Lufthansa insurers set aside $300 million over Alps crash

Germanwings’s parent company had previously offered over $54,000 to each victim’s family

By AP 31 March 2015, 1:57 pm

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A helicopter of the French gendarmerie flies over Seyne-les-Alpes on March 28, 2015, near the site where a Germanwings flight crashed in the French Alps, killing all 150 aboard. photo credit: AFP/JEFF PACHOUD)

BERLIN — Lufthansa said its insurers are setting aside $300 million to deal with possible costs resulting from last week’s crash of a Germanwings jet in the French Alps, in which 150 people died.

Lufthansa spokeswoman Kerstin Lau confirmed a report on the set-aside in the daily Handelsblatt on Tuesday. She said $300 million is the amount currently reserved to deal with “all costs arising in connection with the case.”

Last week, the company offered immediate aid of up to 50,000 euros ($54,250) per passenger to relatives of the victims. Those payments are separate from eventual compensation payments.

Prosecutors believe, based on data from the cockpit voice recorder, that the Airbus A320’s co-pilot locked his captain out of the cockpit and deliberately crashed Flight 9525 from Barcelona to Duesseldorf last Tuesday.

Lufthansa, Germanwings’ parent company, declined to say whether it knew of pilot Andreas Lubitz’s mental health problems. But it said the young pilot had passed all required medical checks since starting work for its subsidiary two years ago.