Families of Germanwings victims sue US flight school
The 80 families of the 150 victims of the Germanwings crash last year are suing a pilot school after it transpired that co-pilot Andreas Lubitz had a history of mental health problems
Andreas Lubitz, co-pilot of the Germanwings aeroplane which he then flew into the French Alps, was shown to have a history of mental health problems
The 80 families of those killed when the co-pilot of a Germanwings aeroplane crashed it into the French Alps in 2015, have filed a law suit against the US flight school where he was trained, for failing to properly screen his medical background.
Last March, Andreas Lubitz, who received his training at the Airline Training Centre of Arizona (ATCA) locked the plane's captain out of the cabin before flying it into the Alps, killing all 150 people on board.
Shortly after the crash, investigators found that weeks before the crash a doctor had urged him to attend a psychiatric hospital but his employer was never alerted. Lubitz had also struggled for many years with mental health problems.
The lawsuit, filed in Phoenix, Arizona, alleges the school was negligent in admitting him by failing to discover his medical history. A lawyer for the firm that filed the suit issued a statement saying that Lubitz's past made him a “suicide time bomb, triggered to go off under the ordinary stresses of life, particularly the kind of stresses a commercial pilot routinely faces”.
The legal bid involves lawyers in the UK, Germany and the Netherlands, and according to reports, a spokeswoman for Lufthansa said the action had "no chance of success", but the school is yet to comment.
