Marina Bandres and her seven-month-old son, Julian, were in a hurry to return home to their lives in Manchester on March 24, 2015.
The pair had left the country for the weekend to attend a funeral in Spain. Unable to return directly, they rearranged to fly back via Dusseldorf – a chance decision that put them among 150 passengers and crew on board the doomed Flight 9525.
The plane departed in the morning from Barcelona and was supposed to land two hours later in Germany. But it never arrived because, investigators said, the plane was deliberately downed by 28-year-old co-pilot Andreas Lubitz.
Infant Julian was among three Brits on board the Airbus A320 as it passed by Digne in France and crossed through the Alps. In the space of just 13 minutes, the plane dropped 34,000ft before crashing into a mountain at 345mph, killing all on board.
Prosecutors said those on board would not have realised what was happening until the final moments. Death would have been instantaneous.
Marina’s husband, Pawel Pracz, said his wife had bought tickets back from her uncle’s funeral at the ‘last moment’ as she ‘wanted to return to her daily routine as soon as possible’. He was ‘devastated’ by the news, he said.
Today, hundreds of families will be commemorating the 10th anniversary of the downing of Flight 9525 with their own personal traditions. Their losses remain incomprehensible. The material question lingers: How was this able to happen?
A decade on, prosecutors believe that the co-pilot, suffering from mental illness, was ‘obsessed’ with an ‘unfounded fear’ of his career collapsing. Having researched other ways to die, he chose to end his life – and those on board – with the ‘instrument’ he had ‘mastered’, because he considered it ‘safe’.
Wreckage collected from the crash site of the German Airbus A320 of the low-cost carrier Germanwings stored at the Col de Mariaud in Le Vernet
Andreas Lubitz, co-pilot of Germanwings flight 4U9525, running during the Aerportrace in Hamburg, Germany, 13 September 2009
Film editor Marian Bandres, originally from Spain, was returning with seven-month-old son Julian to her home in Manchester
At a high school in Haltern, Germany, students were preparing this morning to mark the anniversary of the crash by laying down white roses for the victims at 10:41am, the moment of the crash.
The church bells were set to ring out, casting a sombre mood over the town of 38,000 as they remembered 16 students and two teachers killed in the crash while returning from an exchange trip to Spain.
‘There was hardly a family that wasn’t affected somewhere in their circle of friends or relatives,’ the high school’s principal, Christian Krahl, told German news agency dpa.
Also killed were two babies, a pair of acclaimed German opera singers and a member of an Argentine rock band, three generations of the same family, a vacationing mother and son, a recently married couple, people on business trips and others going home.
One hundred and fifty people died in the crash on March 24, 2015. Hundreds of families and communities were ripped open that morning, leaving wounds never to heal.
Adding confusion and disbelief to the tragedy, investigators revealed in the days after the crash that co-pilot Andreas Lubitz had locked the flight’s captain out of the cockpit to deliberately set the plane on a collision course with a mountainside.
It emerged that Lubitz had suffered from depression in the past, but was later deemed fit to fly. He had searched online for ways to end his life, before researching the security of cockpit doors.
As prosecutors dug deeper into what had happened, they found that the pilot had suffered from a ‘severe’ depressive episode before being hired – something the airline were not informed of.
Just weeks before the crash, a psychiatrist diagnosed a psychosomatic disorder and possible psychosis, but Lubitz hid his sick notes.
Prosecutors believed he became ‘virtually obsessed’ with an ‘unfounded’ fear of losing his vision – a condition that would surely end his career as a pilot.
All of this led them to conclude that Lubitz had deliberately cast the plane down into the mountains in a deliberate attempt to end his own life.
Rescuers are searching for debris and human remains at the crash site, on March 26, 2015
A part of the crash site of the Germanwings Airbus A320 near Le Vernet, French Alps
The Germanwings Airbus A320 on the runway at Dusseldorf airport in Germany, 15 April 2014
The Airbus A320 took off from Barcelona’s El Prat at 10am local time (9am GMT) on March 24 as scheduled.
It climbed to about 38,000ft (11,600m) in its ascent over the Mediterranean and into France before making its final routine contact with ATC around 9:30am.
But seconds later, the selected altitude was changed from 38,000ft to just 100ft. The plane began to descend, quickly.
With the descent, the plane’s speed increased as it passed by Digne in the south of France.
Ground crews, noticing the change, contacted the plane several times but heard nothing back.
Seven minutes later, the plane crashed into the side of a mountain near Seyne-les-Alpes, killing all on board.
One local spoke of hearing an explosion ‘like dynamite’ while another said he had seen the plane flying far too low.
Sebastien Giroux said: ‘There was no smoke or particular sound or sign of anything wrong, but at the altitude it was flying it was clearly not going to make it over the mountains.
‘I didn’t see anything wrong with the plane, but it was too low. I didn’t see much, perhaps for two or three seconds … it seemed it was going down.’
Paul Bramley, a 28-year-old from Hull who was studying in Switzerland, was also among the 150 people killed
Martyn Matthews (pictured with his wide and children) was killed in the Alps crash. He had been on a business trip to Barcelona and took a connecting flight so he could get home to his family sooner
French emergency services workers and members of the French gendarmerie gather in Seyne, near the crash site, in March 2015
Rumours immediately swirled as to what could have happened. Contemporary reports speculated that the pilots may have suddenly fallen unconscious.
Some quoted aviation sources in saying the pilots had issued a Mayday distress signals. Civil aviation authorities later denied the reports.
In the days after the crash, search teams combed the treacherous mountainsides to recover the plane’s black boxes.
The contents of the recorders, it was hoped, would help investigators to piece together the plane’s final moments and make better sense of how the tragedy came to pass.
Teams rappelling off helicopters and scaling barren slopes found debris and human remains before they retrieved the black boxes.
What they found was ‘possibly the worst nightmare that anyone could have in our company’, Lufthansa boss Carsten Spohr said at the time.
‘We are in a state of shock. We’re horrified.’
The information held within led investigators to conclude that 28-year-old Lubitz had deliberately locked the pilot out of the cockpit and intentionally crashed.
French prosecutor Brice Robin said that Lubitz used the flight managing system to put the plane into a descent, something that can only be done manually and deliberately.
He said: ‘The intention was to destroy the plane. Death was instant. The plane hit the mountain at 700km per hour.
‘I don’t think that the passengers realised what was happening until the last moments because on the recording you only hear the screams in the final seconds’.
Members of the recovery team collect debris and find the second black box as they resume at the crash site
Debris is seen on the mountainside in March 2015, after the crash
The crash killed all 150 people on board after the plane dropped more than 30,000ft in under 10 minutes
On the recording recovered, the captain could be heard handing over to Lubitz as he stepped out of the cockpit shortly after 9:30am GMT.
Robin said the co-pilot had been courteous at first, but become suddenly quite ‘curt’ when they discussed the planned landing.
Handed control of the 123ft jet, Lubitz altered the flight monitoring system to send the plane into a rapid descent, the prosecutor said.
As the jet gained speed, a buzzer sounded in the cockpit. The captain had returned and was heard knocking on the door to be let back in.
Muffled voices could be heard until the end of the recording.
Noises ‘similar to violent blows on the cockpit door were recorded on five occasions’ in the space of a minute as the plane made its final descent.
With just over a minute until impact, ‘low amplitude inputs’ were recorded on the co-pilot’s flight controls.
The level of movement was too low to allow the autopilot to disengage, so the inputs did nothing to affect the flightpath.
But the die was cast. A haunting message of ‘Terrain, Terrain, Pull up, Pull up’ was triggered at 9:40:41am, continuing until the end of the recording 25 seconds later.
Co-pilot Andreas Lubitz runs the Airportrace half marathon in Hamburg, Germany
A rescue team makes its way to the crash site in the first days
A piece of debris with the plane’s registration sits in the mountains as search and rescue workers are at the crash site of the Germanwings Airbus A320 above the town of Seyne-les-Alpes, France, 26 March 2015
Three days after the crash, German detectives searched Lubitz’s properties.
They did not find a suicide note or any other evidence to suggest the crash had been motivated by political or religious reasons.
They did find a letter from a doctor indicating Lubitz had been declared unfit to work.
German media then reported that he had received prolonged treatment for a ‘serious depressive episode’ starting in 2008, seven years before the crash.
Vanessa Torres, a spokesperson for Lufthansa subsidiary Germanwings, said they ‘didn’t know this’ when they hired him in 2013.
Prosecutors said that torn up sick notes, including one for the day of the crash, suggested that he had hidden his illness from his employer and colleagues.
He had been prescribed antidepressants and sleep medication, which were found in Lubitz’s body during a toxicology exam post-mortem.
‘The presence of citalopram and mirtazapine, which are two antidepressant medications, as well as of zopiclone, which is a sleeping-aid medication was detected,’ the final report noted.
A month before the crash, in Februrary 2015, a private physician diagnosed Lubitz with a psychosomatic disorder and an anxiety disorder, and referred him to to psychotherapist and psychiatrist.
On March 10, two weeks before the crash, the same doctor diagnosed possible psychosis and recommended psychiatric hospital treatment.
Investigators carry boxes from the apartment of Andreas Lubitz, the co-pilot on Germanwings flight 4U9525, on March 26, 2015
A policeman carries bags out of the residence of the parents of Andreas Lubitz, co-pilot on Germanwings flight 4U9525, on March 26, 2015 in Montabaur, Germany
Flowers and candles are placed at the Germanwings Flight 4U 9525 air crash memorial in Le Vernet, France, 24 September 2015
Prosecutors later revealed that Lubitz had investigated suicide methods and the security of cockpit doors in the days leading up to the crash.
‘He concerned himself on one hand with medical treatment methods, on the other hand with types and ways of going about a suicide,’ spokesperson Ralf Herrenbrueck said of his apparently duality of thought.
Düsseldorf public prosecutor Christoph Kumpa said in conclusive remarks to Austrian Wings ten years on that Lubitz had researched ‘how he could kill himself in other ways’ the week prior.
‘The methods he researched there probably seemed unsafe, insufficiently successful, or unfeasible to him. Therefore, he subsequently researched the function of the cockpit door mechanism again.’
Kumpa suggested that, based on medical records, Lubitz was ‘due to his mental illness, virtually obsessed with the objectively unfounded fear of going blind’.
As a result, he said, Lubitz ‘believed that his purpose in life, his career as a professional pilot, was over’.
‘From this, one must conclude that the co-pilot wanted to end his life using a method he considered safe, and for this purpose he chose the instrument available to him and mastered, the aircraft, because he knew that he would not survive a crash…
‘There is no evidence for anything else, especially regarding technical aspects of the aircraft. In my view, the events of March 24, 2015, have been clarified beyond any doubt.’
Search workers are deployed by helicopter at the crash site of the Germanwings Airbus A320, to collect debris and find the second black box
Images from the first rescue helicopters to reach the remote crash site shows wreckage spread across hundreds of metres
The flight number and date of the crash are engraved on a memorial stone for victims of the 2015 Germanwings plane crash at the forest cemetery in Haltern am See, Germany, 21 March 2025
In the wake of the crash, global airlines brought in new safety measures to maintain at least two crew in the cockpit at all times. Many in the U.S. already had such a ‘rule of two’.
The changes may have saved lives in the years since. For the families affected by the crash of Flight 9525, it came too late.
Marina Bandres, an editor and colourist, had been living in Manchester with her husband for seven years.
Marina and her partner, Pawel, met at the Futureworks School of Media in Manchester before graduating in 2009, per the Manchester Evening News.
A tutor who taught the 37-year-old at the time described Marina as somebody who ‘made the world a brighter place’.
‘Marina was an exceptional student who was liked and respected in equal measure, she was the type of person that made the world a brighter place and she will be truly missed,’ Richard Hellawell, Head of School for Film, said in tribute at the time.
Danielle Hewitt, on the same course, said the couple were ‘really nice, friendly people’ who were ‘always together and never on their own’.
Marina and her British-born son, Julian, were among the victims on board the flight.
Wolverhampton businessman and father-of-two Martyn Matthews, 50, and Paul Bramley, a 28-year-old student from Hull who was studying in Switzerland, were also named as the other British victims of the crash.
Mr Matthews, a manager for German electronics firm HUF UK in Tipton, was abroad for a one-day conference in Barcelona. He left behind a wife, Sharon, and two young children, Jade and Nathan, then 20 and 23.
Student Mr Bramley was studying hospitality and hotel management in Lucerne, Switzerland, where he was about to start an internship after travelling with his Estonian girlfriend Anneli Tiirik.
The 28-year-old had just finished his first year at the college and had taken a few days holiday with friends in Barcelona before flying back to the UK via Dusseldorf to see his family.
Yellow roses lay at a memorial for the victims of the March 2015 Germanwings plane crash in front of the Joseph-Koenig-Gymnasium school in Haltern am See, western Germany, on March 24, 2025
People attend a commemorative event for the victims of the March 2015 Germanwings plane crash ten years ago, in front of the Joseph-Koenig-Gymnasium school in Haltern am See, western Germany, on March 24, 2025
A memorial stone for victims of the 2015 Germanwings plane crash at the forest cemetery in Haltern am See, Germany, 21 March 2025
Ten years on, hundreds of families affected will mark the 10th anniversary of the crash in their own way.
Lufthansa, which owned Germanwings, is inviting the victims’ relatives every year to the village near the crash site and is expecting around 300 mourners to attend this year’s memorial service, dpa reported.
Commemorations are also planned at the airports in Dusseldorf and Barcelona.
In the German town of Haltern, today laying white roses for the students and teachers killed in the crash, the mayor said the ‘state of shock, the deeply felt sympathy of all the residents for the families and the question of why this happened are still with us today’.
‘The Germanwings crash is a permanent part of our town’s history.’
