Could anyone stop suicidal pilots from 'doing 9/11' again?

Thinking about the Ethiopian flight and Germanwings flight a while back where the co-pilot’s locked the door and diverted it or crashed it respectively.

aircraft legislation was supposed to stop terrorists from ever physically forcing the door open or emotionally trying to guilt the pilots into opening the door by making it impossible. The pilots have full control now.

On the other side of the coin, this seems to benefit the Andreas Lubitz wannabes. Although rare, I do imagine in a scenario where you have four pilots on two planes who wish to crash a plane into the Eiffel Tower and Westminster.

Theoretically, could they claim an emergency on the aircraft (engine failure) requesting to turn off the transponders, request to divert the plane to the closest airport of their target while keeping communication with ATC to prevent suspicion and the deployment of fighter jets and then at the last few minutes, crash it into their target.

I assume that the crew, passengers, or even in the case of a suicidal co-pilot, the pilot would be unable to enter.

IANAP, but after the Germanwings incident, I recall that airlines were going to change their policies so that nobody would ever be alone in the cockpit again. But since there aren’t many commercial airliners with more than two cockpit crew members (AFAIK it’s just older versions of the 747), that means that if one gets up to go to the bathroom, he/she gets temporariliy replaced with a cabin flight attendant, which has a couple of implications:

  1. Cabin flight attendants are typically women, who are typically smaller/weaker than men.

  2. Cabin flight attendants are typically not trained pilots.

If a pilot (typically male) with truly murderous intent is left alone in the cockpit with a female cabin flight attendant, he could kill her with a chokehold and then have complete control of the plane. Even if he didn’t kill her, she’d have a difficult time overpowering him or counteracting his control inputs.

This is all pretty long odds, though. And for the sneak attack like you described, both pilots would have to be in on it, also long odds.

Bottom line, anything’s possible, but some things are very, very unlikely; this is one of them.

Since this requires speculation, it’s more appropriate for GD than GQ.

Colibri
General Questions Moderator

A murderous & suicidal pilot wouldn’t necessarily have to overpower someone with their bare hands: Federal Flight Deck Officer - Wikipedia. But you probably have similar odds to finding a murderous & suicidal Air Marshall.

Pilots usually have an indication of what they’re flying into rough weather or smooth sailing. In general, they wouldn’t decide to unstrap themselves if they knew they were about to be flying in rough stuff & could get thrown around.

Have you seen a cockpit? They’re not really large & with some controls between the pilots means one needs to climb into & out of the seats.

While I don’t know specific airline policies about having a FA in the cockpit vs. having them strapped & in sitting in the seat my guess is that it’s just easier to stand in the back for the typical few minutes someone is in the loo.

There is NO reason the co/pilot should be unstrapped / up out of their seat if they are the only pilot in the cabin for a few minutes. If the FA is standing behind the co/pilot & paying any kind of attention, there should be no way the co/pilot should be able to unstrap, get up & out of that seat & be able to lay hands on her before she can unlock the door.

What we’ve learned is even by the fourth plane on 9/11 passengers will fight back. In every incident since that one, they have successfully dogpiled & assisted in detaining the offender, whether it was the shoe bomber, the underwear bomber, or just a rowdy drunk. If she can get the door open, I’m sure passengers will help secure the co/pilot until the other one can get back from the loo.

Short of posting anti-aircraft artillery on the roof-tops of buildings, the answer is obviously “no”.

Even that wouldn’t really work. What’s gone up must, perforce, come down. Shooting a big old plane down over a crowded city results in a big old plane crashing somewhere in a crowded city. That’s always going to leave a mark.

Another implication of this is that a flight attendant might not realize what the pilot is doing until it’s too late. If you put me in the cockpit of a plane, I’d be able to tell you that the pilot is doing something: He’s obviously adjusting controls, steering the wheel, and so on. And I’d also be able to tell you what’s generally in front of the plane by looking out the window. But I don’t think I’d be able to tell that a particular turn with a particular bank will put the Eiffel Tower directly in the flight path in a particular number of seconds.

“Prevention” of anything is a tall order. “Reducing the likelihood” is more do-able. And certainly the details will vary by airline and by jurisdiction. What the US government does and what the Eire or UK government does can easily be different things.

Successfully reducing the likelihood of anything comes from installing multiple layers of individually porous obstacles. e.g.[ul][li]Don’t hire pilots who are sleeper agents for terrorist groups.[]Don’t hire pilots with mental problems.[]Continuously monitor your pilots’ mental health and political leanings.[]Monitor all flight’s paths and be very suspicious of any deviations from normalcy, even under the guise of an emergency.[]Have plenty of fighter aircraft immediately available everywhere.[]Have plenty of anti-aircraft missiles and cannons installed near each and every possible target with crews on hair trigger alert.[]Install remote controlled self-destruct devices on every large aircraft.Make all aircraft either autonomous, or flown by remote control from people on the ground who’re supervised by goons with guns.[/ul][/li]
Each of these layers is increasingly costly, increasingly intrusive, and is increasingly likely to have increasingly adverse side effects when the inevitable mistakes occur.

How many innocent airliners are we willing to destroy per year just in case one might be aimed at a high value target?

Once we collectively can answer that question we can get into the specifics of designing a system of countermeasures.

In a day and age where government cyber-security measures have repeatedly demonstrated they’re not up to the task, this would be a far greater danger than security measure.

And such devices (remote self-destruct controls) would be very attractive to the nefarious. No need to hijack the plane, just hack into the “protection” system and crash it remotely.

Of course. That’s exactly my point.

The OP is silly. We can keep piling on “fixes” to prevent the problem the OP is trying to prevent. But real quickly the “fixes” are worse than the problem.

I think the thread idea is overall silly as well. Study enough of the world, and you will learn that no matter what you do to prevent something, a determined person with enough resources will find a way to do it anyway.

The idea that ALL prevention is built on, is that we do enough to make it VERY DIFFICULT to do something wrong, and then accept what occurs anyway. Whether it’s acts of terrorism, or the far more common acts of sheer selfish stupidity, we look at what went famously wrong, try to figure out a cost-effective preventive measure, and then go back to the rest of life with fingers crossed (figuratively).

A flight attendant can’t stop a suicidal pilot from wrecking the plane. The attendant wouldn’t effectively negate the control inputs, or perhaps even recognize what is going on until it’s too late, and even if he/she opened the door to let the other pilot into the cockpit, the plane might already be in an unrecoverable dive.

The answer is that nothing can stop a determined pilot from destroying their plane. One of the reasons why it is ridiculous to say that pilots can’t be armed on the plane.

There is still a useful purpose to the two-man rule, though. If, for instance, there is only one pilot in the cockpit (while his colleague is, say, using the restroom) and that pilot suddenly loses consciousness or has a stroke or something, then the cockpit door would be locked and there would be no one in the cockpit who is capable of flying the plane. In that situation, yeah, you’d want there to have been a flight attendant or someone else in the flight deck who could open the door from the inside.
But I digress from the topic.

That is all the two person rule in the US was ever intended to do. It was 99% to put somebody inside who could look through the peephole and ensure that the person on the outside trying to get in was the right person before reopening the door. It was 1% to call for help from the back and act as emergency doorman if the sole pilot still flying became incapacitated. during the other pilot’s potty break.

It was never intended, and will never suffice, as some kind of check over the behavior of the sole pilot.

The various forms of two-man rule used in finance, accounting, nuclear handling, etc., all operate on the basis that both parties have the exact same training and skills, or at least know enough about the other’s job that they can readily detect and take measures to correct any procedural violations.

No. I’ve got an airline pilot friend that I was talking to about this. He tells me, that a suicidal pilot or co-pilot could crash a plane as it does the take-off climb, even if the other guy tries like hell to prevent him. It would be over in a matter of seconds. By the time the other guy in the cockpit realized what was going on, he could either fight for control, or fight to disable the guy trying to crash the plane.

At that phase in the flight, too little altitude and too much else going on to prevent an un-survivable disaster. Just a matter of how much additional carnage on the ground.

At cruising altitude, you would have to do a Germanwings thing, and somehow take sole control of the aircraft.

Wasn’t there an armed pilot who had an accidental discharge? Anyway, what use would an armed pilot be? The whole point of current security protocols is that the pilots and passengers can’t mix.

We have volunteer armed pilots in the US. Not everybody, but many. Federal Flight Deck Officer - Wikipedia

The idea is that it’s the last ditch final defense after a bad guy comes through the door. Most flights over 2 hours have the door open 4+ times. On 8+ hour flights its opened even more times. The program got started before the high security doors got retrofitted and we were looking for anything that might work. To be sure, by now a lot more pilots have entered the program long after the fleet was fully equipped with high security doors.

I’m explicitly not offering an opinion pro or con. Just explaining that it exists.