Germanwings Flight 9525

Confirmed 74,705

Overview

The Germanwings Flight 9525 was a scheduled passenger flight operated by the German airline Lufthansa's low-cost subdivision that departed from Barcelona, Spain and crashed in the French Alps while en route to Düsseldorf, Germany on the morning of March 24th, 2015. The disaster resulted in the deaths of all 144 passengers and six crew members.

Background

On March 24th, 2015, 10:01 a.m. local time, Germanwings Flight 9525 departed Barcelona-El Prat Airport en route to Düsseldorf, Germany, carrying 144 passengers of 18 nationalities and 6 Germanflight crew members. At around 10:40 a.m., less than an hour into the flight, air traffic controllers in France reported that they lost contact with the plane after the transponder signal went offline over the French Alps.^[1]

Notable Developments

Investigation

On March 26th, Marseille prosecutor Brice Robin announced that evidence collected from the plane's "black box" voice recorded suggested that co-pilot Andreas Lubitz had deliberately started the plane's descent after locking the pilot out of the cockpit.^[10]

Online Reaction

Also on March 26th, the world news site Quartz reported that Lubitz' Facebook page was being memorialized by the social networking site. Later that day, the page was taken offline. Meanwhile, several Reddit threads about the crash reached the site's front page.^[11]^[12]^[13]^[14] On Twitter, many mourned the deaths of those who were aboard the plane with tweets using the hashtag #germanwings.^[15]

Conspiracy Theories

On /bane/

In the days following the crash, members of 8chan's /bane/ board,^[5]^[8] a board dedicated to Baneposting, quickly began drawing parallels between the Germanwings Flight crash with the memorable scene from The Dark Knight Rises, mainly due to their similarities in flight patterns and altitude changes, including "4U" in the airplane number (4U9525), the name of the nearest city where the accident happened having "Bains" in it, photographs of French police officers on the spot who look like actors from the famous plane scene, and the plane crashing with no survivors. The board also managed to rise into the top 10 boards of 8chan on March 26th. In reply to this, the title of the board was also temporarily changed to the airplane number (shown below). Other boards that endorsed Baneposting as a result of the crash were the /pol/ (Politically Incorrect) and /tv/ (Television and Movies) boards on both 8chan and 4chan.