Germanwings crash inquiry will re-stage doomed jet's flightpath

[FRANKFURT] Investigators probing the crash of a Germanwings jet on March 24 will re-stage the flight to help provide further insight into the tragedy in the French Alps.

The re-enactment next month by Germanwings owner Deutsche Lufthansa AG will "shed light on the remaining open questions raised by the data we have," German Transport Minister Alexander Dobrindt said on Wednesday.

A re-staging is a standard procedure to help accident investigators better understand what happened during a flight, and how that correlates with information on cockpit-voice and flight-data recorders. All 150 people on Flight 9525 died after co-pilot Andreas Lubitz locked his captain out of the cockpit and deliberately crashed the plane, French prosecutors say.

Information found on the two flight recorders backed up the theory that Lubitz was to blame, while data retrieved from a computer at his Dusseldorf home showed that he researched suicide methods and cockpit-door mechanics prior to the event.

Lufthansa will fly a plane on the same path as the doomed Airbus Group NV A320 bound for Dusseldorf from Barcelona under the direction of French accident investigator BEA, said Germout Freitag, a spokesman for German investigator BFU, which is collaborating in the probe. The BEA didn't return calls.

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