Doomed to Fail - Ep 190: Suicidal pilots: Germanwings Flight 9525

Episode Date: April 14, 2025

At this point, maybe if we talk about plane crashes enough, the irony would be TOO intense if we actually died in one! Let's go back 10 years to March 2015, when Germanwings pilot Andreas Lubitz was absolutely not in the right headspace to fly a plane. We dig into the mental health of pilots, why some of them don't get help, and why those who do are stigmatized. Andreas, for example, was on a new medication, coupled with his history of depression, he took over the cockpit and crashed Germanwings flight 9525 on purpose. It's awful.  Join our Founders Club on Patreon to get ad-free episodes for life! patreon.com/DoomedtoFailPodWe would love to hear from you! Please follow along! Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/doomedtofailpod/  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/doomedtofailpod  Youtube:  https://www.youtube.com/@doomedtofailpod TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@doomed.to.fail.pod Email: [e-mail] 

It's a matter of the people of the state of California versus Hortonthal James Simpson, case number B.A.019. And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you. And we are live, Taylor, and we are happy and not angry. I'm fine. Yes. You're happy. You just vented and now you feel better.

That's true. That's true. Jell did hear a little bit of a vent. And the event is over. And now we're going to think. of positive things and we're going to cover things that are doomed to fail, which is going to be very positive, which tees up our intro very well, Taylor. Hello, welcome to doomed to fail.

We bring you history as most notorious disasters and epic failures twice a week. I am Taylor, joined by Fars. And I'm laughing because I posted about our episode about Friar Diego Delanda, who burned all the Mayan books on Instagram. And we get comments from people who like don't have any followers and don't have any pictures. I'm like, what is this? Like who could it possibly be? But someone was like, one of those people was like, this is not a disaster or a failure.

And I was like, actually, it's both. And we do plenty of episodes that aren't either. Was it a real person or? I don't think so. I don't know what that means. I think it's probably like a weird bot, but like, why would a bot do that? I don't know. I mean, if it's someone, yeah, I'm fully convinced that the rest of the world is trying to soak chaos.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. So I'm like, of all of our examples, that actually is one. And a lot of times we don't do disasters or failures. We just tell you stories that we think are cool. You're welcome. I will be doing a disaster and failure today, though, just for full disclosure. Well, great. Well, sometimes we do it.

Sometimes we do it. Am I first on the board? Okay. Taylor, you're not going to like this. I can't wait. But this is going to be a relatively quick one, too. So you might actually enjoy that. So we've been talking a lot about flights, air travel.

You know, I mentioned this in a previous episode that the daily had covered why mental health in the aviation industry is like such a weird conundrum and challenge to kind of cover. And there's one specific flight that was the kind of baseline route for all these conversations that we're currently having. You know what? I didn't actually put the flight number down. So let me go ahead and pull that up real quick. so that people know we should change our life mission to like advocating for that high speed rail than ever going to build in the united states yeah yeah we enjoy the esra Klein crew yeah let me talk about train crashes but whatever so i'm going to be covering a flight called german wings

9525 german wings is a budget airline of luftanza which is like a premium carrier out of germany and um the flight itself is pretty basic mostly what i'm going to be talking about has to do with mental health and what that looks like for commercial pilots. I remember this because I actually have another friend who's a pilot who's a German pilot and he was the boyfriend of my German exchange student in like 1999. And when this happened, this happened like in the last 10 rest of the years, right? Yeah, exactly. I definitely reached out to Stefan because when I met him, he was an 18 year old kid and he was like,

I want to be a pilot. Now he is a pilot. I don't know. I think he might work for like the next one under Lufthansa, but I was like, are you alive? And he was like, yes, but we're upset. I was like, great. Yeah, it was a huge, huge deal in Germany especially. But yeah, I'm going to briefly cover the flight, go into the state of mental health with pilots before this event happened and what the current conditions are of mental and mental health and safety regulations after this happened. And I'm going to go into a lot of detail about the individual that we believe caused this incident. them to occur. So a nightmare. First things first, it turns in like the one part about the flight I'm going to cover. If you were to close your eyes and actually picture it, you'd give yourself a heart attack. We'll talk about that. So first things first, what was the state of mental health amongst commercial pilots before this event occurred, which again was in 2015? Pilot certification mostly focused on physical health and obviously the ability to kind of fly a plane. That was kind of a given. But it was mostly focused on physical health. I have a question. I kind of want to raise my hand. I don't know how to do that in Zoom. Can I ask you a quick question? Yes.

Is this like an international thing or is it that are you talking about like Germany or are the rules different other places? Rules are different and different places. Thank you. Yep. Yeah. The standards that I'm going to cover now are essentially ubiquitous. The safety regulations and wind effect after this, they became kind of fractured amongst different countries and regulatory bodies. so before this event again physical health was the most obvious thing that airlines would test for to make sure that your heart had the ability to kind of pump you know all that stuff there was no forced psychological evaluations as part of the process of getting certified as a commercial air pilot mental health was only addressed when it would be self-reported by

a pilot but like we mentioned before there's a lot of downsides to self-reporting mental health issues if they disclose they're having these issues then they can be forcibly grounded they It could be suspended. It could be career ending. It can turn you into a pariah amongst your colleagues, which isn't good. And probably the worst aspect of it is that there's also not a clear path to how pilot can get back to flying again after addressing their mental health issues. It was kind of just like there was no one size fits all.

I shouldn't be with mental health. But there was no obvious track that's like, hey, I'm going to report myself. So I need to be on paid medical leave for six months. And then I want to get a reevaluation in like two months and another one in two months. and I'm back to flying in six months. Like that wasn't a standard practice. Yeah. So in addition of that, due to data privacy laws in the U.S., they're HIPAA laws, but they have

them in Europe as well, obviously, doctors are in a legal gray zone in terms of what they have to mandatorily report based on concerns around safety. And unless it's a clear and imminent danger, doctors do not have to report this. And even if they, even if there is a clear and imminent danger, it's all. subjective and I learned that Germany generally has like a very insular culture of privacy and they're they're less vocal about things like this like you know here in the U.S. we have things like red flag laws where if you think somebody's a danger and that they have a firearm then you can call the police and you know there's no issues with that but Germany

seems to have a lot more kind of self-reliant culture I guess so that's going to complain this as well. The issue of mental health and pilots has been around even before German wings. So I'm thinking back to 1997. There was a flight called Silk Air Flight 185 when the pilot turned off the flight data and cockpit voice recorders and then the nose died the plane into the ground killing 104 people. Two years later, Egypt flight, Egypt Air Flight 990. That was one the first pilot took control the plane while the other pilot was in the bathroom and then nose died the plane into the Atlantic Ocean killing 217 people. So this had happened before.

I feel like I didn't, why don't, why isn't that on my nightmare rotation? Well, luckily, lucky for you, it now is. It is now. Oh my God, I also know talked about like making sure that you, um, when you're on like a boat, you look at the person and you're like, I'm going to go off this boat. I'm here. I also do that to captains. I'm like, look at me.

Look how cute. Look at my family. Look at us. Look at us. Look how cute we are. Think about how much we have to live. before you know if I like your plan there's also a gold there's a golden girl's episode where they're like at the airport bar and a guy's been drinking and he gets up and the guy's like

having a flight captain he goes thanks he turns around and bumps into a pole and then keeps going and the girls are like oh my god you know what I never research is where did the whole drunk pilot trope come from I don't know it'll be interesting to dig back into that so we had these issues that were that had happened around mental health of pilots so that stuff is hard to kind of track down to because there is no a lot of these cases there's no conclusive evidence of what happened because again the cockpit flight recorder was shut off or the data recorder was shut off and then they just nose dived and so there could be a situation where somebody had like a heart ailment and just leaned over the column we don't know for

sure it wasn't a for sure for sure thing in those two situations but german error yeah so sorry so why can't now that i'm thinking of it you mentioned like like oh there was like a black box you have to find that has all this information of what happened why isn't that just like being automatically transmitted into like a place on land i bet it probably is now okay good i mean i bet it probably is too i feel like why would why do you relying on this box when we have satellites the only the only thing i can think of about why they might not want to do that is because the volume of data would be so massive would be bigger than all the AI companies combined in terms of what it records and so maybe that could be a limitation but i would assume they're doing that now yeah so again these all have been

the late 1990s. German wing was the one that kind of set off the alarm bells within the industry. And it was a lot more of a conclusive, cut and dry. Yeah, this is actually what ended up happening. And also, I think part of that is because it was after 9-11. Like, all this, I mean, before 9-11, people don't know that if you're young

enough. You used to, like, walk in through the security checkpoint and, like, see your family off on their flight. Like, it was like, we weren't as stringent about things before them. Now that I think about that, that sounds awful. Like, I remember it, but also, like, doesn't that, like, triple the number of people going through security. It does seem like a weird obligation, too. Also, security was a joke back

then. Yeah. Yeah, you're right. So, let's start by the flight itself. The flight took off from Barcelona on March 24th, 2015, with 144 pastures, 160 crew, and it was headed to Dusseldorf, Germany. It took off at just around 10 a.m. local time, and 30 minutes later, it started to descend from its 38,000-foot cruising altitude. Air traffic control saw this, and frankly, try to get a hold of the pilots and was unable to and essentially declared an emergency. French military execs at this point had crossed over into France. They were scrambled and sent to intercept the plane, but they didn't really, they didn't get to it in time. And the plane was recorded as having crashed into a mountain range just north of Nice at 435 miles per hour.

Obviously, everybody was dead. Yeah, no. So what was going on here? We're going to start with the pilot. So there's two pilots, and the commanding pilot was a guy named Captain Packer, Statenheimer. He was 34 years old. He had a ton of flying experience commercially. He was kind of the guy in charge. Also, 34 seems kind of young, but maybe that's just me. It does, but Yeah. The other pilot was a guy named Andres Lubits, a 27-year-old junior pilot who was trained

by Lufthansa and then employed by German Wing about a year after this ended up happening. Before that, he was a flight attendant for Lufthansa while he was kind of moonlighting and doing his training stuff. The investigation began by collecting the flight data and cockpit voice recorders. The prevailing theory is that the captain, Sondonheimer, left the cockpit for bathroom break 30 minutes after taking off. And post 9-11, cockpit doors were reinforced and controlled mostly from the inside. On the outside, there is a code that can be punched to gain access, but that code can be

overridden and the door remain locked from the inside. The reason for that is if a pilot goes outside, somebody grabs them and says punch the code in like you need to be able to override it and so um so that's essentially what ended up happening here like when the pilot goes to the bathroom they like put that little wall up and this plant is just stand there and stare at you and i'm like can we get him back i know this doesn't feel it does not feel safe can we get him some sort of bucket they could just pee in i mean i don't want to like dehumanize his job but like i'd like him to stand it and not why don't you just have another door on the other side of the bathroom and then when the pilot opens that door

it locks the main bathroom door so somebody can't just go in from there. Yeah. We should be flame designers. You know, while we've really opened up her opportunities already in this episode, so I'm excited for us.

Yes, yes. So the prevailing theory is that the captain Sondonheimer, he left the cockpit for bathroom break. And the investigators think that what happened is that Lubits overroved the code and locked the door from the inside. Sondonheimer tried his code and realized

it didn't work, and he was heard on the cockpit voice recorder pounding on the door and asking Lubits to open the door while all this is happening the plane is descending rapidly way too early everybody knew it was way too early for this thing to be descending some of the dramatizations around this

had people asking the fight tonight like wait there's no chance we're here already right like why are we going down so much we later will learn that Lubits had set the desired altitude on the plane to 100 feet and I think at this point Sandenheimer is realizing

what's going on this is the part that's like nightmare feel for me he's given what's called a clash axe I think it's called it's some sort of axe they keep on board for some reason and oh probably for crashes actually well

sorry probably it reminds me of the I don't know if it's true but it reminds me of the crowbar that it came under my bed now to get out of the door just in case of a earthquake. So you probably have to ax your way out of a plane. Yeah, yeah. As I literally spoke the words, it occurred to me why they have this there.

So picture this. On the flight recorder, we can indicate that we know that Sondonheimer, as he was screaming frantically to Lubits to open the door. He was also smashing the door in full view of the passengers to break into the cockpit how scary is that that's that's it yep nope hate it so investigators would say that on the cockpit of voice recorder you could hear the pastor screaming like everybody everybody knew this was going on oh god and ultimately we know what having we just said that it crashed room out of four and 35 miles per hour um so that's that's where it kind of ended it was also learned that on

the from the flight the air quarter was learned that on the previous flight the one that brought it from Dusseldorf to Barcelona before they did the turnaround back to Dusseldorf. Sondondheim had also stepped out of the cockpit and the flight data recorder showed that someone had set the altitude to 100 feet like flipped it back and forth a couple of times while he was away.

So like he was practicing. He was like, just thinking about it. He was thinking about it. He was practicing it. Ugh. So the investigators start focusing on Lubits and searched through his apartment and find a letter from a doctor indicating that he was unfit for flying.

They also found two types of medications for depression and a prescription-grade sleeping pill. One of those medications, which is the street name or the pharmaceutical name for it is Lexapro. It's a selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitor or SSRI, which like is a super long name. I don't even know what that means. But SSRIs are known to potentially cause suicidal ideation. It's particularly bad and present in younger people, but can also impact adults. The FDA's analysis of SSRIs found that people,

25 years old or younger have the highest risk of suicidal ideation and lubits like we already mentioned was 27 it's so i don't understand that like i i i take an s sri and i've taken it for like 15 years and it's great i feel fucking awesome is it left no i take so loft but before that i was like super depressed and now i'm not i'm not like super happy you know but i'm not like laying in bed all day um but it's just so weird that like it can stop me from being depressed but it also comes with suicidal ideation like what is that in your brain how does that even work i don't i don't think that medical science actually knows why any of this stuff works the way it does and who it works on i think that we're not quite there yet really crazy that it can be both and like i said it's worth noting that it's not as common and like older adults and it is and younger adults and it's not every sri like they specifically called out lexaprob wow so um investigators would search lubits his computer and found that he had been searching for ways to commit suicide and even ran oh by the way i forgot to mention this he started taking lexapro nine days before this happened and it's worth noting that the ideations are the most intense right

when you start taking it yeah so again uh the search of the computer found that he'd been searching for ways to commit suicide and even ran searches on cockpit doors and how secure they were. I also think we should now, now we should monitor pilots, Google history. I know. I mean, yeah, let's just make it impossible for anybody to be a pilot. You know, why don't we just do drones?

Suicidal drone operator. That's why. It was a trick question, Taylor. Oh, wait, they wouldn't commit suicide in that case. Never mind. No, you've got, I am as like unsafe that I feel it would be to be in a place as a

bunch of self-driving cars just, like, driving around. I am kind of, I kind of feel like self-driving planes would be safe. I think self-driving everything would be safer than humans. But I, I feel nervous about, like, self-driving cars all on the road together. I mean, right, right, I can empathize with that because right now, like, it's not a ubiquitous technology. But I assume, like, by the time we're dead, and it's ubiquitous in every car, like, I would assume they would have created, like, a nerve, central nervous system where they all communicate with each other. So every car knows

where every other car in his vicinity is and they're communicating back and forth their intentions. That's when it gets safe. I would agree. And then they enslave the humans and we live in car world. I'd be okay with that. Yeah. Yeah. Get what we deserve. Down. So as investigators dug further into

Lubits' history, they found that shortly after joining that training program with Lufthansa, he was hospitalized for severe depressive episodes. And it wasn't until like nearly a year later that he was medically clear to continue his training. He was also having other issues. He seemed convinced for some reason that he was going blind. In addition to all the other psychological problems that he was having,

he apparently visited 40 doctors to like confirm that he's going blind and check his vision. Despite the fact, there was no indication. Every doctor reports like, you're fine. You see perfectly well. There's no deterioration whatsoever. You're thinking. Did he mention that he was a pilot? So a lot came out of this, Taylor, that was like, why did any of you doctors report this to his employer?

Like, why? And so much of the dialogue around this has to do with Germany's privacy laws. Well, that and like the culture of secrecy of like, hey, it's your business. It's not my business. Like, I'm not going to intrude on your life. You do you. But I mean, I mean, they could have stopped a lot of problems if they were a little more intrusive in what other people are doing. I'm not going to, yeah, I do feel, as I'm saying this, that, like, there's going to be, like, four pilots left after we, like, do all of this, like, in 10 years anyway, you know, they're all, they're old and they're going to retire, or people are going to be like, why I'm going to prep with this shit and then not do it.

Yeah. Well, the money. I think, I think pilots make exceedingly good salaries, too. Don't they? I think it's like, you could also be a software engineer. Yeah, well, not. In 10 years, probably not. But. be either. Actually, we're all replaced in 10 years. I'm going to be a train conductor. Yeah. Be a train conductor. That actually would be fun. So, after German wing, the system underwent some reforms.

A two-person cockpit rule went into effect, meaning that at all times two people have to be in the cockpit. But as you literally just stated, when you gave the example of when the stewardess stands in front with a little box things, it is

sort of being used and sort of not being used. It's not ubiquitous. It Lufthons of themselves rolled it back after two years. I'm like, yeah, it's not going to actually be that helpful to do this. And a lot of places don't do it. It's an airline by airline thing. It's not like a legal requirement anymore. The European version

of the FAA called the European Union Aviation Safety Agency, they now make pre-employment psychological screenings mandatory for all new pilots. This includes a personality test, an assessment, behavioral evaluation and background checks, but

this is a one-off evaluation. There's no ongoing process for health monitoring throughout a pilot's career, which should probably have. Yeah. There's there's now a return to duty practice, which includes regular check-ins with an aviation medical examiner and conditional reinstatement after clearing a psych eval after being grounded. So like now there are processing place where there is a path back to being able to fly again. There are now airline run support groups by pilots for pilots, where they can confidentially talk to other pilots and disclose what

is going on in their minds without fear of retribution or being grounded. That's nice. Doctors can now report serious concerns about airworthiness to airlines without violating patient privacy laws. Again, that's up to the

doctor to decide that that's a serious safety concern. They should report it and not all of them have. For what what it's worth about two years after the crash of this German wing flight. Lubits' parents came out and said they don't think their son did any of this and that something else was going on. But it's worth noting that the only other explanation is that he died mid-flight.

And even then, he would have, he still manually set to 100 feet the altitude. And it's also worth noting on the cockpit voice recorder. He was audibly heard, like, breathing. like he was he he was there like he was definitely there um so so that's where it kind of ended and uh now we're having planes bump into each other midair which is nice and on the ground yeah which is which is not great plane bumper bumper bumper yeah i hate that i hate that um i found my i found my message to stephan from facebook from march 24th 2015 i said you're alive yes and he said yes i'm alive he's he flies with air berlin he said we're all very sad and shocked

he was flying to rome and had two passengers on his plane to rome that lost their sister on the german wings flight he said it's pure horror but how are you trees i can't imagine yeah yeah but that's my story um to be fair they're actually after this event there's really been only only one situation where a pilot tried to do something. I think it was Alaskan Airlines, and it was a pilot that was catching a flight on the jump seat or whatever inside the cockpit. So he wasn't actually supposed to be flying the plane, but what he did mid-flight was he reached over and turned off the engines of the plane. Was that the guy who was on Shrooms?

Yes. Well, he was on Shrooms like that weekend, and then he got on the plane and had an anxiety attack and flipped out and it did that. but ever since then it actually hasn't been that frequent that pilots have done this which is good that's good yeah positive silver lining see that we're our happy show

so anyways that's my story hopefully it was at least somewhat interesting it is interesting it's terrifying but interesting thank you yeah the image of people seeing the captain trying to break in it had to be like man nope nope terrible

terrible terrible yeah sweet um what do you got for us taylor um i want to say thank you to nadine and juan who joined our patreon we appreciate you we're not going to shame anybody but you know who you are if you haven't you are um and thank you very much you really appreciate it that's super cool that we have your support um just a reminder you can join patreon as five dollars a month just to help us grow and then later if we ever have ads you will not have ads that's the way it goes it's there it's that um and then the other thing i wanted to mention is i watched the island of dr morrow and I asked you a question via text

because I was like, wait a minute. So you're telling me that the guy who Lupin from Harry Potter plays was supposed to be played by Bruce Willis but then he was played by the guy in Northern Exposure. What's that guy's name again? Rob Morrow.

Rob Morrow. And I was like, but you never talk about Rob Morrow again and you were like, oh, right, if I was to tell you, so can you tell everybody what happened to Rob Morrow? Yeah. What happened to Rob Morrow is that two days after principal filming started,

he went into the set that was the ship and he called the CEO of New Line Cinema crying saying please I will do anything if you just let me off this movie this is unbelievable it's chaos and he actually his biggest issue was he was like the energy is so negative Alcccum was such a jerk and the director was so not ready to do this that he was like I can't handle like the stress of being here and they granted him the ability to kind of leave

so that's nice yeah I mean was he was he not even in a single scene I assume not okay yeah there you have funny Good for him. Yeah. And then I also mentioned that Taylor that the character of Minimi in the Austin Power series also was derived from

Marlon Brando's relationship with, I forgot what the name that small actor is, that 17 foot tall man. 17 inches. And also he was nude a lot of the movie than the small man. That makes it so much better

for some reason. I mean, I think if you haven't watched it, I think you should, everyone. It's on YouTube. It's only an hour and a half. which I also think is crazy because movies now are like eight hours long and I was like all that for an hour and a half movie and it is everything that yeah did you enjoy watching it I did I did enjoy it I would watch it again it's fun yeah it's fun okay yeah the whole time you're like what it's it's it's a fever dream it's also like there's what is the science is so funny because there's like no science to this obviously and like Dr. Moreau allegedly like

won a Nobel Prize. And the guy's like, oh, I remember him. He's a great scientist. And there's like a part where Marlon Brando was just like holding a petri dish. And he's like, look at this. Look at this. You know, you're like, I guess it's what science is. If you're like, ask a third grader to show you a lab, they'd be like, here's my

graduate cylinder. And my petri dish. I'm a scientist. That's so funny. I was hoping there'd be like something in terms of a scientific. Like the way Jurassic Park explained it, it was like, oh, this actually kind of tracks. Like, this makes sense. Oh, no, no.

Nothing. They didn't, like, explain DNA or anything. Jeez, right. Cool. Well, thank you, Fars. Thank you, everyone. We are at doomed to fail pod on all social media. Doomed to failpod at gmail.com if you have any ideas.

And we, oh, yeah, and, okay. You just said it. And we have the Patreon. We do. You already said that. Okay. Cool. We'll go ahead and cut off there.

Thank you, everyone. Thanks, Taylor. Thanks. I'm going to be.