Germanwings co-pilot Andreas Lubitz , deliberately acted to ‘destroy the plane’ against French Alps mountain: prosecutor

An eerie silence descended on the cockpit, interrupted only by the increasingly panicked pounding on the door — and the screams of those about to die.

A suicidal German aviator turned mass murderer at 35,000 feet as he locked the captain out of the cockpit and silently slammed the commercial plane into the French Alps, officials said Thursday.

Deranged co-pilot Andreas Lubitz, 28, remained chillingly quiet, his breathing calm and even, in the minutes before all 150 passengers and crew aboard Germanwings Flight 9525 were killed on impact.

“It was absolute silence in the cockpit,” said French prosecutor Brice Robin in explaining the unfathomable end to the doomed flight between Barcelona and Dusseldorf.

Lubitz offered no hints of the macabre ending he had planned for his final flight aboard the Airbus A320, loaded with 144 passengers and five other crew members.

 

“You don’t get the impression that there was any particular panic, because the breathing is always the same,” Robin said.

The terrified howls of his victims were captured on the cockpit voice recorder just before the Tuesday crash as the passengers realized their fate.

“The victims realized just at the last moment,” said Robin. “Only toward the end do you hear screams. And bear in mind that death would have been instantaneous.”

The plane was pulverized when it hit the remote mountain at 6,000 feet after an eight-minute descent.

Lubitz had manually reset the autopilot to take the plane from 38,000 feet to 96 feet, its lowest setting, according to the flight tracking service Flightradar24.

Investigators searched Lubitz’s family home in Montabaur, Germany, and his apartment in Dusseldorf on Thursday. They were seen removing a computer and several boxes from the family home. One person emerged from the home shielded with a coat to avoid the media.

Some relatives were brought Thursday to an overlook near the crash scene as investigators repeated the insane details gleaned from one of the plane’s mangled black boxes.

Officials were still hunting for a second black box with flight data.

Lubitz’s family, while in France, was kept separated from the other mourners once word of the murder plot surfaced.

The co-pilot — who was engaged to be married — stopped training six years ago because of “burnout syndrome,” former classmates told German newspaper Der Spiegel.

But others who knew Lubitz challenged stories of him being depressed, swearing he seemed nothing but pleased with his work.

"He was very happy. He gave off a good feeling."

The glider club's chairman, Klaus Radke, said he couldn't accept the allegations against Lubitz.

"I don't see how anyone can draw such conclusions before the investigation is completed," he said.

Friends and colleagues said there was no indication of the evil that surfaced during what started as a routine flight.