Radio and television covered the crash for hours on end, seemingly to the exclusion of all else; people spoke of it in the bars and shops and post offices as if nothing else had happened for weeks. I thought that the loss of life was tragic, as it is in all such events, but the crash was not worse than many another.
The thought even occurred to me that the excessive emotional reaction to the deaths would give comfort to the enemies of the West, in so far as it indicated too tender a sensibility to sustain any kind of resistance to armed assault.
I was mistaken. Others had sensed at once what I had failed to sense: this crash was not the result of mere mechanical failure.
And it soon enough emerged that the crash was not an accident at all, but an act of mass murder or, at least, of mass homicide, as well as of suicide. It was only natural speculation should soon start to run rife, including in my mind.
I thought at once that the pilot, Andreas Lubitz, had probably had a reversal in his love life, that perhaps his girlfriend had left him or had threatened to do so, and that this had plunged him into a crisis.
Many suicidal acts are acts of vengeance against someone who has caused the person pain; it is common for people who attempt suicide to imagine themselves present in some kind of shadowy way at their own funerals, hovering over the mourners and exulting over their sorrow. “Now you’re sorry, but it’s too late. You’ll feel guilty for the rest of your life, as you deserve.”
It turns out Andreas Lubitz did have a problem in his love life, but it is unlikely that we shall ever know what his thoughts and feelings were that induced him to crash the aircraft. After all, reversals in love affairs are within the experience of most of mankind, and they get through them without taking scores of people with them.
So even though Andreas Lubitz did have a broken love affair, his act cannot be explained.
There was an element of grandiosity about it: after all, if he could face dying by crashing an aeroplane into the ground, he could have faced dying by throwing himself off a building or by some other method not entailing the deaths of others.
His act could hardly be called impulsive, since he locked the cockpit door, resisted insistent and desperate appeals to open it and plunged the aircraft downwards for eight minutes before it hit the ground.
As with other mass killers, whose acts almost always end in their death by their own hand or that of the security forces, Andreas Lubitz wanted not to slip away unnoticed but to make a grand — or at least a very public — exit, one that no one would forget in a hurry.
Relatively few people without weapons of mass destruction have the opportunity to kill 150 people at a stroke: he wanted to make a mark as well as die. Quite a lot of homicides are followed by the suicide of the killer.
For many years in Britain, before the abolition of the death penalty, about a third of homicides were followed by suicide. In the majority of such cases, the killer was mad: a mother, for example, might kill her children because she believed that she had infected their bloodstream with lice and that by killing them, before she killed herself, she was liberating them from a terrible future.
In other words, her act was a perverted form of philanthropy, caused by her delusion.
There is nothing in Adreas Lubitz’s case to suggest philanthropy of any kind, however perverted.
One psychiatrist quoted in a French newspaper said he thought Andreas Lubitz “was in his inner world, a sort of tunnel, and that everything else was superfluous”.
Such a state of mind occurs in severe melancholia, but it is unlikely that such a state of mind would have gone unnoticed either before or during the flight.
His depression was more of the kind, once called misery or unhappiness, caused by an interaction of personality and circumstances.
But anyone nowadays who presents to a doctor in such a state of unhappiness is prescribed antidepressants (one-tenth of the population now takes them), as was Andreas Lubitz; and these drugs have been suspected of provoking extremely violent outbursts in a few of those who take them.
This is difficult to prove with any degree of certainty, but the suspicion remains.
What is little in doubt is the inefficacy of these drugs in making most people who take them any the happier.
It seems to me most likely that the co-pilot’s act of homicide and suicide was one of wounded narcissism, though information still to come may refute my hypothesis.
In any event, the case lays bare the preposterous contention that psychological disturbance, known metaphorically as illness, is precisely the same nature as physical illness, a contention now enshrined in the laws of several countries.
This has always been dishonest, as witnessed by the public outrage that Andreas Lubitz was allowed to fly despite a history of medicated misery. Did Lufthansa know that its employee had such a history?
If it did, it suggests that it was more afraid of an accusation of discrimination against the mentally disturbed than of a crash of an aircraft: discrimination that in this case ought to have been exercised.
Theodore Dalrymple is the author of Admirable Evasions: How Psychology Undermines Morality (Encounter Books).
