Airline sets US$300m aside for crash victims’ families
Print Edition
INSURERS have begun counting the financial cost of the Germanwings plane disaster, parent company Lufthansa said yesterday, with hundreds of millions of dollars being set aside to cover compensation for victims’ families.
As search teams continued to scour the crash site in the French Alps under arduous conditions, the German flag carrier said US$300 million in provisions had been earmarked to cover the damages.
The sum includes financial compensation for the families of the people who died and the cost of the Airbus A320 jet itself, which belonged to Lufthansa’s low-cost carrier Germanwings, a company spokeswoman said.
The current list price of an Airbus A320 jet is US$93.9 million.
The director of operations at Germanwings, Oliver Wagner, has said the company would immediately compensate each family with 50,000 euros (US$54,000).
This sum would not be deducted from any final compensation deal, he added.
The catastrophe has dealt a heavy blow to Lufthansa’s image and it said yesterday it would cancel celebrations planned for April 15 marking the airline’s 60th anniversary “out of respect for the crash victims of flight 4U9525.”
Investigators evaluating voice recorder data from a “black box” located last week say the Germanwings co-pilot Andreas Lubitz apparently locked his captain out of the cockpit and deliberately slammed the plane into a French mountainside.
The plane crashed last week at a speed of 700 kilometers an hour, instantly killing all 150 people on board.
Lubitz was diagnosed as suicidal “several years ago,” before he became a pilot, but had appeared more stable of late, German prosecutors have said.
Doctors recently found no sign he intended to hurt himself or others, said Ralf Herrenbrueck, spokesman for the prosecutor’s office in Duesseldorf.
However, he was receiving treatment from neurologists and psychiatrists who had signed him off sick from work a number of times, including on the day of the crash.
Ripped-up sick notes were found in a flat used by Lubitz, which authorities believe indicates the 27-year-old was trying to hide his illness from his employer.
Meanwhile, investigators resumed their grim search through the wreckage and hundreds of body parts in the French Alps using a new service road built to the remote crash site.
Three trucks set off from the dropzone in the town of Seynes-les-Alpes early in the morning after a hectic 48-hour road-building operation to ease access to the mountainside.
Trucks now take 45 minutes to reach the base of the rocky slope where debris remains spread across a wide area, while two helicopters hover overhead to check for pieces that may have been flung further.
Somewhere in there lies the second “black box” recorder, which gathered technical data on the flight.
French investigators say they are concentrating on “systemic weaknesses” that might have caused the disaster, including the logic of locking cockpit doors from the inside.
It said it would also look into procedures for detecting “specific psychologic profiles” in pilots.
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