It’s the co-pilot’s parents for whom I feel most sorry

Like the parents of all the people who died in the crash (and they all appear to have been young enough to have parents still alive), they have lost their child and will spend the rest of their lives grieving.

But unlike all those other parents, they also have to contend with the fact that their child murdered 150 people and deliberately destroyed a commercial airliner.

To contend with the fact that your child murdered one person is bad enough. But 150, in that manner, is not something anybody can deal with. He might as well have murdered his parents too. They will be unable to live with this. There can be no recovery and no way of coping.

This story has galvanized me with horror because a Germanwings flight between Barcelona and Dusseldorf is exactly the kind of flight my own sons might have been on, their friends, my friends, me – routinely, without a thought.

While we might get onto a long-distance flight operated by a ‘target’ airline with a slight flutter of trepidation, which of us has ever done that when getting on to a ‘bus’ flight operated by a budget airline between two European cities?