France BEA’s aviation investigators on Friday said the second black box recovered from the Germanwings crash site in the southern French Alps confirmed that co-pilot Andreas Lubitz had deliberately crashed the plane.
“A first reading shows that the pilot in the cockpit used the automatic pilot to put the airplane on a descent towards an altitude of 100 feet,” BEA investigators said in a statement on Friday, France 24 reported.
“Then several times the pilot modified the automatic pilot settings to increase the speed of the airplane as it descended,” it added.
Authorities found the second black box, which contains technical flight data, on Thursday after a grueling nine-day search in difficult mountain terrain.
Data from the first black box, which records conversations in the cockpit, suggested that Lubitz, 27, locked his captain out and then deliberately set the plane on a deadly collision course with the mountains.
The plane smashed into the mountains at a speed of 700 kilometers an hour, instantly killing all 150 people on board – half of them German and more than 50 from Spain.
It emerged on Thursday that Lubitz had searched online for information about suicide and cockpit doors.
German prosecutors have said Lubitz was diagnosed as suicidal “several years ago”, before he became a pilot.
