Alone at controls, co-pilot sought to 'destroy' the plane

Rescue helicopters land and take off, top, in Seyne-les-Alpes, France, Thursday March 26, 2015. The Germanwings Airbus A320, on a flight from Barcelona, Spain, to Duesseldorf, Germany,inexplicably began to descend from cruising altitude after losing radio contact with ground control and slammed into a remote mountainside in the French Alps on Tuesday, killing all 150 people on board.
Rescue helicopters land and take off, top, in Seyne-les-Alpes, France, Thursday March 26, 2015. The Germanwings Airbus A320, on a flight from Barcelona, Spain, to Duesseldorf, Germany,inexplicably began to descend from cruising altitude after losing radio contact with ground control and slammed into a remote mountainside in the French Alps on Tuesday, killing all 150 people on board.

PARIS — The co-pilot of the doomed Germanwings jet barricaded himself in the cockpit and "intentionally" sent the plane full speed into a mountain in the French Alps, ignoring the pilot's frantic pounding on the door and the screams of terror from passengers, a prosecutor said Thursday.

Co-pilot Andreas Lubitz's "intention [was] to destroy this plane," Marseille prosecutor Brice Robin said, laying out the conclusions reached by French aviation investigators after listening to the last minutes of Tuesday's Flight 9525.

The Airbus A320 was flying from Barcelona to Duesseldorf when it began to descend from cruising altitude of 38,000 feet after losing radio contact with air traffic controllers. All 150 on board died when the plane slammed into the mountain.

Robin said the pilot, who has not been identified, left the cockpit, presumably to go to the lavatory, and then was unable to regain access. In the meantime, Lubitz, a 28-year-old German, manually set the plane on the descent that drove it into the mountain.

Robin said the commander of the plane knocked several times "without response." He said the door could only be blocked manually.

"The most plausible, the most probably, is that the co-pilot voluntarily refused to open the door of the cockpit for the captain and pressed the button for the descent," Robin said.

He said the co-pilot's responses, initially courteous in the first part of the trip, became "curt" when the captain began the mid-flight briefing on the planned landing.

The information was pulled from the black box cockpit voice recorder, but Robin said the co-pilot said nothing from the moment the commanding pilot left.

"It was absolute silence in the cockpit," he said.

Read Friday’s Arkansas Democrat-Gazette for full details.

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