Germanwings Flight 9525
deliberate crash of an Airbus A320 in the French Alps on March 24, 2015
Germanwings Flight 9525 was a scheduled international passenger flight from Barcelona–El Prat Airport in Spain to Düsseldorf Airport in Germany. The flight was operated by Germanwings, a low-cost carrier owned by the German airline Lufthansa. On 24 March 2015, the Airbus A320 operating the flight crashed 100 km (62 mi; 54 nmi) north-west of Nice in the French Alps, killing all 150 people on board.
The crash was deliberately caused by the first officer, Andreas Lubitz, who had previously been treated for suicidal tendencies and declared unfit to work by his doctor. Lubitz kept this information from his employer and instead reported for duty. Shortly after reaching cruise altitude and while the captain was out of the cockpit, Lubitz locked the cockpit door and set the plane to fly downward in a controlled descent into a mountain.
Aviation authorities swiftly implemented new recommendations from the European Union Aviation Safety Agency that required at least two authorised people to be in the cockpit at all times but, by 2017, this rule had been dropped.
By 2017, Lufthansa had paid €75,000 to the family of every victim, as well as €10,000 in pain and suffering compensation to every close relative of a victim.
Flight
Germanwings Flight 9525 took off from Runway 06R at Barcelona–El Prat Airport on 24 March 2015 at 10:01 am CET (09:01 UTC), 26 minutes behind schedule. It was due to arrive at Düsseldorf Airport by 11:39 CET. According to the French national civil aviation inquiries bureau, the Bureau of Enquiry and Analysis for Civil Aviation Safety (BEA), the pilots confirmed instructions from French air traffic control at 10:30 CET.
At 10:31 CET, after crossing the French coast near Toulon, the aircraft left its assigned cruising altitude of 38,000 ft (11,600 m) and without approval began to descend rapidly.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 18, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q19671417. Authority coordinates are 44.280, 6.439. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2015 and 2017.
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This entry incorporates text from “Germanwings Flight 9525” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.