Prosecutor: Germanwings Plane Crash Deliberate Act
BERMAN: Stunning developments in the deadly crash of Germanwings flight 9525. According to the French prosecutor, the copilot deliberately crashed that plane with all 150 people on board. The prosecutor says 28-year-old German national, Andreas Lubitz, locked the captain out of the cockpit and activated the plane's descent. The captain could be heard on the cockpit voice recorder trying to smash the door down trying to get back in. Investigators believe the copilot was completely conscious during the descent of that plane because of the nature of his breathing.</s>UNIDENTIFIED, FRENCH PROSECUTOR: So far as I know, there's no camera within the cockpit to film the copilot. We don't get the feeling that there was any particular panic because the breathing remains steady. How can you tell from his breathing that he was conscious? Well, the breathing was not faltering. It was normal human -- normal breathing.</s>BOLDUAN: That was the French prosecutor talking right there giving those amazing details. He emphasized the copilot activated the descent of the plane and that can only be done deliberately. There's a lot of technicalities that are very important. Let's try to break it down a little bit with safety analyst and former FAA inspector, David Soucie. David, you said it took a long time to build this up, it's difficult to explain. Let's start first on the idea of a deliberate act to activate the descent that they're discussing. Tell us what that means. We're looking at the Airbus A320 cockpit.</s>DAVID SOUCIE, CNN SAFETY ANALYST: There's a little knob on this eyebrow panel. What it does is sets the rate of descent. If you want to go at 1,000 feet per minute down, you set it at 1,000. You can also say I want to go up 1,000 feet as well. That's what he's saying was intentionally moved. There are some models that you just spin it and it knows you're going that. But it's so you go of 1,000 foot increments or 100-foot increments. He's saying he reached up, turned that down to about 3500 feet per minute.</s>BOLDUAN: Sounds difficult to make that be an accident. No one is saying accident at that point.</s>SOUCIE: Look how far you are from this? You're not going to hit your head or catch a sleeve.</s>BOLDUAN: Is there any evidence that this wasn't deliberate, any of the details they've discussed, that this was not a deliberate act?</s>SOUCIE: There's a couple things and I'm really reaching. We need to rule it out. Number one, this is the control yoke right here. This is how you fly the airplane, with just a joy stick basically. The thought is here, if he passed out and pushed that forward as he fell forward, it would have gone forward, initiated that rate of descent and overrode this, so the airplane would have continued down. Even though it's set at zero, it would continue this trajectory.</s>BOLDUAN: Again, they still say, everything they know is that it is deliberate.</s>SOUCIE: That's right. Second thing real quick, if the pilot got up from here and his sleeve caught this going in this direction, it would have changed the rate of descent. But from what we can tell, he's already out of there.</s>BOLDUAN: He's out of the plane before that happens. Now let's go to where the focus really is. Two things. This is the override panel outside the cockpit to get in. This is the lock panel to lock the door from the inside. We know now something happened here. We don't know if the override was attempted. That's one thing we don't know. We also don't know the lock button was pushed. But we have to assume something happened because that's what the airline said.</s>SOUCIE: Right.</s>BOLDUAN: Walk us through this, David. This is important. Why does the five minutes matter?</s>SOUCIE: What happens here if the copilot -- they're saying the copilot intentionally did the lock? No matter what the pilot did, there's no door handle, no way to get in. He notifies the guy, I've got to get in. If the copilot decides he doesn't want him in, he clicks that down and has five minutes of solitude, no one is going to come in at all. It's impossible.</s>BOLDUAN: After that, how does the 30 seconds play in?</s>SOUCIE: How that works, if he wants to get in, he hits the button -- this is for in case both pilots are incapacitated. If the flight attendant can't reach anybody in there, she puts in a special code in. That little code goes over to the front near the pilot. It gives a 30-second buzzer type warning. That goes on for 30 seconds. Pilots have a choice. If they're incapacitated, they're not going to respond to that.</s>BOLDUAN: Right.</s>SOUCIE: However, what they need to do in that 30 seconds is either lock that door.</s>BOLDUAN: Or do nothing.</s>SOUCIE: Or let them in or wait 30 seconds and do nothing and the door automatically opens.</s>BOLDUAN: With all this, there's a lot of detail that needs to come out as to how this played out. There's a lot of time that could have passed when they're trying to initiate the override, five minutes, 30 seconds, we're talking eight-plus minutes before the crash happened.</s>SOUCIE: Not a lot of time.</s>BOLDUAN: David, thank you so much, as always. John?</s>BERMAN: Kate, the FBI has been called in to assist into the investigation of Andreas Lubitz, the copilot officials now say deliberately clashed Germanwings flight 9525, we have new information on just what investigators hope to get their hands on in the coming hours. That's next.