With captain Patrick Sonderheimer locked out, inside the cockpit, copilot Andreas Lubitz was now in complete control of Germanwings flight 9525. He appeared to have kept his composure, too: As the black box recording would later reveal, his breathing remained calm and constant as he set the plane on its terminal trajectory.
It was later revealed that, shortly after Sonderheimer left the cockpit, Lubitz altered the altitude settings of the Airbus A320. The aircraft had been cruising at a normal height of 38,000 feet, but Lubitz set the plane to drop to 100 feet, sending it into steady decline over the French Alps, losing altitude at a rate of between 3,000 and 4,000 feet per minute.
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As the plane descended, numerous alerts sounded in the cockpit, including: “Terrain, Terrain, Pull Up, Pull up.” It is believed that one of the wings clipped a peak, before the entire vessel struck the mountainside at 430 mph, killing everyone onboard in an instant.
