I worked as a flight attendant for German Lufthansa for several years. I was diagnosed bipolar in 2012. I got unfit to fly immediately. My flight career was over. I really don't understand why they sent him flying, taking antidepressants from the beginning. When you take antidepressants you're unfit to fly, that's it. I miss flying every single second.

My friend's brother in law was on that flight going to work. He left behind a wife and two young children. So sad and upsetting. The trauma this caused was terrible.

My boyfriend flew the same route some days later. The pilot went through the passanger cabine and talked to them. Said that he understand that many people might be afraid to fly these days. With this story back in their heads. He said: "I promise, I will take you back to your familys and friends safely." Must have been a crazy feeling for everyone...

Our military instructor used to tell us "There is nothing more dangerous in this world than a man who feels he has nothing left to lose." That statement cannot be sounded from the rooftops enough.

Dude was not just depressed, he was actually crazy. Had a serious disorder, be it neuronal or psyche. He killed so many to hurt his girlfriend and whoever else he felt to blame.

I never understand the mentality of "my life is shit so I'm going to end it but take as many innocents with me as possible".

The crazy thing about suicidal people is, their friends, coworkers and loved ones typically see a spike of happiness and normal behavior just before they carry out whatever plan they've decided to go forward with. That's why you always hear people say they can't believe that person would do that, they seemed like they turned a corner...they seemed happy and optimistic. This is usually because they have already decided their own fate, and all of the anxiety and depression they typically experience is now gone. There is a light at the end of their tunnel and they no longer have to worry about their own future. Pretty sad sh*t.

Saw this on air crash investigation episode. Earlier that day he tried to bring down the plane twice only to change his mind. And sure enough, on their way back later that fateful day, he decided to go for it. Very sad for the family of innocent passengers

That picture of him on the Golden Gate Bridge angers me. If he wanted to do anything, do it there and not murder 155 innocent people.

My mum has severe depression. She once had a meltdown and said to me, whilst driving her car with me as her passenger, that she wanted to crash the car and kill herself because she was a POS and so was I. We got home unharmed but it was the most terrifying moment of my life.

A depressed and evil person is a lethal combination. Pure malice with nothing to lose.

As someone who has suffered with depression as a teen and into my 20’s. And still suffering from severe anxiety today. I NEVER have wanted to harm others. I know many people who still suffer terribly, and none wish harm to others. It sounds like there was far more going on there. Sounds more like he had a severe personality disorder with an evil streak.

Imagine a person with a responsibility to make all passengers safe instead choosing to murder them out of suicide wow if you gonna kill yourself why bring all this innocent people with you. Condolence to the family of the people that passed away in a tragedy done by a monster

As a pilot, I truly believe it’s beyond vital to make sure you have some form of therapy and stress relief before you commit to flying. If you aren’t feeling right, whether that be sick, or upset, even if it’s the smallest form of upset; take care of everything before you fly, even if that’s your form of therapy.

Yvonne Selke her daughter and Emily Selke, two Americans from Virginia, were also aboard that flight. Emily had graduated from college the previous year and the two were on a mother-daughter trip to visit Europe. Both were kind, witty, and funny women. Both are deeply missed by husband/father, son/brother, and countless others.

This man was so consumed by fear and depression that in his mind it was a good idea to take all those people down with him...this is so damn sad. RIP to all the innocent people who lost their lives.

When you think about it, it’s crazy how we just trust some random person to fly us thousands of feet above ground. Obviously they are trained but anything could flip in your mind at any moment no matter how trained you are, your mind isn’t always as stable as your ability to perform well in your profession.

Suffering from chronic depression throughout my life I never ever had even a fraction of a thought of hurting somebody else. There must have been something else wrong with him.

This is why I ALWAYS thank my pilot before I board a flight. I at least want them to know that they are appreciated.

Captain Sondenheimer deserves credit for attempting to get control of the situation to the very last second. Brave professional family man RIP.

As someone who has suffered from depression since I was 17 and been medicated since then, it absolutely destroys me when people take the lives of others when the depression takes over. I’m 48 now and while I have sporadic suicidal thoughts, in no way would I make others pay. I’ve always said suicide is the selfish act there is and those taking others with them is pure evil.

As a german my blood boils every time I hear of this case not only because Lufthansa fucked up but because of our laughable compensation laws trough which you get ridiculous little money if a relative of you gets killed or when you get beat up even nearly to death and such

The fact they let him fly while being diagnosed is absurd to me. I had a friend when I was in flight school who's mom and dad died within a week of each other, aunt took her to the doctor cause she wasn't eating and got diagnosed with depression. Her flight career ended immediately. She was fine about a year or so later but she's now a waitress.

The exchange students that were on board that plane coming back to Germany went to a school not too far from where I lived and where about my age. I will forever remember them and the day this happened. We were all shocked sitting in school.

Those who gave Andreas the go ahead to fly the plain even though he clearly was in no fit state to do so should themselves have been sacked from their jobs and prosecuted for it

I want to say thank you for introducing us to the passengers/victims of this criminal/unsettling tragedy. I’ve heard this case multiple times but no one really did a great job of introducing us to the victims which I think is critically important when delivering true crime content. Remembering the victims is essential to the living family members ongoing grieving process.

$53,867 for each person. Thats nothing compared to the loss.

Thank you for presenting this story. Great commentary. Subbed.

Mirtazipine is not a powerful mood stabilizer. It’s pretty run of the mill. This guy had a serious personality disorder. Depressed people don’t kill others, maybe themselves, but not others.

I am from Barcelona. I remember this case ...it was shocking.. R.I.P. all the people in the airplane exept Andreas.

to think my life might be held hostage by a psyco I have absolutely no way to stop is terrifying

Never have seen your videos before and so glad that this came up in my feed. Happy New Subscriber here!! Keep up the good work!

As a mental health professional I’m inclined to make some comments about this case in order to clarify some points for a better understanding of this tragedy. 1. Mr. Lubitz’s hometown psychiatrist got everything right the first time. Treated his first depressive episode, got the patient into remission and KEPT HIM MEDICATED. You never take a depressive patient out of his meds right after he gets well. In a first depressive episode you keep the patient medicated until around a year after he is free of symptoms. Only then you taper the medications off, carefully watching if any symptoms get back. 2. At least according to my home country’s regulations, everyone with a history of use of psychotropic meds is unfit to fly unless a psychiatrist states otherwise. I cannot understand why in the world the FAA allowed Mr. Lubitz to resume training after his medical record was known. 3. When Mr. Lubitz went after medical help, every medical doctor besides his ophthalmologists screwed up. When organic causes were discarded, the first diagnostic to be considered is a conversive disorder. His visual symptoms were unconsciously produced. The hypocondria hypotesis was a significant mistake, although the differential diagnosis for these disorders is quite difficult to make. 4. Mr. Lubitz’s hometown psychiatrist should be able to at least recognize two aspects of his patient’s new condition. First: conversive symptoms are characteristic of severely distressed patients with relatively few psychologic tools to withstand mental conflicts. And second: if his visual symptoms were strong enough to impair him, and were from unconscious (therefore uncontrollable) origins, he was unfit to fly at that moment. Any of these two aspects obligated his psychiatrist to axe Mr. Lubitz’s airworthiness straightaway. I do not know the intricacies of Germany’s laws, but from an universal medical ethics point of view, in situations that may expose others to risk (like a pilot suddenly losing his ability to see properly during a flight, for whatever reason), the medical secrecy should be broken to ensure the safety of others. 5. The difficulty that all doctors had to correctly diagnose and manage Mr. Lubitz’s second breakdown comes from a failure in medical training. Today’s medicine is guided by the so called Evidence Based Medicine. Although EBM is responsible for massive improvements in diagnostic and treatment of several diseases, one of it’s major disadvantages is that it tends to neglect, or even to discredit phenomenon that cannot be quantitatively described and to consider unworthy of study authors whose body of work is not suited to be scrutinized by EBM. And that is the exact case of psychiatric disorders and conversive disorders in particular. That is why it’s important to study considered “outdated” autors like Sigmund Freud and Melanie Klein whose theoretical works explain quite reasonably Mr. Lubitz’s illness development and progression. And this case happened in Germany of all places… 6. From these medical failures on, things went straight downhill. Mr. Lubitz started to worsen from a heavily neurotic state to a psychotic one. Or, as Mrs. Melanie Klein described, from a depressive position to a schizoparanoid position. Even if we forget the classical theorists, today’s psychiatry could detect that Mr.Lubitz’s condition started to include psychotic presentations. His increasing paranoia being the greatest marker of that. He quite probably became a bipolar floating between all spectrums of this disorder, from severe bouts of depression with suicidal thoughts, manic episodes with delusions of greatness and extramarital affairs, and mixed episodes combining these symptoms making him functional enough to do what the did at the end of it. And as far as this video mentioned his diagnosis or treatment, no mood stabilizers or antipsychotic meds were given to Mr. Lubitz. Probably this massively important diagnostic hypothesis was never considered. I know I’m commenting from the always privileged position of a “next day doctor”. Maybe the doctors who dealt with Mr. Lubitz did not have all the necessary info to make all the right moves. Maybe Mr. Lubitz was in fact a refined psychopath, which I think it’s somewhat unlikely due to the lack of transgressions before his battle with mood disorders begun. But I cannot shake off the feeling that quite a few people who dealt with him could have done a better job and maybe avoided what happened at the end. And finally I want to commend the author for the amount of information and research put in this video. Although I know that maybe the purpose of this channel floats around describing psychopathic people with a tiny grain of gore, this video was so well conceived that it allowed a deeper understanding of what may have happened between the ears of someone who took so many lives together with his own in one of the biggest tragedies of our times. Thank you.

It also depends on the type of depression. When your depression is related to a situation, once you get free of it, it usually goes away and stays gone. Chronic depression (usually brain chemical imbalance) is what comes and goes in an everlasting cycle, sometimes exacerbated by a situation. I have the latter bestowed by lifelong abuse/trauma with only some family history. I'm on meds and had therapy as well. No murdering here :)

I love commercial aviation, I love true crime, this video covers both! And you are an amazing presenter/narrator!! Thankyou - I've subscribed.

This documentary is by far the most detailed and consistent one on this case and it depicts a lot of interesting stuff about Andreas Lubitz, but I just need to point out that on a couple of the photos you used it's not Andreas, for example at 14:18 , that's another man sharing the same name, whom the media initially mistook in 2015.

every time I hear about this case, I become enraged with how much attention the killer is given. regardless of his mental wellbeing, he was aware of what he was doing, he planned this, he killed 155 people. he has absolutely no redemption in my eyes.

my former classmate worked as germanwings stewardess and we had recently reconnected on a germanwings flight to tenerife where she spoilt me and my family as if we were kings. when i heard about the germanwings crash i immediately texted her if she was ok and spent anxious minutes before she replied and she had not yet heard what happened. that memory will stick. shiver.

I'm sitting at the airport waiting for my flight on a Lufthansa plane and this came up on my feed. 😬

This is absolutely heart wrenching all these people gone… at the hands and because of the decision of one person. My heart breaks for the victims and their families. 💔

This incident is what crosses my mind when I'm on a plane. I never thought about this when I was younger but as an older adult I come to realize you never know what the staff who is working on an airplane is thinking and what they might do. There was a case of a pilot that had mental breakdown during a flight and tried to jump out the emergency exit door.

My old PE teacher was the wife of Martin Matthews, I’ll never forget the day when we was told the news it was nothing but devastation , she’s a lovely woman and I hope she’s found peace after these years ❤😢

Wow it was hard to find this channel new subb I enjoyed this excerpt.

I love this style of video so much and your channel is so good

After 9/11 the cockpit doors were reinforced, even bullet proof , there was a code that someone could punch in to open the cockpit door but this could be disabled from the cockpit , The pilots can operate the door with a lever on a control panel. There are three settings: norm, lock and unlock. There is also a keyboard panel in the cabin area with a green and red light, as well as a telephone for the crew to talk to the pilots. The cockpit has an emergency buzzer and pressure sensor that responds in the event of a pressure loss in the cabin. Protection against intruders Usually, both pilots remain in the cockpit and the door is locked. It can't be opened manually from outside, because there is no handle. The control lever setting is "norm" - which means the three additional door bolts are not activated. Any flight attendant who wants to access the cockpit must first ring the bell on the control panel. The pilot then has to move the switch to "unlock" for the person to enter. As soon as the door is closed again, the setting reverts to "norm." Anybody trying to enter the cockpit without using the telephone - either by knocking or hammering on the door - would raise the pilots' suspicions. In such a case, they would switch to "lock" - effectively activating the additional three bolts. An intruder would need more than raw force to break open the door. The captain entered the code and a green light appears in the cockpit , if he does nothing the door will open in 30 seconds . If Andreas lubitz in this case pulled the lever to lock position the door will be locked for additional 20 minutes, and can be extended indefinitely. There was no way for the captain to enter the cockpit Imagine the horror for passengers seeing the captain trying to smash or break the door in screaming open the damn door The terror must have been unimaginable. 😢 Last you could hear on the cockpit voice recorder were people screaming If lubitz was suicidal, fine but why kill additional 150 people. It’s incomprehensible. Rip to all the victims

He's also not the only one who's done this, there are disturbingly many worldwide. Easy to look up many of them, but oddly some are harder to find, like the mass murder off the California coast some years back that resulted in security changes for flight staff. There's a memorial to the victims near the crash site. The EgyptAir flight that went down in the Atlantic wasn't that long ago, nor was the MH370 mystery flight disappearance that's now considered pilot murder/suicide.

Damn your writing is good....your description of the last moments before the crash nearly made me cry...

The guy was psychotic and crazy. No normal depressed person with anxiety would kill a bunch of innocent people

His parents were as much to blame as anyone. Driving him on, encouraging him in his dreams, even when it was obvious he wasn't psychologically cut out to be a pilot. And then, finally, denying he was to blame for the inevitable crash.

Im the worst kind of passenger. The slightest disturbance and Im like "Well we're all dead". I would just get up and raid the liquor cabinet. I refuse to die in a fiery plane crash while sober.

RIP to all the victims. I didn't know about this case, really devastating. I wish all those victims family well as well as his family. I wish they are free from all the burden, the guilt from listening to all the victims stories and the tragic mistakes that happened. Very very sad..

I condolences to the families, that was a unbelievable and dark act that will never be forgotten.

You did a wonderful job detailing the horrific nature of this tragedy. I never heard of this, and now I can’t stop researching about this story and the families affected. My heart truly Goes out to them 🙏🏾❤

"Why didn't he choose a lone suicide?" Oh, that's easy. While some guy killing himself at home is tragic, it's forgettable. It'd be easily brushed over and forgotten within a couple of news cycles. But deliberately crashing a plane and murdering over 100 people? That's instant, enduring infamy. Remember, Lubitz excelled when it came to focusing on objectives. Since the company was causing him so much stress via their policies and was obviously negligent, what better and more direct way to screw them over by crashing one of their planes and immediately exposing them to public scrutiny? He wasn't going to have a career much longer and had planned on killing himself anyway. So it'd make sense for him to go out in a blaze of glory and get away with it. He completed his objectives. Edit: Just to be clear, I'm not defending or making excuses for him. What he did was inexcusable, but it was understandable.

“He wasn’t a terrorist” proceeds to explain how he exploited his access to a plane and internationally hijacked a plane, crashed and killed 150 people

Great video!

Because of this case rules regarding mental illness in fact became more lax, so pilots wouldn't feel forced to lie to hold their jobs. They can't fly while having an episode, but now they can speak more openly about it and return to their jobs if they get better. This would allow for pilots to speak more openly about their mental illness. Also the cabin was so hard to pry open because, after 09/11, they were made with the intention of keeping terrorists out. Still there is another side of that, if the madman is already inside, you can't reach him.

As someone who has had suicidal thoughts I could never ever imagine taking out anyone with me. That is just wretched to do. I have no sympathy for this killer. He chose to murder innocent people bc he wanted to and no other reason than that.

• "One who's hurt , will to hurt others" • "Attention is like a fire where there's Attention that thing known as sorrow, agony, depression,pain disappears... Attention is like a flame" • "Ending of Sorrow is Passion" - J Krishnmurti

Excellent narrative work!

Obsessed with your way of telling the story. It’s always respectful but light toned and keeps my attention!! Thank you!

This killing really bothered me,as my entire life I had dreamed of becoming a commercial Airline Pilot! It never happened as i could NOT afford it , moving out at 17 from my alcoholic parents home, making it by myself with ZERO support! WOW! It's a fucked up world isn't it?

I know a Lufthansa pilot whom I spoke to recently about this specific event. Unaware that he had any known connection to anyone on that flight, I sensed an automatic energy shift in him. He reacted with both despair and anger and told me he knew the Captain of that flight quite well and considered him a good friend. He explained that he was furious with Lubitz and said that he also gave a negative reputation to all other Lufthansa pilots after the tragedy, not to mention that he killed a good friend of his as well over 150 innocent people. After saying he had listened to the CVR post crash, he then shut down the conversation and said that he doesn’t want to talk about it because it re-traumatises him and is too painful to think about. Obviously, I apologised and discontinued any further conversation about the event. Just shows how many lives this affected outside of the lives and family of the casualties involved. RIP to all who were killed in this tragedy, and sending love to their family & friends 🙏🙏🙏

Wow!! Sir you did an amazing job telling the story and showing the passengers. Better than the documentary.

This is one of the scariest things ever.

My mom was supposed to be onboard this flight but suddenly her ticket disappeared through quantum fluctuations, which saved her life. Rest in Peace those once onboard.

As a therapist, it's very difficult to predict future behavior with no background of similar behaviors. Lubitz had no history of violence towards others and depression and anxiety is so common, you don't just run and tell an employer that your client has depression without cause that your client is a danger to himself or others. I highly doubt that any of these agencies or the mental health professionals had even thought that he might kill himself in the manner he did. The system is set up to fail, because all he ever wanted to do was fly. Telling people about his problems would have resulted in his not being able to be a pilot; which was all he ever wanted. The system basically forced him to keep quiet, thus resulting in his basically being a pressure cooker. It first came out as somatic complaints, but his body just could not keep in all the demons building. A lot more here to say why he kept being allowed to fly by many agencies, but basically they all seem to know you can't realistically stop people from a career just because they are taking medication. No one could have known what was to come. It's a terrible tragedy for all and I feel awful about the experiences the passengers and their families had to go through.

If I were to write a screenplay based on this story, it would start the day before the crash. Andreas tells a psychiatrist about his sinister plans and checks himself into a psychiatric hospital. He has conversations with different patients around him, and is disturbed by a nagging familiarity. He remembers them as different passengers on the plane and realizes that the crash did occur. His psychiatrist reveals that he is in fact an Angel charged with Andreas’s soul in purgatory and it is unlikely he will overcome his separation from God and others for many centuries because of his sin.

I hate flying or letting someone else drive for that matter. We are human and in every profession, there's days when we just don't want to be at work or when we take our problems with us. The last thing we want is to be 30,000 feet in the air when someone else has a mental breakdown.

I really enjoy your telling of these stories, James. This is one I’ve been tweaked about forever and you’ve done superbly :)

So, people on the sky are not allowed to get depressed ? Don't understand how come we have still pilots and flight attendants. The receive a very bad salary, the have an stressful job, they put their lives at stake every single time and also they can't be sad sometimes ?! Wow

The sole existence of a person like Andreas Lubitz is like a kick in the balls for every professional pilot on this planet. When I hear his name, I get high blood pressure. This "man"....he was not a " man".... no honour, no dignity, no nothing. His life was a total waste of .... life.

I wish he had sought more help or at least only taken himself out. Suicidal depression is a horrible thing to suffer from, but it’s not fair to take others down with him like that. Horrible :(

Your narration of the situation in this video was amazing, what a tragedy but thanks for the amazing video

Commentator is awesome. Layers of negligence make this story all the more tragic. It did not have to happen.

I can’t imagine the final horror moments, just sitting there and having your final moments of life because a co pilot decided to commit yk..

Mirtazapine was one of the antidepressants a past pdoc had me try. It made me so sleepy, dizzy, weak, and unable to think straight in the morning that I couldn't function let alone go to class unless I slept for 8+ hours (not an option for my uni schedule). An airline pilot on mirtazapine is already a scary thought.

When these huge companies behave like this I do not know why survivors don’t get their own justice.

I bet this incident narrowed the gate for people to enter the flight school even further.

Its crazy how antidepressants side effects would be suicidal thoughts....

I'm so glad you got your channel back. This is incredible work

Despite suffering from substantial physical and mental illness, I had to fly to my father's unexpected funeral 2 weeks ago. As hard as I tried to fight it, I took a bit of a turn on the plane; and, I was pleased and grateful how quickly and compassionately the flight staff responded to my medical emergency. I share this to give others comfort that at least some airlines have considered these sorts of situations and implemented protocols to deal with them. Thank you Air Canada for your compassion, understanding, and assistance.

A lot of kids of our school were on that plane. Our town was devastated.

U got my like and sub bruh ive read into this pretty extensively but u had numerous things on here i didn't know of and I love how u show it wasn't just Lubitz, though of course it's absolutely no excuse on his behalf and if he did it(which I'm 99.9% sure he did) i truly hope he's burning in hell x1000...there's absolutely no excuse especially since he knew he had a history of mental illness..it's not like this shit just crept up on him in March 2015...he had been having these problems for years and lying about it and he put his career before the lives of others...in the extremely small chance he didn't crash the plane on purpose and is completely innocent of it he'd still be a real piece of work for choosing to keep flying with mental issues like that but lets be real we all know he crashed the damn plane..i mean I'm very open minded and i believe almost anything is possible but I'd almost certainly firmly file His Innocence in the Not Possible Column

Videos are levelling up James! So glad you’re back 😁

The scariest thing in this world is not an animal that has no brain and whose instinct is survival, it's a human with a twisted brain. I felt so much at a loss watching this. He should have been permanently grounded right from the first episode 😭

I remember flying on that same day but with a different machine 2 hours before. The days before we were looking to what flight to book and almost chose the Germanwings. Now to this day it still haunts me knowing how I could've been dead today😰

I’ll never forget this day. I was in the student Union building of my uni campus and I had planned to work on my dissertation when I checked Facebook and saw the breaking bbc news headline. I spent the morning on the bbc news website, refreshing the page and hoping there would be survivors

Worst nightmare worst nightmare 😢 I can’t even imagine those poor people final thoughts. Just tragic 😢

Ok but my safety word is banana.

The beginning of the video is just frightening.. I can only imagine how the people on board must have felt.. I have chills all over my body.

I remember following the news about this situation when I was a kid, hopping that they would find the black box so we’d know what exactly happened. It was truly a tragic event

The human mind can be so incredibly distorted to the point where I'm extremely apprehensive to board a plane. Been with my other half for over a decade now and we have only gone abroad on holiday one time. Dying in a plane crash is literally one of my greatest fears so we didn't want to put ourselves in possible danger, no matter how little the risk. You never know who could snap and when. Why on earth was a pilot prescribed mitrazapine?! Even when I'm suffering from yet another depressive episode since I went through awful trauma at just 15 years old and even I turn down the offer of mitrazapine, they are disgusting and they make you feel like shit. I've been on anti-depression medication for 20 years now- I only found out last week that the doctor who put me on anti-depression meds had committed a crime in prescribing them to someone under the age of 18 knowing that that particular law had already been in place since the early 1990's. I honestly think counselling would have helped me all together, literally just someone to talk to about what I just went through but no, she decided to just med me up instantly. I'm considering suing the NHS- in these 20 years I've only been given 2 seperate counselling sessions of only 1 hour yet I've been tried and put on nearly every single depression tablets available. That's ridiculous.

"If you're not killin' , you're not trying" - Andreas Lubitz

Oh my goodness! Thanks for all the details 😢the airline is absolutely responsible and so is the Dr, I feel so sorry for the victims families

This was very intense to watch after my best friend just moved to another country. Thank god her pilot was ok.

Many people have attempted suicide but this was murder. What about all the friends and relatives of those that perished? They’ll be pretty depressed losing loved ones. The fact he lied on FAA documents says it all. He wasn’t trustworthy

Getting help for anything at all mental health related is so difficult for pilots in the US that most will self medicate or seek help under the table rather than risk their careers. The bureaucrats at the FAA think they're keeping passengers safe but their draconian rules and requirements more often than not make things worse by forcing pilots to choose between their careers and their health. Doing the "right thing" will get them punished so they suffer in silence and find ways to cope with their health issues without reporting them.

As a German I remember this case very well. Devastating beyond words. I could imagine, he was on the brink of a psychotic breakdown and no longer master of his thoughts and feelings. Which of course doesn't minimize the terror and guilt in any respect. Maybe the involved physicians tried to not stigmatize him and to not shatter his career after what they misdiagnosed as a mere episode of mental illness. Having said this: Of course all that was a chain of tragic mistakes ...

My brothers work collegue was due to be on this flight, his alarm didnt go off that morning and he missed it. Scary!