page_title: Germanwings
section_title: Incidents and accidents
hierarchical_section_title: Germanwings / Incidents and accidents
caption_attribution_description: English: Airbus A320 (D-AIPX) of Germanwings taking off from Barcelona Airport. On 24 March 2015, this plane crashed in the French Alps.
context_page_description: Germanwings GmbH was a German low-cost airline wholly owned by Lufthansa which operated under the Eurowings brand. It was based in Cologne with hubs at Cologne Bonn Airport, Stuttgart Airport, Hamburg Airport, Berlin Tegel Airport, Munich Airport and further bases at Hannover Airport and Dortmund Airport.
  Germanwings operated independently as Lufthansa's low-cost carrier until October 2015, when Lufthansa decided to transfer the brand identity of its short haul-product to Eurowings. Since 2016, Germanwings is a wet lease operator for its sister company Eurowings. The Germanwings brand has not been used since then, although the IATA code "4U" continued to operate under the Eurowings brand until March 2018, when Germanwings' own IATA-Code 4U was abandoned and replaced with the Eurowings designator EW. Germanwings was closed in April 2020.
context_section_description: As of the merger, Germanwings had been involved in one major incident, which resulted in 150 fatalities. On 24 March 2015, an Airbus A320-211 with registration D-AIPX was operating Flight 9525 from Barcelona to Düsseldorf when it crashed in the south of France near Digne-les-Bains, with no survivors. The flight was carrying 144 passengers, two pilots and four cabin crew. German prosecutors decided that nobody other than the 27-year-old co-pilot Andreas Lubitz could be held accountable for the crash.  Lubitz took time off from his flight training for several months and informed the Flight Training Pilot School in 2009 of a "previous episode of severe depression". He later completed the training. Prior to his training as a commercial pilot, he was also treated for suicidal tendencies.
  Following the incident, the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) made a recommendation to airlines that two authorized people must be present in the cockpit at all times. In coordination with the German aviation authority, other German airlines and the German aviation industry association, the airlines of the Lufthansa Group implemented a policy requiring this.
caption: D-AIPX, the plane that crashed as Flight 9525 in March 2015
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