I think it was so that Lubitz only got a Third Class medical from the FAA so that he could fly solo during his training in the States. (The FAA medical form has a little beige sub-section that forms your Student Pilot License when it's validated by your AME. That is what you need to fly solo in the States, along with an appropriate sign-off in your logbook from your Flight Instructor.)
Most people in Lubitz' situation routinely would go for an FAA First Class medical, since that is usually a prerequisite for entering training for a professional license, a license that requires a First Class medical in order to exercise its privileges. In other words, there would be no point to training someone for an FAA Commercial license if he were not able to obtain that necessary First Class medical. If all you could get was a Third Class medical then you would be expected to train for a PPL, nothing more.
What the FAA signed off on there was only allowing Lubitz to fly as PIC under Part 91 (non-commercial flying) and Part 141 (flying on an approved curriculum in a flight school), both as a student pilot, subject to approval from an FAA-licensed CFI. (It would have been a very brave examiner who would pass an applicant for a PPL with Lubitz' history of depression, for fear of another version of what he did, using an aircraft to kill himself.)
Lubitz would have been barred from flying even under FAA Part 135 (commercial operation of light aircraft) with only a Third Class medical. Too, he most probably did not give full and honest answers to that question about how many visits he had made in the last year to health professionals and for what reasons. If he had, then his history of depression would probably have caused the FAA never to issue his medical.
The FAA is in the clear on this for two reasons:
The FAA has "sovereign immunity," meaning that they can not be sued for any oversights they have made.
The FAA stopped short itself of certifying Lubitz for anything more than non-commercial, student flying, as far as I know. Here's what the database at faa(dot)gov shows for him:
ANDREAS GUENTER LUBITZ
Medical Class: Third, Medical Date: 6/2010
STUDENT PILOT
PRIVATE PILOT (Foreign Based)
AIRPLANE SINGLE ENGINE LAND
GLIDER
Limits:
ENGLISH PROFICIENT.
ISSUED ON BASIS OF AND VALID ONLY WHEN ACCOMPANIED BY GERMANY PILOT LICENSE NUMBER(S) 27788 9460.
ALL LIMITATIONS AND RESTRICTIONS ON THE GERMANY PILOT LICENSE APPLY.
Lubitz' FAA Third Class medical lapsed on 6/2012, more than 2 1/2 years before he killed himself and everyone else aboard his aircraft. At the time of his act of murder-suicide he was not FAA-certified to act as a pilot, given that he did not then hold a valid FAA medical.
The Lufthansa flight school in Arizona, on the other hand ... they trained and passed a fellow who had already dropped out for ten months because of severe depression, and then unleashed him upon his fellow aviators and his passengers as someone who was safe to fly with.
Lufthansa has had a large surplus of highly-qualified applicants, so that it's very difficult to understand why they allowed this man with such an obvious, high-risk problem as severe depression to go through training and then get into the right seat of an airliner.
I wonder if there is some back-story to this, someone with "pull" who mistakenly befriended Lubitz by getting him back into the training program after he had already had to drop out.
I really hate to see people who tell about how "It's always been [their] dream to be a pilot," and so on. Yeah, well, dream on, Pal, but being a dreamer is not a sound basis for success in a demanding, highly technical field such as professional aviation, especially not when chasing that dream leads you to ignore some obvious personal short-coming such as wanting to kill yourself!
As to suing in the States, rather than just taking that hundred thousand euro per victim and buggering off .... If I had lost someone in that crash then I would want to see a team of the biggest, meanest, lowest, most bottom-feeding, ambulance-chasing lawyers who ever put on sharkskin suits and two-tone shoes turn that flight school upside down and shake it violently until every last bit of loose change fell out of their pockets.
What would you guess, five million per victim, including the Captain on that flight, when you factor in getting to watch your Captain hammering on the cockpit door while the view out the windows shows the Alps first slowly and then quickly getting bigger and bigger? What sort of "pain and suffering" that must have been, and pretty directly caused by passing on a guy who never should have been put through that school. Lubitz himself, had he survived, would probably have walked on an insanity defense, given that he would be unlikely to ever be allowed to do that again, but who allows an insane person to become an airline FO?
Last edited by chuks; 14th Apr 2016 at 13:01.