieces of evidence used by prosecutors to reconstruct the flight’s last moments. The rest of plane along with the contents of a second black box shattered on impact into thousands of pieces.

Germanwings CEO Thomas Winkelmann and Carsten Spohr, the CEO of parent company Lufthansa, travelled to a memorial near the site of the crash on Wednesday where they stood in silence for several moments before laying flowers.

On Tuesday, Lufthansa said its flight training school knew of Lubitz’s problems with depression, producing a 2009 email in which he explained he was ready to resume flight training after a break. In it, he informed the school of a “previous episode of severe depression.”

At the memorial site, Spohr expressed his grief and thanked French authorities for their work, but declined to answer journalists’ questions about when the air carrier found out about Lubitz’s 2009 email.

Lufthansa provided the email along with other documents to prosecutors in the German city of Dusseldorf and said it was cooperating fully with the investigation.
—
National memorial service

Earlier, Spohr said Lubitz had passed all his medical tests, and that he “was fit for flying without any restrictions.”

Prosecutors said that Lubitz had been in treatment with psychiatrists and neurologists and that a doctor had noted a suicidal tendency in him before he received his pilot’s license.

In the town of Haltern in the west of Germany, families and friends were to gather late on Wednesday for an ecumenical religious service in memory of the 16 school pupils and two teachers from a local school killed in the crash.

The students from the town’s Joseph Koenig Gymnasium had been returning from a trip to Spain.

The service was to be held in the Catholic church of St Sixtus, the same venue as used for a memorial service last Friday with Germany’s President Joachim Gauck.

Germany’s national memorial service for the dead is to be held April 17 in the Catholic cathedral of Cologne with Chancellor Angela Merkel attending.

Photo: GE Deutschland via Flickr