The murderous co-pilot who intentionally crashed an Airbus into the French Alps last week, killing all on board, repeatedly encouraged the captain to take a bathroom break minutes earlier — so he would be left alone for his suicide plot, a new report revealed Sunday.
The chilling revelation came as it also surfaced that the doomed plane’s 149 passengers and crew were terrifyingly aware something dire was happening for up to eight minutes before the crash killed them.
Germanwings Flight 9525 had begun routinely enough on the morning of March 24. Before the plane took off from Barcelona, Captain Patrick Sondenheimer lamented that he hadn’t gone to the bathroom, according to Germany’s Bild newspaper, based on information from the flight’s voice recorder.
Deranged co-pilot Andreas Lubitz coolly told him to go anytime, sources said.
But Sondenheimer insisted on getting them to cruising altitude first — 38,000 feet — and then discussed their plans to land in Duesseldorf.
As the captain talked about the landing, Lubitz, 27, chillingly replied with “Hopefully’’ and “We’ll see’’ at different times, sources said.
At 10:27 a.m., after the plane reached its cruising altitude, Lubitz tried to push the plane’s captain out the door again.
“You can go now,” he said.
Another two minutes passed before the captain took him up on the offer.
“You can take over,” Sondenheimer eventually said as sounds indicate his seat being pushed back and then the cockpit door being closed.
It would not open again.
Almost immediately, the aircraft began its deadly descent.
An automated alarm can be heard in the cockpit announcing “Sink rate” — a warning that the plane was descending too fast.
Sondenheimer, returning from the bathroom and in full view of some of the passengers, began to panic on the other side of the cockpit door. Banging desperately, he begged his co-pilot to let him back in. He then grabbed an ax in a frantic, last-ditch effort to bash the steel door in.
“For God’s sake, open the door!” the captain can be heard shouting on the recording, followed by screams from the passengers.
In the cockpit, the co-pilot was silent. Only his breathing could be heard on the voice recorder, which picked up another automated warning: “Terrain! Pull up! Pull up!”
Sondenheimer was still pleading: “Open the damn door!” he shouted.
The black box recorded two more telling noises: the continuing sound of distraught passengers and a noise investigators believe was the plane’s right wing scraping the mountain, the last sound on the transcript.
Lubitz could have killed more if he had realized his dream to fly larger planes for long-haul flights, Bild reported. Another pilot told the German newspaper that Lubitz’s ultimate goal was to fly Boeing 747s and an Airbus A380.
A 747 can carry more than 600 people. An Airbus 380 can carry nearly 800.
Post Wire Services