Germanwings

Lowcost airlines easyJet, Air Transat and Norwegian Air Shuttle have announced a change in the rules for pilots during flights.

According to the rule amendments, there should always be two crew members in the cockpit. Whenever one of the pilots needs to leave, the main air hostess will substitute them.

The tragic irony from Germanwings crash in the French Alps this week, assuming that the scenario of the co-pilot's reckless suicide proves the most prevalent, is the fact that the impassable cockpit door was a result of safety measures instituted after 9/11.

Police searched the house of the Germanwings co-pilot Andreas Lubitz on Thursday, as it emerged that he intentionally initiated the descent of the plane, which crashed in the French Alps on Tuesday.

According to the local government in Dusseldorf, the most recent regular security check on Lubitz, which had been carried out on January 27, established nothing unusual.

"We are really deeply shocked and I wouldn't not have been able to imagine that the situation would have got even worse" said the Chief executive of Lufthansa, parent company of Germanwings Carsten Spohr, at the company's press conference.
Highlights of the conference:

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.

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.