A Bewildering Crash

A French helicopter departs for the site where Germanwings Flight 9525 crashed.
A French helicopter departs for the site where Germanwings Flight 9525 crashed.PHOTOGRAPH BY MUSTAFA YALCIN/ANADOLU AGENCY/GETTY

Flying time from Barcelona to Dusseldorf is an hour and fifty-six minutes—not a long haul—so there’s no reason to imagine that Andreas Lubitz, the co-pilot of Germanwings Flight 9525, could have anticipated that his commander, Captain Patrick Sondenheimer, would get up and leave him alone in the cockpit, as the captain did, a little more than twenty minutes after takeoff on Tuesday, while the plane, an Airbus 320, cruised over the French Alps. There is no reason to imagine, in other words, that Lubitz could have foreseen, on that route, or on that day, much less in that precise airspace, that he would find himself, without any struggle, in a position to lock himself in the cockpit and take control of the plane, initiating its descent, and continuing to fly it steadily down, down, down over eight minutes that must have seemed to anyone conscious of the trajectory a god-awful eternity, especially after the captain began knocking, then shouting, then pounding at the barred cockpit door—flying down, down out of the sky, down into the mountains, down into death: his death and the deaths of the hundred and forty-nine other souls whose fate he had become.

But that, we’re told, is what happened to that plane. That’s the story that emerged from the recovered cockpit voice recorder, by way of Brice Robin, the chief prosecutor of Marseille, who listened to the full thirty minutes of audio, from takeoff to oblivion. There was nothing wrong with the plane. There was nothing identifiably wrong with the pilots: their conversation, until the captain stepped away, was perfectly genial, collegial, banal. But the cockpit door could only be secured like that intentionally, from within, and the plane’s loss of altitude, its steady dive into the teeth of the Rhone Alpes, too, could only be the result of deliberate individual action. Asked if Lubitz had committed suicide, Robin said he did not call it that but that it was a logical theory to consider. Robin would only go so far as to say that Lubitz had evidently intended “to destroy the aircraft,” and that he was upgrading the case from involuntary to voluntary manslaughter. In the final moments before annihilation, the recorder registered the hammering of the captain’s fists and feet against the door, the screams of passengers, and the quiet, steady rhythm of Lubitz’s last breaths.

The horror. It’s all there in the sound of Lubitz breathing. The wind of life, the wind of death. That steady soughing tells us all that we know so far, and all that we don’t yet—and may never—know, about this atrocity, the deadliest aviation catastrophe in France in more than three decades. Just as the brevity of the flight, and the apparent spontaneity of the captain’s decision to leave the cockpit—to stretch a leg? or take a piss? or have a chat? We do not know—tells us that Lubitz could not have planned before he flew that day to crash the plane that way; and just as the locking of the door, and the pushing of the button that brought the plane down, tell us that he acted consciously and deliberately, so Lubitz’s breathing, unbroken by any attempt at speech, tells us that he chose not to explain himself. He knew that he was on the record. What did he think he was doing? What came over him? What possessed him? And why?

Assuming, for now, that Robin has got the story right, Lubitz’s victims—high-school students and opera stars, vacationers and business commuters, young lovers and old married couples, families and solitary travellers, citizens from at least fifteen countries—meant nothing to him. They could have been any of us, anywhere—whoever flies or rides a train or takes a bus or in any way entrusts her life to strangers, as we all must regularly and routinely to get through this world. That sense of investment in calamity—it could have been me—is true, of course, of accidents and targeted acts of terrorism as well. But to be told that a scene of mass death is the result of an accident or terrorism is to be given not only an explanation of the cause but also an idea of how to reckon with the consequence–through justice, or revenge, or measures meant to prevent a recurrence. After the massacre at Sandy Hook, we could at least dream of gun control. But the story of Lubitz, suddenly in control of a plane flying all those aboard to their deaths, offers us only a cosmic meaninglessness and bewilderment.

Around the same time that the prosecutor, Robin, was telling a press conference in Marseille what he had heard on the Germanwings flight recorder, the news wires were reporting from England on the grand ceremonial reburial, at Leicester Cathedral, of Richard III, the blood-soaked fifteenth-century king, whose remains were recently exhumed from a local parking lot. The Bishop of Leicester, presiding, laid the cutthroat monarch to rest with the words “All our journeys lead to this place where reputation counts for nothing.” You could take that to mean that all worldly action and ambition is in vain, or that the void of death that awaits us makes it irrelevant whether we do good or bad on Earth. But why let the Bishop have the last word? Thinking of the mystery of Lubitz’s last breaths, and the bones of Richard, I turned to my idea of a higher authority, Shakespeare, and his imagination of Richard reckoning his own bloody meaning and meaninglessness as a force of nature:

What do I fear? Myself? There’s none else by.
Richard loves Richard; that is, I and I.
Is there a murderer here? No. Yes, I am.
Then fly! What, from myself? Great reason why:
Lest I revenge. What, myself upon myself?
Alack, I love myself. Wherefore? For any good
That I myself have done unto myself?
O, no! Alas, I rather hate myself
For hateful deeds committed by myself.
I am a villain. Yet I lie. I am not.
Fool, of thyself speak well. Fool, do not flatter:
My conscience hath a thousand several tongues,
And every tongue brings in a several tale,
And every tale condemns me for a villain.

This week, the King of Spain, the President of France, the German Chancellor—all said that they will stop at nothing to make sure that the Germanwings crash is thoroughly investigated. But what comfort is there in such assurances? When death strikes without the rhyme or reason of coherent human agency, in the form of a tsunami or an earthquake, a flood, or lightning bolt, or falling tree, the insurance companies, godless agencies of capital though they be, describe the blow as an “act of God.” Even those who like to believe in a divinity that loves us and means us well can grasp, and take some sort of solace in, the awareness that creation is random and incomprehensible and indifferent; that—turn, turn, turn—there is a time to every purpose under heaven; that, in short, it is not personal. Still it seems to go against our grain to accept that we are part of this natural order of disorder ourselves—and that the wholesale murder of innocents by someone as apparently motiveless as Lubitz (as far as we know so far) might also best be understood as an act of God.