When dealing with human pathology, the unthinkable can happen.
Which is why safeguards and strict protocols, while not perfect, need to be established, if only to protect us from terrorist acts.
That’s what the horrifying suicide mission Tuesday of a German copilot was — terrorism, for whatever deranged reason or cause. The copilot apparently locked the pilot out of the cockpit and flew Germanwings Flight 9525 into a mountain, killing all 150 passengers and crew on board. Mass murder on this scale, apparently planned and deliberate, fits the definition of terrorism — even if German and French government officials decline to use the word.
The sounds of passengers screaming as the pilot pounded on the cockpit door trying to gain entry are a stark reminder of past nightmarish scenarios that have led to major changes in plane security — and should lead to additional steps airlines can take to reduce the risk of pilots deliberately taking a plane down.
Based on recordings recovered by French investigators, co-pilot Andreas Lubitz on the flight Tuesday from Barcelona, Spain, to Dusseldorf, Germany, initiated the plane’s descent when he was alone in the cockpit — then failed to open the door for the captain who had stepped outside to use the lavatory.
Though the copilot reportedly had been treated for depression some years ago, nothing else indicated he might have the propensity to kill himself by deliberately crashing an airliner. But something, obviously, went very wrong inside Lubitz’s mind.
Things might have turned out differently if there had there been another person in the cockpit. European regulators do not require two people to be in the cockpit at all times. By contrast, two people are required to be in the cockpit on U.S. airlines. If one pilot has to go outside for any reason, flight attendants or off-duty pilots flying on the plane must step in.
Locked cockpit doors have been the norm for most international airlines since the Sept. 11, 2001, hijackings, when the seizure of four airliners by terrorists pointed up the potential danger of allowing outsiders into the cockpit. Ironically, that decision to strengthen cockpit doors seems to have made it harder for the captain of the Germanwings plane to get back into the cockpit.
The incidence of pilots using planes to commit suicide and kill passengers is rare. Still, it happened in 1999 on EgyptAir Flight 990 from New York to Cairo, with 217 people losing their lives, and many suspect the baffling disappearance of Malaysia Flight MH370 last year was a case of a rogue pilot deliberately taking a plan off course and off the communications grid until it crashed somewhere in the southern Indian Ocean. In November 2013 Mozambique Airlines flight TM470 went down while on a routine flight between Maputo and Luanda in Angola, killing everyone on board. In that crash, the captain waited for the co-pilot to go to the bathroom before locking the cockpit door. The black-box flight recorder revealed how the captain desperately tried to get back into the cockpit as the co-pilot put the plane into a deliberate descent from its cruising altitude of 38,000 feet. It was later revealed that the co-pilot had marital problems and his son had recently died.
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No safety policy will ever anticipate every situation. But requiring two people to be in the cockpit during flight helps reduce the risk that comes with leaving the lives of hundreds of people in the hands of just one person. All airlines should take it. Another measure would be instituting enhanced psychological screening of pilots. We’d also like to see development of flight computer systems that would prevent a pilot from doing something that made no sense, like programming a descent that would take the airplane into the side of a mountain.
Can we lock a pilot out of the ability to crash an airplane? Probably not entirely, but regulators and airlines must do more to at least make the attempt. Hopefully the tragedy of Germanwings 9525 will get this message across.