Crash pilot had been treated for suicidal tendencies

File photo of co-pilot Andreas Lubitz. [Photo/IC]

RIGOROUS SELECTION

Lufthansa CEO Carsten Spohr has said the airline prides itself on the rigorous selection methods of its pilot training scheme. The school is currently closed to new applicants, but around 6,000 people apply each year, with just 7-8 percent of them making the cut.

Lufthansa has also made clear that Lubitz's medical records were subject to doctor-patient confidentiality and that the airline therefore had no knowledge of what they contained.

Under German law, employers do not have access to employees' medical records and sick notes excusing a person from work do not give information on their medical condition.

Some politicians have called for a loosening of these rules in the wake of the Germanwings disaster.

But at a news conference in Berlin on Monday, a spokeswomanfor the German health ministry said doctors already had the right to break their vow of confidentiality if they thought their patients posed a danger to others.

French investigators said on Monday they were digging an access route to the mountain crash site in order to speed up the investigation.

The head of the French police forensic team told reporters it would take two to four months to identify the victims and that there was no certainty all would be identified because of the high speed at which the plane crashed.

"After a plane crash like this, the state of the bodies is not like after a simple car crash. The bodies are not necessarily whole, as the families know," Colonel Francois Daoust, head of the French Gendarmerie's criminal research Institute, told reporters.

He added that some 400 samples from body parts taken from the crash had allowed police to identify 78 different DNA profiles so far, but no identifications had been made as yet.

The plane's second flight recorder, which contains flight data, has not yet been found.

Kay Kratky, a board member of Lufthansa's German airlinesunit, told a German talk show on Sunday evening that, due to the force with which the plane hit the mountain face, it was possible the recorder's locator beacons had been damaged and were not working properly.

"I am hopeful that we will find the recorder by physical searching," he said.