A Bewildering Crash BY PHILIP GOUREVITCH

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.newyork​er​.com