BP GEOGRAPHIC

Germanwings Flight 9525 in the year 2015 was not the first time that a pilot, in this case the first officer, deliberately crashed a plane.

It happened before, for example in December 1997. SilkAir Flight 185 suddenly nose-dived into a river in Sumatra, Indonesia. The cause of the crash as determined by the NTSB and some investigators of the Indonesian NTSC was a deliberate act of the captain. He crashed the plane because he had debts at the Singapore stock market.

However, the boss of the NTSC didn’t like the final report of his investigators and changed it into “undeterminable”. However, the NTSB issued an independent report.

The CVR (Cockpit Voice Recorder) stopped recording some time before the crash and the FDR (Flight Data Recorder) stopped six minutes after the CVR. This can only be caused by one of the pilots taking out the circuit breakers, most likely the captain because they were behind his seat. Taking out the one of the FDR would trigger an alarm, so the captain probably asked the first officer first to leave the cockpit for whatever reason.

And it seems it happened again, in October 1999. Evidence points to the conclusion that the first officer of Egypt Air Flight 990 deliberately crashed the plane into the Atlantic Ocean, but the Egyptian government tried a coverup. Nevertheless, the NTSB published its findings.