Germanwings crash: locked door, axe… The last terrifying moments of the passengers of the suicide flight

On March 24, 2015, air traffic control loses contact with the Germanwings Airbus A320. This plane was to connect Barcelona to Düsseldorf. On board 144 passengers, six crew members, the captain and his co-pilot. The aircraft will then finish its course in the mountains of the French Alps. After analyzing the black boxes, we learn that Andreas Lubitz, the co-pilot, knowingly brought the plane against the mountain. “I think at that point Lubitz kind of ‘forgot’, all the people that were with him,” advance Maître Sophie Thonon-Wesfreid, lawyer for the families of two Argentine victims who died in the crash.

A few minutes before the tragedy, Andreas Lubitz is alone in the cockpit. When the commander returns, he realizes that the cockpit door is closed. The captain will try to break down the door with an ax, all in front of the amazed eyes of the passengers. “It’s a scene that is so extraordinary, so unusual that maybe no one realized it,” Judge Me Thonon-Wesfreid. “What could be difficult to understand was the rarity of this scene. (…) It was absolutely, absolutely, unpredictable. No one could imagine it.”

An absolute drama

THE victims will then see themselves die. “It was an absolutely appalling work of identification because the human remains were totally shattered, scattered in the mountain”, describes Me Thonon-Wesfreid. “For the families, the main and central question was whether their parents, their son, their children realized what had happened, if they understood that they were all going to die in a few seconds” , continues the lawyer. “Perhaps from the moment when they saw the mountain approaching the wings, then they said to themselves, perhaps, that there was something abnormal. But what you need to know is that it all happened in a few minutes. So the time to design the horror of the situation, they may not have had it then.”