I'm struck by how these pilots (chilling in itself that it's happened enough times to count as its own group) are described as being suicidal. While technically true, it detracts from the greater truth that they are mass-murderers. If someone shot up a mall and killed 150 people then ate a bullet, would we describe them as suicidal?
I don't have a greater point I suppose, but it seems worth thinking about. Except, perhaps-- how do you go about 'screening' for inclination to mass-murder?
(Unless I misunderstood) the gentleman running the press conference actively refused to call it a suicide as the co-pilot was responsible for the lives of the >150 people onboard at the time.
As there have been quite a few incidences of a pilot intentionally crashing a plane, It would be interesting to see if the ratio of mass-murdering pilots to pilots is larger than mass-murderers vs the adult population.
These doors very effectively mean that control of the plane would be put into the hands of the cabin crew, but magnifies the cost of a rogue operator -- I am certain the risks were evaluated and the challenge of a determined suicidal pilot was ruled outside scope.
And yes, there are emergency override codes, but there are also time override-overrides from within the cabin. Even if the protocol where two members of staff are always in the cabin was broken (or absent), again, that does not stop a rogue operator from despatching with the other person.
The question is (hypothetical at this stage, there are a lot of details still unknown): have these type of doors already saved more lives than the ~150 tragically lost this week?
Of course it's really early so you have to be very careful as to making judgements at this point, but if it really is pilot murder/suicide there is some (limited) precedence:-
There is debate in both flights as to whether it was murder/suicide, but the evidence is totally overwhelming that it was. Horrific but thankfully massively rare (as you might expect.) I do hope this isn't the cause here :(
First, remember the Breaking News Consumer's Handbook: Airline Edition (https://media2.wnyc.org/i/620/620/l/80/1/BNCHAE.jpg). Second, I'm sure that Mr. Robin is a nice guy, but there's no need to publish his stray speculations just two days after the crash.
The co-pilot was breathing normally for ten minutes while the door was being hammered repeatedly. Interpreting this as 'deliberate' inaction is hardly 'stray speculation'.
I'm under the impression that he is speaking for the French Investigation of the incident. His statement is reasonably measured:
The most plausible interpretation is that the co-pilot through a voluntary act had refused to open the cabin door to let the captain in. He pushed the button to trigger the aircraft to lose altitude. He operated this button for a reason we don't know yet, but it appears that the reason was to destroy this plane.
It seems pretty far from stray speculations. It is assumed after a check of the black box. That is ultimately what we rely on for an after the fact analysis. If we can't use that what do we use? And you want to wait a year to find out what happened to your loved ones?
Germanwings did not have a policy of requiring a second person in the cockpit in situations where the captain leaves the cockpit. I imagine this is going to become fault standard in aviation from now on.
I wonder how much that would have helped in this case though.
Someone determined to crash a plane would not have too much of a problem incapacitating any cabin crew member (by surprise most likely) before his attempt. I believe that having a second person in the cockpit is more useful (and seemingly essential) if the Pilot/Co-Pilot loses conciousness in order for the door to still be opened.
It seems clear that in this case the co-pilot's actions were voluntary, but what if a co-pilot were to have a medical emergency while (s)he's alone in the cockpit? Would the pilot be able to re-enter?
This seems like a huge risk that wasn't considered when the new strengthened cockpit doors were installed.
> It seems clear that in this case the co-pilot's actions were voluntary, but what if a co-pilot were to have a medical emergency while (s)he's alone in the cockpit? Would the pilot be able to re-enter?
That's what I thought, too. Does the pilot also (always?) have a key to the cockpit door in his pocket (risk, because than a terrorist could steal it while the pilot goes to toilet) so that he could reenter the cockpit? So for me a plausible explanation is the the co-pilot had a medical emergency while alone in the cockpit. Now comes the question:
Would pressing the descent button in this case perhaps even increase the chance of survival (in this case the co-pilot was doing a quick-witted decision) or not?
Is leaving for toilet the only reason for the pilot to leave the cockpit? I seen some comments on having a third person with the co-pilot if the pilot leaves, but is not another "simplistic solution" to have a toilet for pilots within the cockpit lock doors? I understand it is not as simple as "just add a toilet" but I was thinking for of future designs.
I am not a pilot, but my father was and I have a brother who is. When my dad flew, up until the early '00s and past the WTC attacks, there were only yearly medical exams. No psych exams. Like many other pilots, my brother is an alcoholic, and this has given him trouble with some airlines, so he has taken jobs in the Arab world and east Asia (we're Mexican, from Mexico). As far as I know, the airlines have never offered him direct help for his alcoholism.
Btw, my brother knew some details about the accident before they were public news, I assume there must be some pilot grapevine where more details about the accident must be shared. Like I imagine most other pilots must be, he's very shaken by the incident. It's a matter of professional pride amongst the pilot community, I assume.
My father would sometimes be called as an expert witness for blackbox analysis. As a child, I remember him falling into deep depression whenever he had to do that, and he was always given a couple weeks' vacation time whenever that happened.
From my memory of taking my 3rd class medical its trust based, if you don't have a written record in your med file of mental problems or tell the doc you have problems then there's no way for them to know.
Also from memory a 1st class was pretty much a 3rd class with stricter limits and an electrocardiogram which is why it costs microscopically more. At least in the old days if you got a 1st after it expired, it acted like a 2nd for the remainder of the year, and a 3rd for the next year, but a 1st cost more, so I didn't bother (not expecting to achieve ATP cert within 6 months of my solo LOL)
Crudely and inexactly but more or less true, you need a valid 3rd to be a general aviation pilot, a valid 2nd to haul cargo or be a bush pilot, and a valid 1st to work for an airline. Things will be slightly different in Germany but less different than you'd think... we have trust agreements to allow them to fly here and us to fly there so things are vaguely similar but it doesn't matter if my details are slightly off.
Finally you have to be realistic. If 25% of the population experiences a mental health issue at some point in their life or whatever ridiculously high percentage, then given the huge fraction of the population flying with issues, issues obviously almost never cause a problem, its right up there with meteor strikes. So you end up with false positive/negative issues. If you assume all men have been dumped by a girlfriend at least once that means roughly 3e9 false positive if you assume all dumped dudes are going to mass murder an entire airplane, a false positive rate of eight nines I think? That idea would be up there with banning German pilots, after all one of them apparently did kill a lot of people and the false postive rate is staggeringly lower than banning all people with mere claustrophobia or a bad attitude or whatever.
It's still amazing how some obvious procedures aren't standard in many airlines until something horrible happens. There should be two people in the pit at all times. If the pilot goes to take a leak an attendant takes his place until he returns. It's not really a hard procedure to implement.
Any ideas for future improvements to the current mechanism?
A possible idea is to release the lock (allowing entry using the PIN) if the board computer determines that a crash is likely. (This is safe, because it's unlikely that there is an attacker who wants to enter the cockpit and at the same time a situation likely to result in a crash.)
This clearly only helps against the problem with the locked door, but it seems comparatively easy to implement.
Edit: Another idea: The autopilot should prevent a crash and the only way to disable it should be by pressing two buttons at opposite sides of the cockpit (so two persons have to cooperate).
This is the other side of the coin of giving someone too much power.
After 2001 the pilots were considered "good" and the rest of the crew and passengers "bad".
But what happens when pilot intentions are not good? In this case the crew and passengers are impotent to save their selves.
This is probably what happened in the last two missed airplanes too.
The same is happening with the Government, after 2001 the people have given too much power to the Government because they considered it "good" against the "bad" guys. But as the people in Germany knows, the people in the Government could be the bad guys.
I always wondered why the pilots don't wear some kind of fitbit-like bracelets or something similar that would measure (even imperfectly) their vital signs and record them as a third set of data apart from voice and flight data. There are many (although admittedly unlikely, but still) scenarios that could have happened in this case (the co-pilot might have fainted, someone else could have entered the cockpit unnoticed etc), and all we have is the sound recording telling us that he "breathed normally".
Is it realistic that we see human controls largely removed from passenger plane pilots? Or ground-based group overrides? I know that for the largest jets, pilots already operate within some sort of computer-decided 'envelope' (I think it's called) of reasonable decisions.
I think we will see personal driving banned in some cities (CBDs at least) or routes in the coming decades as self-driving cars come to dominate our roads.
I'd suspect the risks of a ground-control system would be substantially higher than the chance of a pilot deliberately crashing a plane every decade or so.
The problem with automation is that it's completely dependent on inputs from sensors, and those do malfunction. This incident from last year involves fighting the automation due to exactly such a problem:
There are enough instances of sensors and autopilot malfunctioning, there should always be manual-override procedures and a human operator available to take control. I don't see this changing any time soon.
Is it the case on all modern planes that a co-pilot could lock out a pilot? Is there any proposal or precedent for a key-code override on the door lock?
There is a procedure in which the lock is overridden in case of no-response from the cockpit; it's time based so it might take somewhere between 45 seconds to 5 minutes to get the door open.
If the inhabitant of the cockpit chooses to respond with a locking command (in the case of the A320, moving the door switch forward); the door will remain closed no matter how hard you try.
It's a question of your threat model. Do you worry more about the cases where someone getting into the cockpit is a problem, or someone not getting into the cockpit is the problem? You can make provisions for both, but your final layer of security can only target one or the other. If you have an 'ultimate override code', eventually an attacker compromises it (hell, it'd probably be 1234 on most planes). If you have an 'ultimate lockout', eventually the wrong person locks everyone out.
In the best-case scenario, if someone in the cockpit wants to keep people out, it sounds like the security mechanisms provide a way to do for for at least five and a half minutes.
The TV news discussed the procedure used in the US, a flight attendant waits in the cockpit for the pilot to come back (I imagine this is done elsewhere too, but they weren't clear about that).
[+] [-] mg1982|11 years ago|reply
I don't have a greater point I suppose, but it seems worth thinking about. Except, perhaps-- how do you go about 'screening' for inclination to mass-murder?
[+] [-] BuildTheRobots|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] koyote|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] backtoearth|11 years ago|reply
http://www.aeroinside.com/item/3416/lam-e190-over-botswana-n...
[+] [-] Florin_Andrei|11 years ago|reply
Automate this stuff.
[+] [-] talmand|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Tomte|11 years ago|reply
The first officer shut the captain out who tried to break the door until the end.
[+] [-] verytrivial|11 years ago|reply
And yes, there are emergency override codes, but there are also time override-overrides from within the cabin. Even if the protocol where two members of staff are always in the cabin was broken (or absent), again, that does not stop a rogue operator from despatching with the other person.
The question is (hypothetical at this stage, there are a lot of details still unknown): have these type of doors already saved more lives than the ~150 tragically lost this week?
[+] [-] lolo_|11 years ago|reply
* An EgyptAir flight in 1999 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EgyptAir_Flight_990
* A Silkair (Singapore airline) flight in 1997 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SilkAir_Flight_185
There is debate in both flights as to whether it was murder/suicide, but the evidence is totally overwhelming that it was. Horrific but thankfully massively rare (as you might expect.) I do hope this isn't the cause here :(
[+] [-] herge|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BuildTheRobots|11 years ago|reply
https://twitter.com/flightradar24/status/581073962274328576/...
[+] [-] vixen99|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maxerickson|11 years ago|reply
The most plausible interpretation is that the co-pilot through a voluntary act had refused to open the cabin door to let the captain in. He pushed the button to trigger the aircraft to lose altitude. He operated this button for a reason we don't know yet, but it appears that the reason was to destroy this plane.
[+] [-] celticninja|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] celticninja|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] koyote|11 years ago|reply
Someone determined to crash a plane would not have too much of a problem incapacitating any cabin crew member (by surprise most likely) before his attempt. I believe that having a second person in the cockpit is more useful (and seemingly essential) if the Pilot/Co-Pilot loses conciousness in order for the door to still be opened.
[+] [-] arethuza|11 years ago|reply
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-man_rule#No-lone_zone
[+] [-] danepowell|11 years ago|reply
This seems like a huge risk that wasn't considered when the new strengthened cockpit doors were installed.
[+] [-] quonn|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wolfgke|11 years ago|reply
That's what I thought, too. Does the pilot also (always?) have a key to the cockpit door in his pocket (risk, because than a terrorist could steal it while the pilot goes to toilet) so that he could reenter the cockpit? So for me a plausible explanation is the the co-pilot had a medical emergency while alone in the cockpit. Now comes the question:
Would pressing the descent button in this case perhaps even increase the chance of survival (in this case the co-pilot was doing a quick-witted decision) or not?
[+] [-] caf|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] followers|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joezydeco|11 years ago|reply
On long flights pilots are also rotated in and out of rest breaks.
[+] [-] znt|11 years ago|reply
I just asked a friend who used to be a pilot for Ryan Air and he said he had never received one.
[+] [-] jordigh|11 years ago|reply
Btw, my brother knew some details about the accident before they were public news, I assume there must be some pilot grapevine where more details about the accident must be shared. Like I imagine most other pilots must be, he's very shaken by the incident. It's a matter of professional pride amongst the pilot community, I assume.
My father would sometimes be called as an expert witness for blackbox analysis. As a child, I remember him falling into deep depression whenever he had to do that, and he was always given a couple weeks' vacation time whenever that happened.
[+] [-] VLM|11 years ago|reply
Also from memory a 1st class was pretty much a 3rd class with stricter limits and an electrocardiogram which is why it costs microscopically more. At least in the old days if you got a 1st after it expired, it acted like a 2nd for the remainder of the year, and a 3rd for the next year, but a 1st cost more, so I didn't bother (not expecting to achieve ATP cert within 6 months of my solo LOL)
Crudely and inexactly but more or less true, you need a valid 3rd to be a general aviation pilot, a valid 2nd to haul cargo or be a bush pilot, and a valid 1st to work for an airline. Things will be slightly different in Germany but less different than you'd think... we have trust agreements to allow them to fly here and us to fly there so things are vaguely similar but it doesn't matter if my details are slightly off.
http://flighttraining.aopa.org/students/presolo/special/medi...
Finally you have to be realistic. If 25% of the population experiences a mental health issue at some point in their life or whatever ridiculously high percentage, then given the huge fraction of the population flying with issues, issues obviously almost never cause a problem, its right up there with meteor strikes. So you end up with false positive/negative issues. If you assume all men have been dumped by a girlfriend at least once that means roughly 3e9 false positive if you assume all dumped dudes are going to mass murder an entire airplane, a false positive rate of eight nines I think? That idea would be up there with banning German pilots, after all one of them apparently did kill a lot of people and the false postive rate is staggeringly lower than banning all people with mere claustrophobia or a bad attitude or whatever.
[+] [-] leephillips|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] celticninja|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] r721|11 years ago|reply
The paper quoted in "suicide note" wikipedia article ([1]) says that "the note-leaving rate remained almost constant (23.4–36.2%)"
[1] http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1440-1819.2005....
[+] [-] neumann|11 years ago|reply
It would be nice before someone is accused of deliberately killing 150 people for no reason to confirm that
- the correct code was put in - there was no malfunction in the door release system - and the descent was deliberate
I haven't read anything on possibly alternate scenarios causing the crash, yet they all seem more probable.
[+] [-] ghostprotocl|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Dorian-Marie|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] breitling|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] breitling|11 years ago|reply
This is nightmare fuel. I cannot imagine what they went through. No human should have to end their life this way...such a tragedy.
[+] [-] quonn|11 years ago|reply
A possible idea is to release the lock (allowing entry using the PIN) if the board computer determines that a crash is likely. (This is safe, because it's unlikely that there is an attacker who wants to enter the cockpit and at the same time a situation likely to result in a crash.)
This clearly only helps against the problem with the locked door, but it seems comparatively easy to implement.
Edit: Another idea: The autopilot should prevent a crash and the only way to disable it should be by pressing two buttons at opposite sides of the cockpit (so two persons have to cooperate).
[+] [-] Htsthbjig|11 years ago|reply
After 2001 the pilots were considered "good" and the rest of the crew and passengers "bad".
But what happens when pilot intentions are not good? In this case the crew and passengers are impotent to save their selves.
This is probably what happened in the last two missed airplanes too.
The same is happening with the Government, after 2001 the people have given too much power to the Government because they considered it "good" against the "bad" guys. But as the people in Germany knows, the people in the Government could be the bad guys.
[+] [-] BerislavLopac|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|11 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] prawn|11 years ago|reply
I think we will see personal driving banned in some cities (CBDs at least) or routes in the coming decades as self-driving cars come to dominate our roads.
[+] [-] ceejayoz|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] userbinator|11 years ago|reply
http://www.aeroinside.com/item/4946/lufthansa-a321-near-bilb...
[+] [-] toyg|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pwnna|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maaarghk|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bulte-rs|11 years ago|reply
If the inhabitant of the cockpit chooses to respond with a locking command (in the case of the A320, moving the door switch forward); the door will remain closed no matter how hard you try.
[+] [-] saalweachter|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] uptown|11 years ago|reply
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/27/world/europe/germanwings-c...
In the best-case scenario, if someone in the cockpit wants to keep people out, it sounds like the security mechanisms provide a way to do for for at least five and a half minutes.
[+] [-] maxerickson|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Cyclenerd|11 years ago|reply