For God’s Sake, Open the Door!

In our worst nightmares we speed toward destruction in the dramatic style of film characters Thelma and Louise, whose car is last pictured frozen in time hurtling over the abyss of the Grand Canyon, forever out of reach of law enforcement, plunging hundreds of feet to oblivion. These two icons have, in a hasty but decisive act to avoid capture and imprisonment, elected this catastrophic ending as a last resort.

We the viewers know the car would fall and crash in real time, but we’d rather remember the exuberant women who sought respite from humdrum lives only to become ensnared first by violence and then by their resulting need for survival and escape as they locked hands and sped toward the void.

Unlike Thelma and Louise, most of us wake from our nightmares unscathed, understanding that we were merely dreaming. Perhaps we even speculate about the meaning of such dreams: Do our lives feel like we’re going off a cliff, losing control, heading for disaster? If so, we do our best to exercise restraint if our feelings seem to be accelerating toward calamity. We seek peace, loss of anxiety, and a secure future.

Maintaining status, control, job security—these goals were slipping away from Andreas Lubitz, the young German commercial airline co-pilot who could imagine no life worth living beyond piloting a Lufthansa Germanwings Airbus across Europe, but could not in the end control the demons that caused his “severe subjective burnout” and depression, accompanied by suicidal thoughts. Instead, as he confided to a former girlfriend, he speculated that, “One day I will do something that will change the whole system, and then all will know my name and remember it.”

He was instructed to provide his employer with several medical reports that specified he was not fit to fly. Instead he discarded those reports in the trash. He apparently consulted with up to five different German clinics about both his mental health and troublesome eyesight, possibly a side effect of his anxiety or medications for same. None of the doctors could give him hope (nor did they appear to investigate further or report their findings to Lufthansa, regardless of German medical privacy laws that arguably did not entirely prevent them from doing so under the totality of the circumstances).

Days before the flight Andreas researched online how the Airbus cockpit locking mechanism could be set in play, when and how it could be opened, and how it could be rendered unassailable. The stage was set. He encouraged the pilot in charge to take a bathroom break after the plane reached cruising altitude near the Alps, leaving him alone in the cockpit. He then locked the door to the cockpit, set the cruise mechanism to descend to 100 feet—far below the Alpine terrain—and overrode the efforts of the pilot to regain admission to the controls.

This pygmy of a man who believed his life was over if he could no longer be at the controls of an airliner then sat in silence for an excruciating eight minutes, breathing evenly, even accelerating the plane's speed, while the pilot banged and hammered on the door, ground control was unable to obtain an audible response, and passengers finally started screaming in terror as the inevitable crash loomed.

The resulting impact after a descent from 38,000 feet to the altitude of the French Alps, at about 6,000 feet, occurred at a speed of about 700 kilometers per hour or 435 miles per hour. The plane and its occupants were pulverized when the plane hit the mountains, the debris field covering several adjacent slopes. Rescuers have relied on DNA to identify victims.

There were 149 passengers and crew who died with Andreas Lubitz when he set an Airbus on an automatic course to crash into the French Alps last week. Available audio indicates that the chief pilot was screaming and beating at the impregnable door, perhaps with a fire ax, yelling, “For God’s sake, open the door!” As the plane inexorably descended, the passengers were shouting in fear, their fate determined by a 27-year-old man who could not face his future without aviation but instead sought immortality through a breathtaking act of barbarity.

Thelma and Louise made an improvised pact in their last few conscious seconds to drive off the rim of the Grand Canyon to their deaths rather than spend the rest of their lives in prison, but Andreas Lubitz made no pact with any of the occupants of the plane he piloted into the side of a French mountain. They had no chance to opt out. They had no warning. They were not willing to end their lives. And so the 149 passengers and crew, young and old, seasoned fliers and nervous inexperienced travelers, were carried to their doom by the fears and insecurities of a selfish, dishonest, pitiable excuse for a man.

It is not hard to kill oneself; there are dozens of ways to do this publicly or privately. And in lovers’ quarrels, it is not unusual that a heartsick or revengeful partner kills his wife or girlfriend as well as himself, even other family members such as minor children.

But to methodically pilot a planeload of the innocent to their doom from the clouds to the mountains below is beyond diabolical. It is an act of aggression against the common good that does not suggest doing “something that will change the whole system, [so that] all will know [his] name and remember it.”

It is madness. It is a crime against humanity. It is the ultimate fear that clutches our hearts every time we are in the air and depend upon the skill of a pilot to bring us safely back to earth. If a well-respected airline such as Lufthansa cannot protect us from savagery like the Germanwings suicide crash, then none of us will ever be safe.

We do not wish to remember Andreas Lubitz. His remains should be buried in an unmarked grave. And although his act may never be forgotten, his infamous name should be obliterated from history.