he didn t engage the actual command button he simply dialled in the altitude 100 feet. that doesn t cause the plane to increase its rate of descent at all. but it again, i know you know it s kind of monday morning quarterbacking here but the pilot comes back in there s nothing that shows him in other words, you can wipe out all that information you were playing with before? right, it s a button a physical button that you turn that has numbers in it and if he returned it back to the appropriate altitude that was issued by air traffic control, the captain would have no idea. anthony romine always a pleasure to see you, thank you for being with me. still watching that baltimore mayor press conference, which is expected to begin, we re almost seven minutes into the hour now, could
believe all he was doing was visualizing the planning of the suicide and acting it out ahead of time. interesting. anthony, talk to me about this four-minute period where the on the previous flight the pilot went out to use the restroom and during those four minutes he was practicing or at least thinking about these different flight altitudes during this four minutes. when the pilot comes back in there s no trace that this happened, so there s no way, i m asking, there s no way for the pilot or anybody else to get some kind of warning? no there is no way. it would be recorded in the flight data recorder but that s not routinely looked at until there s an accident. so the autopilot control panel is right at the very top of the control panel where the pilot sit and it s kind of in the middle of the two pilots so they can both reach it and what he simply was doing was engaging the autopilot altitude command.
barcelona. in that french investigators are saying that andreas lubitz did what you could call a dress rehearsal for his later plan changing the altitude of that plane five times in four and a half minutes all while the pilots was out of the cockpit. the captain of the plane was out of the cockpit, presumably in the bathroom. take a look at this graph that was released with the preliminary report. you ll see that there s fluctuations in the altitude changing it up and down from as low as 100 feet and up to 49,000 feet. now, an expert that i spoke with says that this would not necessarily be noticeable if he actually engaged these changes in the autopilot because the plane was already on a descent. so you wouldn t necessarily notice there was anything going on in the plane. no red flags to speak of. the cockpit the pilot returned to the cockpit a couple minutes later and everything went on after that as planned. it landed safely in barcelona. the next flight from lars low th