Germanwings - Update

Germanwings Pilot Andreas Lubitz's Mental Health Was Questioned By FAA 2010

 AP | By By JOAN LOWY


WASHINGTON (AP) - Five years ago Federal Aviation Administration officials questioned the mental fitness of the Germanwings pilot who crashed an airliner in the French Alps last month, but they awarded him a U.S. pilot license after his German doctor said he had fully recovered from severe depression, government records show.

The records, posted online by the FAA in response to a Freedom of Information Act request, show Andreas Lubitz applied for a U.S. pilot license while he was employed by Lufthansa, the parent company of Germanwings, and was training to be an airline pilot at a flight school in Phoenix in 2010. As part of the application, he initially submitted a medical form to the FAA asserting he had no mental disorders. He then resubmitted the form acknowledging he had been treated for severe depression from 2008 to 2009.

The FAA initially sent Lubitz a letter warning that his license application could be denied and giving him 30 days to provide a letter from his doctor describing his treatment and his current condition. The license was granted after he provided letters from his doctor describing his treatment and saying he had recovered.

Lubitz had suffered an episode of severe depression because he was unable to cope with "modified living conditions," according to the letters. Lubitz was treated with two drugs, Cipralex and Mirtazapin, which, along with therapy, "enabled him to develop sufficient resources for getting on with similar situations in the future," the doctor, whose name was blacked out by the FAA, said in one letter.

Prosecutors believe Lubitz intentionally crashed Germanwings Flight 9525 while flying from Barcelona to Duesseldorf on March 24. Cockpit voice recordings indicate Lubitz locked the captain out of the cockpit after he had left. The captain can be heard on the recordings demanding to be let back in and trying to break down the door.

Lubitz and all 149 others on board the plane were killed in the crash.

Germanwings Crash Looms Large at Lufthansa Shareholders Meeting

HAMBURG, Germany - It was a shareholders meeting in which business, inevitably, was only part of the agenda.

Five weeks after a Germanwings co-pilot crashed his plane into the French Alps, killing himself and 149 others, the disaster continues to cast a long shadow over the airline's parent company, Lufthansa, as well as its employees, customers and investors.

"This tragedy has changed us, and the scars that it has left on our company will remain forever," Carsten Spohr, the group's chief executive, told the 2,000 shareholders who gathered in this northern port city.

Outside the city's conference center, a column of Lufthansa banners bearing a black-and-white version of the company's crane logo fluttered in a steady wind. Inside, a stark memorial stood in the reception hall, where 150 candles flickered, and where many arriving investors had paused to add their names to condolence books. Attendees observed a minute of silence was before the meeting was called to order.

Yet at a time when Lufthansa faces urgent commercial challenges - including heightened competition in Europe and on long-haul routes, as well as tensions with the group's 5,400 pilots - many shareholders expressed concern on Wednesday that the Germanwings tragedy risked distracting management from its turnaround efforts.


A Lufthansa jet on the tarmac at the Frankfurt airport. Shareholders on Wednesday expressed concern that the Germanwings tragedy risked distracting Lufthansa's management from its turnaround efforts. Credit Fredrik Von Erichsen/European Pressphoto Agency


"Obviously, without this tragedy, management would probably be under more intense pressure from all of us today," said Ingo Speich, a portfolio manager at Union Investment, a Frankfurt firm. "But at some point, they will have to come back to reality," he said.

He added: "And that reality, frankly, is not very pleasant."

Since taking over as chief executive of Lufthansa in May, Mr. Spohr, 48, has struggled to put the sprawling group - besides Germanwings, it includes Austrian Airlines and Swiss International Airlines - back on a path to growth. Net profit shrank last year to 55 million euros, or $60 million, from €313 million in 2013, on revenue that was basically unchanged at €30 million.

That weak performance, combined with mounting pension liabilities and investment losses, prompted the board in February to suspend its dividend payout, in order to reinvest in improvements to its fleet and services.

Until now, Lufthansa has responded to intensifying competition from no-frills airlines like EasyJet and Ryanair by shifting an ever-greater share of the group's domestic and European traffic to Germanwings, whose labor and other operating costs are about one-third that of Lufthansa's.

Late last year, Lufthansa's board approved plans to extend the budget concept to include a number of long-haul leisure destinations. Beginning in October, the group plans to start flights from Cologne/Bonn Airport to destinations in Thailand, Dubai and the Caribbean under its second low-cost brand, Eurowings. As part of that transition, the Germanwings name will eventually disappear, to be rechristened under a unified Eurowings banner.

But those efforts have been met with firm resistance from the group's pilots. Attempts to freeze salaries and scale back an early-retirement deal for pilots, alongside changes to pay and working conditions, were at the heart of the series of strikes by Lufthansa's pilots over the past year that cost the group more than €230 million.

Continue reading the main storyContinue reading the main story
In the wake of the Germanwings crash, pilots agreed to suspend more strikes that had been planned this spring. And on Wednesday, Mr. Spohr proposed bringing the dispute to an external mediator for resolution.

"I think that's a positive signal," said Mr. Speich, the fund manager. "I hope it's a chance for the company to move closer together, to work more constructively toward solutions."

Still, Lufthansa's pilots are not the only ones uneasy about Lufthansa's embrace of the low-cost sector.

"I don't see how this low-cost strategy makes any logical sense," said Markus Neumann, who sits on the board of SdK, a German shareholder activist group, and who abstained Wednesday from endorsing management's program. "I think there needs to be a fundamental strategic rethink."

He added that the carrier should maintain a substantial presence in airline catering and maintenance, which remain respectably profitable, and that "Lufthansa, in my view, can only succeed as a premium airline."

Despite the revelations that Lufthansa knew six years ago that the 27-year-old Germanwings co-pilot, Andreas Lubitz, had a history of severe depression, Mr. Neumann said he was confident that the crash would not have a long-lasting impact on the airline's image with passengers.

In recent weeks, a task force made of German aviation, medical and government experts has held the first of a series of meetings aimed at clarifying what led to the Germanwings crash and how it might have been averted. Two working groups have been formed. The first is charged with exploring possible changes to secured cockpit doors and their use, taking into account that Mr. Lubitz was able to deliberately crash the airliner after locking out the pilot.

The second task force is reviewing current standards of medical oversight of pilots and the exchange of information between doctors, the authorities and the airlines. That group hopes to publish an initial progress report at some point in June. Any final recommendations made will be discussed first at the European level, then an international one.

"I think this tragedy will be viewed as a singular event," said Mr. Neumann, the shareholder activist. "It may have some short-term effect on bookings, but over the long run, Lufthansa can still rely on its well-earned reputation as one of the world's safest airlines."

Not all the shareholders on Wednesday, however, were finding it easy to look ahead.

"I can't stop thinking of all those people, particularly the children, and their final minutes," said Ralf Schönfeld, a 49-year-old banker and father of four who had driven in from Schwerin, about an hour east of Hamburg.

Mr. Schönfeld said he hoped the crash would prompt a close re-evaluation of Lufthansa's procedures for pilot selection and training, as well as a deeper examination in Germany and elsewhere of what changes should be made to better identify pilots with serious mental health problems and how to prevent sick pilots from flying.

"I think it's important that we not simply try to assign blame or call for someone's resignation," said Mr. Schönfeld, who was visibly moved as he signed his name to a condolence book. "That cannot be the goal."