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The Last Flight
April 3rd, Kansas City: Some thoughts about the Germanwings crash |
A plane went down, and because usually a lot of people are in a plane, the number of victims is shocking, even in our world hardboiled as it is from daily catastrophic news on TV. And thus, the attention is higher than usual.
 Germanwings crash site
Or maybe it has to do with the fact, a lot of us fly occasionally in planes and thus, this incident touches directly on the fears of everyone.
Now we know, or at least can strongly guess, the copilot ran the Airbus into the mountains intentionally to commit suicide. Which is another factor heating up the attention. And with all of this of course, the media blame game starts to get really really wild. Why wasn't this pilot evaluated, the rules in our country (and this is independent from the country those commenters are in) are soooo much better ... lets be honest here, this is bullshit!
Suicides happen and sometimes also pilots commit suicide. Most of them at home and alone. Suicide has become a quite frequent incident over the whole population. However, suicidal pilots very rarely crash planes with hundreds of passengers in order not to die alone. Aside of Lubitz, I know only of one other case, in which pilot-masshomicide.-suicide was actually proven. All other cases were more like "we can't find another reason for the crash, so we assume, pilot suicide". Which in a way gives all those cases of "pilot suicides" a little bit of a suspicious touch. USA Today reported only a few days ago, at least 44 amateur pilots used planes in suicides. Of course, a closer look reveals in at least three of those cases the reason was not suicide but heart attacks or strokes, means medical conditions disabling the pilots suddenly. One turned out to be a technical failure and the rest ... well, there was no reason found, so it had to be suicide, right?
Interestingly, just four years ago, the FAA changed some rules. Pilots who come forward with having depressions or other mental health problems, will be evaluated and, if their problems are well-controleld by drugs, they can retain their licenses. Because nowadays, mental conditions aren't considered automatically a disability to fly a plane responsible. Fact is, we don't know how many pilots with possible problems are right now in the air and all that is between them and disaster are some pills ... lets hope, they took them this morning, shall we? So we have there a problem of entirely different dimensions. And still ... is this all we can think about?
Here is the problem: Maybe, probably, Lubitz killed himself and everyone on board of Flight 9525, but what can we do to prevent things like that in the future? The question is not who is to blame based on national bias or simplified Yahoo-board opinions, but what can effectively be done?
Now a lot of people call for regular psychological evaluations. Once per year. Which will not prevent anything because things develop fast if there are outside stressors involved. A girl friend leaves, the pilot in question goes into depression now ... not in six months when he is due for the next evaluation! And right now, in most countries, the pilot checkups are physical examinations. Eye tests, heart conditions, that kind of stuff. The doctor maybe asks some casual questions about the mental state of the pilot he examines, but that's it. | Those doctors are physicians, not trained psychiatrists. And even for a trained psychiatrist, things are often not that easy. If they would be that easy, Westenr societies wouldn't let go thousands of dangerous criminals go free every year because a psychiatrist determined, they would be no risk for themselves or others. They are often right, sometimes not so.
Mental problems are a wide field and yes, societies have to learn
 Andreas Lubitz, the suspected suicide pilot
how to deal with it. It's an important subject. But it's not so much an important subject for airfare. Here, the discussion easily could prove as damaging because the blame game ("it was Germanwings responsibility to do this or that ...") will close out the view on some other details:
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The pilot was locked out, the entry code overridden from the inside
This is basically what the rules demand since 9/11. However, while a door to the cockpit makes access for terrorists harder, the overriding option of the entry code is over the top. The idea was, if someone on the outside needs to get in and terrorists get him, they can torture the code out of him. So the pilot in the cockpit can also lock out any crew member in possession of the code. But this enables of course the pilot in the cockpit to do whatever he plans to do and there is no way to stop him.
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The copilot, Andreas Lubitz, was alone in the cockpit.
Now, this happens when the pilot has to go to the bathroom. Fine. Many airlines have rules if one of the pilots leaves the cockpit, a flight-attendant has to sit in there with his colleague till he is back. So nobody is ever alone in there. Of course, there is a possibility a suicidal pilot could overwhelm a smaller female flight-attendant by pure physical power, but while he does that, he wouldn't be able to reprogram the flight computers, set the autopilot on descent or override the door code.
- According to media reports, Lubitz pressed a button that sent the plane in descent
Now, there is actually no single button to do that. Not in an Airbus, not in a Boeing. What he had to do was to reset the altitude on the autopilot and then sent the plane to a controlled descent to that new altitude. Since the second recorder, the data recorder, is not found yet, we don't know which buttons and knobs he used. All we know is, he didn't answer and, this is the weird part, he had done an oxygen mask ... now, some airlines demand that the remaining pilot wears an oxygen mask if the other pilot leaves the cockpit and the plane is above 18,000 feet altitude. So Lubitz may has donned the mask already at 38,000 ft when the descent started. But despite all gaps, we know, he didn't switch off the autopilot and flew the plane manually in the ground. Why not?
The problem is, the ground proximity warning system gave at least one alert before the impact. Airbus' flight envelope protection system should have reacted unless it was disabled. So this is a much complexer picture here than the media hype tells us. A lot of details are still in the dark.
| Bottom line is, the current hype talk prevents us all from looking at other options to prevent incidents like this one in the future and even worse, it maybe sends the whole crash investigation into a bias. Which is not a good thing because this kind of tunnel vision will in the end lead to other crashes with hundreds of victims more.
 The cockpit door in an A320
Even worse things become when I read the suggestions in the public discussion. For example to make planes remote controllable from a tower station for example, just like a drone. Now, if the radio network to control a drone is hacked by, lets say terrorists, you can always press a self-destruct button. Can you do that with a plane full of people? The idea to save terrorist organizations the work to build bombs and provide them with a potential backdoor to send planes remote controlled via a hacked network into buildings sounds not so bright to me. The same goes for ideas to take control away from pilots and transfer them to board computers. More Airbuses went down for problems caused by those computers than by pilot suicides and Airbus computers are somewhat infamous for their tendency to flood cockpit crew with many unsorted messages when something is wrong and thus to contribute to plane crahses by work overload. You don't want a confused computer in control of a plane full of people when things are iffy. Remember Air France Flight 446?
And, last but not least, there is another truth about air travelling. We see those plane disasters and in almost every case, hundreds die. It doesn't really matter if it was a disappearance, like MH370, a shotdown, like MH17 or a tehcnical failure leading to disaster, like with SR111. In every case, hundreds die and the grief isn unmeasurable. It appears, we hear more and more about those disasters, there seem to be always more planes crashing. But the simple statistical truth is, the number of planes in the skies has increased over the last twenty years to about double of what was. There are more planes falling out of the skeis because there are even more under way there. Day by day. If you cut it down to numbers, flying has become actually safer than it ever was. To fly in a plane over a distance of three-thousand miles gives you a better chance of arriving healthy and in one piece than driving thirty miles in your car. Why is that? For a very simple reason. Every accident is investigated acribic and thorough to leanr from it and to get rules in place to prevent this kind of accident ever again. That will of course, don't prevent another kind fo accident next year, but it makes air travel so dafe as no other way to travel. This worked out for millions of passengers and flight crews. We should stick with this cold acribic way to get things figure out instead of going into the media hype because the blame game never saved anybody's life!
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... back |
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Tue, May 17, 2016
12:00 AM CT
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