On March 24, 2015, a Germanwings Airline flight between Barcelona, Spain, and Dusseldorf, Germany, crashed in the French Alps, killing 150 passengers on board. The pilots included 34-year-old Captain Patrick Sondenheimer, who had 10 years of flying experience on the Airbus A320, and a co-pilot, 27-year-old Andreas Lubitz, who had 630 flight hours of experience. The crash investigation revealed a startling finding. The co-pilot Lubitz locked himself in the cockpit of the Airbus A320-211 and deliberately crashed it. Sondenheimer’s voice can be heard pleading with Lubitz to open the cockpit door, “For God’s sake, open the door!” “Open the goddamn door!” Lubitz set the plane’s autopilot altitude control from 38,000 feet to 100 feet.

Lubitz, like millions of people, had previously been diagnosed and treated for depression. In 2008, while in flight school, he became severely depressed and had suicidal thoughts. He was treated with two antidepressants, citalopram and mirtazapine. While some have speculated that Lubitz suffered from a psychotic mental illness (such as major depression with psychotic features), there is no evidence that he suffered from disorganized speech, hallucinations, delusions, or grossly disorganized behavior before his attack. No antipsychotics were ever prescribed. His parents were completely unaware of their son’s actions and became distraught upon discovering that their son committed such a heinous act. His father continues to insist that his son was not depressed that day. Such accounts are commonly observed in families of perpetrators of mass shootings, assassins, or terrorists. Subsequent psychologists and psychiatrists have stated that they doubt that depression was the key factor in Lubitz’s actions. In this article, I will discuss Lubitz's mental health history and beliefs, which might match some of my studies of terrorists, assassins, and mass shooters who are motivated by extreme overvalued beliefs........

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