“We are really deeply shocked and I wouldn’t not have been able to imagine that the situation would have got even worse” said the Chief executive of Lufthansa, parent company of Germanwings Carsten Spohr, at the company’s press conference.
Highlights of the conference:
Lufthansa confirmed that co-pilot Andreas Lubitz appeared to have prevented the captain from re-entering the cabin after a toilet break, resulting in the crash that killed 150 people onboard.
As Carsten Spohr said, the company was in complete shock.
It was “beyond our worst nightmare”, he told reporters in Cologne. “It leaves us absolutely speechless … I wouldn’t not have been able to imagine that the situation would have got even worse.”
The Chief executive of Lufthansa also stressed that despite the disaster, Lufthansa has full confidence in its training and pilot screening procedures.
However, they will be reviewed, he said.
Furthermore, Spohr said it appears the captain punched in the emergency number into the cockpit door to gain entry, but the co-pilot deployed the five-minute over-ride. He also said that, irrespective of all the sophisticated safety devices, “you can never exclude such an individual event”, adding “no system in the world could manage to do that”.
While he was asked about the theory that the co-pilot killed himself, he stated that“We can only speculate what might have been the motivation of the co-pilot. In a company that prides itself on its safety record, this is a shock. We select cockpit personnel carefully.”
The Lufthansa chief executive repeated that despite the crash, he has confidence in the screening and training procedures of Lufthansa and Germanwings pilots and that the training procedures are sound, but they will nevertheless be re-examined.
Among others, he noted that there was an interruption in Andreas Lubitz’s training.
Responding to a question, he said he can’t shed any light on this and added that it will be have to be investigated.
In response to a question about people’s fears of planes after the crash, he insists that flying is the safest mode of transport.