The second black box recovered from the crash site of a Germanwings airliner confirms that the co-pilot deliberately crashed the plane and even increased its speed before the Airbus A320 slammed into the French Alps, killing 150 people, French investigators said Friday.
France's BEA aviation investigators said Andreas Lubitz, the 27-year-old co-pilot, "used the automatic pilot to put the airplane on a descent towards altitude of 100 feet," France24 reports.
"Then several times the pilot modified the automatic pilot settings to increase the speed of the airplane as it descended," it added.
Information from the first black box, which captured conversations in the cockpit, had confirmed Lubitz locked out his pilot, who could be heard shouting and banging on the cockpit door as the plane headed toward the mountains for almost 10 minutes.
In Marseille, prosecutor Brice Robin underlined French investigators' conviction that Lubitz was conscious until the moment of impact, and appears to have acted repeatedly to stop an excessive speed alarm from sounding.
The plane, en route to Duesseldorf from Barcelona on March 24, was traveling at 420 miles an hour when it first clipped one side of a mountain and then hit head-on into the ground.
The second black box, which records data such as speed and altitude, was found blackened and buried at the crash site on Thursday.
Lubitz spent time online researching suicide methods and cockpit door security in the week before crashing Flight 9525, prosecutors said Thursday — the first evidence that the fatal descent may have been a premeditated act.
German prosecutors have said Lubitz's medical records from before he received his pilot's license referred to "suicidal tendencies," and Lufthansa, Germanwings' parent company, said it knew six years ago that Lubitz had had an episode of "severe depression" before he finished his flight training.
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