This Article is From Mar 30, 2015

Jet Crash Tests Germany's Faith In Its Precision

Jet Crash Tests Germany's Faith In Its Precision

Carsten Spohr, CEO of German airline Lufthansa, at a press conference after the crash of Germanwings Flight 4U 9525. (Agence France-Presse)

Berlin:

Even in the nightmarish immediate aftermath of the plane crash in the French Alps on Tuesday, Carsten Spohr, the former pilot who runs Germany's Lufthansa airline, was sure of one thing: the co-pilot, Andreas Lubitz, 27, was "100 percent" fit to fly.

Lubitz, after all, had been through the widely respected Lufthansa training system - "one of the best in the world," Spohr said - and had met all other requirements to fly commercial aircraft.

In the decades since it emerged from the ruins of Nazism, this country - which reunited in 1990 and in recent years has dominated Europe as its economic powerhouse - has come to define itself as orderly, rule-driven and well-engineered. It is an identity that is both an antidote to its past and a blueprint for economic success. From Mercedes-Benz cars - "the best," says a current ad campaign - to its countless tidy towns, Germany purrs excellence.

Now Lubitz - born and raised in one of those pretty towns - has upended that well-ordered world and challenged other assumptions built into German life. As Spohr noted, the co-pilot's terrifying deed was a singular, perhaps unstoppable disaster. Yet somehow the system failed.

Any nation would be jolted. But this one raised questions distinct to Germany. In a society that prizes process, did the system lack the ability to spot warning signs that could have stopped Lubitz before he flew a jetliner into a mountainside, killing himself and 149 others? What, if any, responsibility should German society bear? And 70 years after the end of World War II, should Germans insist that protecting privacy trumps open debate that may help avoid the worst of human behavior?

The official response to the crash affirmed Germany's decades-old trust in defining itself as one member of a European community. In January, Chancellor Angela Merkel leaned on the shoulder of President Francois Hollande of France, showing solidarity after the terrorist attacks in Paris. In this case, Merkel stood near the crash site with Hollande and the prime minister of Spain in a tableau of unity and shared grief.

But affected Germans showed a clear preference for sorting out the questions posed by events in their own way.

Writing from Montabaur, the Rhineland town of some 15,000 where Lubitz was born and raised, a journalist for the online edition of the respected weekly Die Zeit, Karsten Polke-Majewski, described the hostility of residents to prying questions and pondered the discomforts of self-examination.

"Already during the journey in, the doubts grew: What can the hometown say about someone who yanks 149 people to their deaths? What can friends, neighbors or fellow club members really know about the life of a 27-year-old man who lived in Bremen, in America and Dusseldorf?" Polke-Majewski wrote, referring to Lubitz's time in pilot training and his more recent residence near big Ruhrland airports. "What would one's own teachers have said about this reporter eight years after high school graduation?

"And yet," he added, "is the warning that has been issued so loudly about how this is all just speculation not simply a way to avoid the bitter truth, because one does not want to pose any more questions?"

Privacy is treasured here even more than in most societies in Europe, where people often lack what is seen as the American - or Anglo-Saxon, to use a popular term - instinct to rush to the microphone to share grief or joy.

Germans' determination to guard their privacy is a legacy of Nazi and Communist rule, when the state snooped on citizens. The strength of German feeling emerged clearly in 2013, when the former contractor Edward J. Snowden revealed the sweep of U.S. intelligence monitoring millions of Germans and other Europeans.

Snowden, considered a traitor by some people in the United States, became a hero to many Germans, whose vigorous debate about surveillance and data protection bolsters the resistance of some to allow digital technology freer creative rein.

Privacy extends to dealings with the news media, and applies, as it emerged this past week, beyond death. When Spohr was asked to explain the gap of many months in Lubitz's training, he cited the confidentiality of medical records - although the co-pilot was dead. Not even the head of Lufthansa has access, he said.

As The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung noted in a long report on Lubitz's mental state this weekend, the young man described by hometown acquaintances as "quite normal" was actually anything but.

"No one believed that the enemy could sit in their own cockpit," the newspaper observed. "The psychological entry tests which Lufthansa says are passed by only one in four applicants seemed too incorruptible for that."

Lufthansa and other European airlines moved swiftly Friday to adopt a practice that many commentators noted was common in the United States: that two people must be in the cockpit at any time, with a cabin crew member taking the place of a pilot if the pilot has to leave briefly.

That was a clear response to mounting calls for improved safety. But resentment of the news reporting that can lead to such a change lingered.

Peter Ramsauer, a Bavarian conservative who was transportation minister from 2009 to 2013, appeared on a popular television talk show Thursday night and questioned the version of the crash presented by the Marseille state prosecutor in France and the news media's reaction.

"Many state prosecutors have put a lot about in the world, and then the final judgment was quite different," he said. Feverish speculation and immediate reporting mean "there are suddenly millions of judges who know exactly what happened."

The host, Maybrit Illner, objected to Ramsauer's criticism of the news media, but in the process acknowledged that without the prosecutor's version becoming public, the news media "of course" might have handled the story differently.

Mass media attention first descended last week on the town of Haltern am See, north of Dusseldorf, which lost 16 10th-graders and two teachers who were returning from an exchange program in Spain when the Barcelona-Dusseldorf flight crashed.

As often happens in Germany, teenagers cited their right not to talk to the media, or gave only their first names. A Facebook page written by mourning students at the Joseph-Koenig high school warned against giving up too much.

"The reporters at the school are asking the names of the victims, please don't give them any information, otherwise the families will have even more to contend with!" read one entry. Another said: "Can't understand how reporters use the suffering of other people!"

The battle between preserving privacy and providing information - even as news organizations competed for readers and viewers - reached almost absurd levels after the French prosecutor named Lubitz around lunchtime Thursday.

Well into Friday, some German broadcasters were still blocking out his face, and referring to him only as "Andreas L." - the routine German practice of withholding a full last name for minors, the accused or others whose identities cannot by law be fully disclosed.

By contrast, the country's best-selling daily newspaper, Bild Zeitung, took up half of its front page Friday with a photograph of Lubitz running a half-marathon in 2013. "Andreas Lubitz, 27, The Amok Pilot," screamed the headline. "He deliberately flew 149 innocent children, women and men to their deaths."
 

© 2015, The New York Times News Service
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