Germanwings Flight 9525 (2015)

Germanwings Flight 9525

Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 went missing on Saturday, 8 March 2014. Reasons for the flight diversion are unknown but it was widely speculated, even in 2014, that it was an instance of pilot-suicide.

Unfortunately, another casualty of that media focus could have been to influence the young co-pilot of Germanwings Flight 9525. After locking the pilot-in-command out of the cockpit the co-pilot deliberately crashed the aircraft into a mountain on 24 March 2015.

Examples of pilot-suicide are rare, particularly with commercial passenger flights.

Of those incidents that could quite reasonably be attributed to pilot-suicide there is a pattern: each flight ended suddenly, and one of the pilots may have left the flight deck prior to the descent.

China Eastern Airlines Flight 5735 descended steeply and struck the ground at high speed; Germanwings Flight 9525 crashed directly into a mountain; SilkAir Flight 185 started a rapid descent from 35,000 feet - and started to break up before crashing into the Musi River in Sumatra; EgyptAir Flight 990 crashed into the Atlantic Ocean with the co-pilot repeating a phrase in Arabic on the way down; LAM Mozambique Airlines Flight 470 was deliberately crashed into the Bwabwata National Park in Namibia; and China Eastern Airlines Flight 5735 may also have been crashed deliberately.

Except for MH370.

We do not know if one of the MH370 pilots was locked out of the flight deck, but we do know that the aircraft continued flying for hours after deviating from the filed Flight Plan and made several controlled changes of course.

In the case of Germanwings Flight 9525 we also know for certain that the co-pilot had mental health issues which he had hidden from his employer.

The Wikipedia article for Germanwings Flight 9525 is embedded below:-

Source:Germanwings Flight 9525, Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanwings_Flight_9525

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