Courtesy of Mish.
Instead of new rules making sure two people are in the cockpit at all times, how about a rule that says no one is cockpit? This is precisely how I felt after 911 and even more so after the disappearance of Malaysia Flight 370 on March 8.
The tragedy of Germanwings Flight 9525 in which a mentally ill co-pilot deliberately flew the plane into a mountain killing all 150 on board is icing cake.
And it's not just two deliberate crashes either. Please consider The Mystery of Flight 9525: a Locked Door, a Silent Pilot and a Secret History of Illness.
Just under 40 minutes into their journey, the plane’s 27-year-old co-pilot, Andreas Lubitz, turned the Airbus A320 into a missile, guiding it into the southern Alps after locking its captain, Patrick Sonderheimer, out of the cockpit.
In the doomed flight’s final minutes, Sonderheimer attempted to force his way through the security door that separates the passengers from the pilots. At one stage he reportedly tried to use an axe. Recordings obtained by crash investigators capture him attempting to remonstrate with Lubitz – whose breathing, according to the microphones in the cockpit, remained sure and steady as the plane made its rapid descent. It was only in the final seconds that there was the sound of screams. Experts said death would have been instant.
As the New York Times revealed early on Thursday, French time, the voice recorder confirmed that Lubitz had locked the captain out of the flight deck and set the plane on its descent.
In November 2013, a flight between Mozambique and Angola crashed in Namibia, killing 33 people. Initial investigations suggested the accident was deliberately caused by the captain shortly after his co-pilot had left the flight deck.
In October 1999, an EgyptAir Boeing 767 went into a rapid descent 30 minutes after taking off from New York, killing 217 people. An investigation suggested that the crash was caused deliberately by the relief first officer, although the evidence was not conclusive.
And in December 1997, more than 100 people were killed when a Boeing 737 flying from Indonesia to Singapore crashed; the pilot, who was said to be suffering from “multiple work-related difficulties”, was suspected of switching off the flight recorders and intentionally putting the plane into a dive.
In an interview with the bestselling German tabloid Bild, the 26-year-old flight attendant, known only as Maria W, said that they had separated “because it became increasingly clear that he had a problem”. She said that he was plagued by nightmares and would wake up and scream “we’re going down”.
Last year he told her: “One day I’m going to do something that will change the whole system, and everyone will know my name and remember.”
A debate now rages about the extent to which companies and regulators can monitor a person’s mental health, especially if they perform a job that carries responsibility for the lives of others. The UN world aviation body has stressed that all pilots must have regular mental and physical checkups. But psychological assessments can be fallible. “If someone dissimulates – that is, they don’t want other people to notice – it’s very, very difficult,” Reiner Kemmler, a psychologist who specialises in training pilots, told Deutschlandfunk public radio.
Debate over Mental Illness …
