Suicidal Germanwings pilot had struggled in US flight school

WASHINGTON (AP) — The German pilot who deliberately flew his airliner into a mountainside last year had struggled with learning to fly and had failed a key test of his skills during training in the U.S., according FBI interviews with his flight instructors.

[...] his training difficulties were one more "red flag" that should have caused Lufthansa and the airline's Arizona flight school to take a closer look and discover his history of depression, asserted attorneys representing families of crash victims.

Lubitz was a co-pilot for Germanwings, a regional airline owned by Lufthansa, when he locked Flight 9524's captain out of the cockpit and set the plane on a collision course with a mountain in the French Alps last year.

Lubitz failed one of five check rides, which are important tests of a pilot's flying skills, and one of 67 training flights, Matthias Kippenberg, president and CEO of the Airline Training Center Arizona, told the FBI.

Germany's strict patient privacy laws didn't allow doctors to share medical information with an employer without the patient's permission.

[...] If the school had checked, Alexander said, it might have learned that German authorities had twice turned down applications from Lubitz for a pilot medical certificate because of his history of depression before issuing him a certificate in July 2009.

In the U.S., the Federal Aviation Administration also initially declined to grant Lubitz a student pilot medical certificate because he said on his application that he hadn't been treated for any mental disorders, and he failed to list doctors who had treated him as required.