Doomed Airbus’ cockpit voice recorder shows pilot locked out

One of the two pilots of the doomed Germanwings Airbus A320 passenger aircraft, which plummeted in the French Alps, killing all 150 people on board, was locked out of the cockpit before the plane’s crash and was unable to get back in, an official says.

Evidence from a cockpit voice recorder recovered from the crash site late Tuesday, several hours after the crash of the low-cost flight from the Spanish coastal city of Barcelona to the German city of Duesseldorf, indicated that one of the pilots had left the cockpit and could not re-enter, an official involved in the investigation said on Thursday.

In the data from the voice recorder, analyzed Wednesday afternoon, the pilot outside was heard “knocking lightly on the door, and there is no answer,” the investigator, speaking on condition of anonymity, said. “And then he hits the door stronger, and no answer. There is never an answer.”

The official said the pilots were conversing normally in German at the beginning of the flight early Tuesday. However, after the sound of knocking “there was no more conversation” until an alarm indicating the proximity of cruising altitude could be heard before the aircraft suddenly began a fatal eight-minute plunge.

“We don’t know yet the reason why one of the guys went out,” said the official, adding, “But what is sure is that at the very end of the flight, the other pilot is alone and does not open the door.”

During a news conference on Wednesday, the German flag carrier Lufthansa’s Chief Executive Officer Carsten Spor said that the crash was “inexplicable.”

Meanwhile, Rémi Jouty, the director of the French Aviation Bureau of Investigations and Analyses, said that it was too early to determine the cause of the crash.

Although terrorism has not been ruled out, Germany’s Interior Minister Karl Ernst Thomas de Maizière said there was no “hard evidence that the crash was intentionally brought about by third parties.” French officials also said terrorism appeared unlikely.