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By Bloomberg

Investigators are focusing on whether a “personal life crisis” led a Germanwings pilot to intentionally crash a plane into the French Alps on Tuesday, Bild Zeitung reported, citing unidentified security officials.

Authorities are trying to determine if Andreas Lubitz’s relationship difficulties with his girlfriend played a role in his apparent decision to initiate the descent into the mountainside, taking 149 passengers and crew to their deaths on Germanwings Flight 9525, the newspaper reported.

The first officer, who had a history of mental illness, had to repeat some stages of flight school because of depression and was occasionally listed as “unfit to fly” during his training in Arizona, Bild said.

Carsten Spohr, chief executive officer of Germanwings parent Deutsche Lufthansa AG, said on Thursday that Lubitz, who started his pilot training in 2008, took leave for “several months” at one point, declining to elaborate. A Lufthansa spokeswoman declined to comment on the Bild report Friday, citing German confidentiality laws concerning medical records.

Police on Thursday searched Lubitz’s apartment in Dusseldorf and the house he grew up in about 140 kilometers (87 miles) away in the town of Montabaur for clues as to why he appears to have locked the captain out of the cockpit and then crashed the plane. Dusseldorf prosecutors are leading the investigation into Lubitz, whom French officials said was 28 while some German reports put his age at 27.

Data Recorder

“We have found things and taken them,” Andreas Czogalla, a spokesman for Dusseldorf police, said by phone. “We can’t comment on the results, the evaluation is ongoing.”

Crash investigators are rushing to find the onboard data recorder to confirm prosecutors’ suspicions that the co-pilot steered the jet, which was en route to Dusseldorf from Barcelona, into a mountain. Lubitz, who had also worked as a flight attendant for 11 months, had logged 630 flight hours.

Audio files from the flight deck revealed that the co-pilot began descending after the captain stepped out of the cockpit, then denied him re-entry, according to Brice Robin, a prosecutor handling the French side of the investigation. Except for his breathing, the co-pilot stayed silent until the plane slammed into a slope at full speed, Robin said.

Manual Reset

The findings from the voice recorder on the Airbus A320 suggest that the crash was deliberate rather than due to a technical fault. Recovering the data unit, the second half of the airliner’s so-called black boxes, is important because it tracks the changes made by the crew to the controls.

Data gathered by tracking service Flightradar24 showed Flight 9525’s autopilot initially was programmed to 30,000 feet (9,100 meters) as the jet climbed, then reset to 32,000 feet and finally to its 38,000-foot cruising altitude, co-founder Mikael Robertsson said. Then the autopilot was manually reset to 96 feet, he said.

Germany’s aviation association is in talks to change the rules in the country to require that two pilots must always be in the cockpit and expects the measure to be introduced in the near future, spokeswoman Christine Kolmar said by phone Friday.

Germanwings and Lufthansa flew relatives and dependents to Marseille Thursday on three special flights from Dusseldorf and Barcelona. The airlines have set up an assistance center in Marseille, where family briefings are set to start Saturday. Two Lufthansa board members have traveled with the families.

Immeasurable Pain

“The suffering and pain this catastrophe has caused is immeasurable,” Germanwings CEO Thomas Winkelmann said on Twitter. “No words can express it and no amount of consolation is sufficient but we want to be there for visiting family members and friends if our support is desired.”

Lubitz’s file at the federal office of civil aviation and his pilot’s license had a code on it that means he needed special medical checks, Bild reported. All pilots are routinely reassessed and Lubitz was deemed fit to fly, Spohr said Thursday. The co-pilot had psychological treatment for 1 1/2 years, Bild reported.

Lubitz studied at Lufthansa’s flight instruction school in Bremen, which was founded in 1956 and trains about 200 pilots a year. Students complete a major part of their practical training in the Arizona desert at a facility that “offers outstanding flying and weather conditions,” according to Lufthansa’s website.

Pilot Testing

Before accepting someone to its flight school, the airline conducts a two-day test that includes mathematics, physics, memory and medical checks. Those passing the first round are invited back for another two days of assessments during which psychologists do role plays with applicants to see how they perform under stress situations, according to past participants.

Lufthansa, along with some other European carriers, prefers to hire pilots at a young age and train them to fly. That system is different from U.S. carriers, which recruit pilots who have come up through the ranks of charter airlines, other commercial flight operations or the military.

“There is a very heavy screening process,” John Cox, a former U.S. airline pilot who is president of Washington-based Safety Operating Systems, said of Lufthansa’s pilot training. “I’m going to guess that only 10 percent of the original applicants get through.”