The co-pilot of the doomed Germanwings Airbus A320 locked his captain out of the cockpit before deliberately crashing into a mountain to ‘destroy the plane’, it was sensationally revealed today.

French prosecutor Brice Robin gave further chilling details of the final ten minutes in the cockpit before the Airbus A320 plunged into the French Alps killing 150 people.

Revealing data extracted from the black box voice recorder, he said the co-pilot – named as 28-year-old German Andreas Lubitz – locked his captain out after the senior officer left the cockpit.

At that point, Lubitz uses the flight managing system to put the plane into a descent, something that can only be done manually – and deliberately. The co-pilot “didn’t say a single word” during the last 10 minutes of the flight, investigations reveal. The pilot kept hitting the cockpit door and “tried to smash it down.”

He said: ‘The intention was to destroy the plane. Death was instant. The plane hit the mountain at 700km per hour.

‘I don’t think that the passengers realized what was happening until the last moments because on the recording you only hear the screams in the final seconds.

Andreas Lubitz had clocked in 630 flight hours and joined Germanwings in September, 2013, straight from the training school. Lubitz was a German citizen and had no terrorist background, said French prosecutor Brice Robin.

Photos of Lubitz on social media:

Also, this…. from September 2013: