DUESSELDORF, Germany — When Andreas Lubitz sent an e-mail in 2009 seeking reinstatement to Lufthansa’s flight-training program after a monthslong absence, he appended what in retrospect was a clear warning about his fitness to fly passenger jetliners: an acknowledgment that he had suffered from severe depression.
Lufthansa put the young German back through its standard applicant-screening process and medical tests. But it did not, from everything now known about the case, pursue any plan to ensure that he was getting appropriate mental health treatment.
Nor did it impose special monitoring of his condition beyond that required for any pilot who had a flagged health issue. Instead, Lubitz made his way through the training program and was entrusted as an Airbus A320 copilot for Lufthansa’s low-cost subsidiary, Germanwings.
The company and its medical staff had no idea of the tortured drama playing out in his mind, peaking in the two or three months leading up to his final flight.
After Lubitz flew himself and 149 other people into a French mountainside last month, Lufthansa’s chief executive pronounced that Lubitz had been “100 percent” fit to fly, showing how unaware the airline was of the extent of the pilot’s psychological troubles.
Lubitz’s journey to the moment when he found himself alone at the controls of Germanwings Flight 9525 from Barcelona to Duesseldorf on March 24 exposed a series of failures and weaknesses at Lufthansa, and throughout the industry and its regulators, in dealing with mental illness among pilots.
The pervasive culture of privacy in Germany created a bias against delving into Lubitz’s condition, and effectively blinded the country’s airline regulator to the medical problems afflicting its pilots.
Germany’s Federal Aviation Office, which issues pilot licenses, relies entirely on the country’s licensed flight doctors to determine whether pilots are fit to fly. But an audit last year by the European Aviation Safety Agency found that Germany’s strict data-protection rules mean that the information flight doctors submit to the regulator is not sufficiently detailed to allow officials to validate their findings.
Other nations have taken stricter measures than Germany when it comes to dealing with depression and other mental illnesses among flight crews.
Dr. Richard Soderberg, chief medical officer for the civil aviation and maritime section of the Swedish Transport Agency, said while depression would not permanently disqualify a pilot in Sweden, the pilot would be grounded during treatment.
The agency would then require the pilot to turn over all medical records related to the depression and submit to psychiatric evaluation every six weeks or so, and the pilot would not be allowed to fly alone.
“The privacy of the pilot cannot be traded for aviation safety,” Soderberg said.
Though the highest-profile example of the pilot-suicide problem, Lubitz was far from an isolated case. In recent years, several commercial pilots appear to have crashed their aircraft intentionally or been stopped from doing so by fellow crew members. In most cases, those pilots had been screened for psychological problems.
“There was almost a denial by the industry, and in particular among pilots, that we don’t do things like that,” said Robert Scott, a former British Navy pilot and aviation consultant who heads a branch of the Canadian Mental Health Association in Vancouver, British Columbia. “It’s not part of our culture. It’s beyond the pale,” he said. “Now we have so much evidence that we have grudgingly come to accept that, yes, it is a problem.”
But flight doctors are well aware of the risks.
“It remains astonishing how many pilots with mild or fading depressive disorders taking antidepressants flew without the knowledge of flight doctors — and still fly for us,” Dr. Uwe Stueben and Dr. Juergen Kriebel, who both worked for Lufthansa, wrote in the abstract of a paper published in 2011, while Lubitz was still a trainee.
Lubitz applied to join Lufthansa’s flight academy straight out of high school, and in 2008 was among the roughly 5 percent of applicants accepted into the training program. But he broke off his training and for several months received psychiatric care.
When he was ready to return to the flight school the next year, he sent Lufthansa the e-mail about his “episode of severe depression,” attaching medical documents, the company said. He received his commercial pilot’s license in 2012.
Although Lubitz had passed his standard medical exam by a flight doctor in August, he had more recent notes from specialists declaring him unfit to work that he never shared with his employer.
Investigators believe he visited multiple doctors in part so none would recognize the true scope of his health problem. Prosecutors said Lubitz did not go to Lufthansa for help.