Aviation

28-year-old Andreas Lubitz, the co-pilot of the fateful Germanwings flight, was a relatively inexperienced pilot, with only 630 hours of flight time.

He began working for Germanwings (a Lufthansa affiliate) since September 2013, but it is yet unknown where he flew before.

Brice Robin, the Marseille public prosecutor, told a press conference that the co-pilot of the Germanwings jet that went down in the French Alps, killing 150 people, had crashed the plane deliberately.

German co-pilot "intentionally crashed aircraft"

PARIS -- The co-pilot of a Germanwings passenger plane that crashed in France earlier this week "intentionally brought the aircraft down," investigators have announced.

There are no indications that the incident, that killed 150 passengers and crew, was a terrorist act, they added on Thursday.

Everything in the investigation of the Germanwings crash focuses on the behavior of the co-pilot, who stayed locked in the cockpit, according to the chief prosecutor for Marseille.

The official's statements:

-Discussions in the beginning of the recording are normal and even happy. Nothing out of the ordinary.

French aviation experts examining the black box and recordings from the Germanwings flight believe that the crash may have been a deliberate, suicidal choice by the pilot in the cockpit. The audio reports show that one of the pilots, the more experienced of the two, remained locked outside the cockpit.

The Germanwings passenger plane fragments scattered across an Alpine mountains are all that is left of the Airbus A320 carrying 150 people en route to Dusseldorf, Germany, from Barcelona, Spain.

The co-pilot of the Germanwings airliner that crashed in the French Alps killing all 150 people aboard appears to have brought the A320 Airbus down deliberately, the Marseille prosecutor said on March 26.
   

One of the two pilots on the Germanwings flight that crashed in the French Alps was locked out of the cockpit before the plane went down, killing 150 people, a source close to the investigation told AFP March 26.
      

One of the pilots got out of the cockpit of the Germanwings Airbus A320 and could not get back in, the New York Times quotes a "senior military official" as saying.

The plane with 150 people on board was flying from Barcelona in Spain to Düsseldorf in Germany when it went down and plowed into the mountains near the French town of Barcelonette, 100 km north of Nice.

France's BEA (Bureau of Investigations and Analyses) said it has successfully extracted recordings from the cockpit voice recorder of the Germanwings plane that crashed in the French Alps on Tuesday.

BEA Director Remi Jouty said at a news conference at its headquarters outside Paris on Wednesday it could take days to get "usable" information from the voice recordings.