Germanwings co-pilot practiced descent on outbound flight before crash: report
Source: Yahoo! News / Reuters
BERLIN (Reuters) - The Germanwings co-pilot suspected of deliberately crashing a plane in the French Alps in March, killing all 150 people on board, practiced a descent on the previous flight, German newspaper Bild said on Tuesday.
Prosecutors believe 27-year-old German co-pilot Andreas Lubitz locked the captain out of the cockpit and veered the plane into an early descent on a flight from Barcelona to Duesseldorf on March 24.
Bild, citing sources close to France's BEA crash investigation agency, said an interim report that BEA was planning to publish on Wednesday would say that Lubitz had practiced reducing flight altitude on the outbound flight from Duesseldorf to Barcelona the same day as the crash.
Bild cited the sources as saying the BEA report would talk about a "controlled descent that lasted for minutes and for which there was no aeronautical justification".
Read more: http://news.yahoo.com/germanwings-co-pilot-practiced-descent-outbound-flight-crash-220421215--finance.html
= new reply since forum marked as read
Let's wait for all the facts to get in. This could still be just an accident. 
But this was just after the plane had already begun its descent. After each occasion that he chose "100 feet" he then corrected himself and entered the correct flight level. The course of the plane was not altered at all.
The picture that builds up is of a man steeling himself for the challenge he has set himself, building up the courage but at each point pulling back - until finally the pilot re-enters the cockpit and normality returns.
...
The changes apparently happened over a five-minute period at about 07:30 on the day of the crash, starting 30 seconds after the captain left the cockpit.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-32604552
